BOOKS: Chalmers Johnson reviews four new books on American militarism
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- Written by Henry Adams
Historian Chalmers Johnson reviews four recent books on American militarism, a subject on which he has made important contributions with Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (2004). -- Of the four volumes reviewed, one is a book that every thoughtful American should read, one is a waste of time, and two others earn more qualified endorsements....
BOOKS: <I>USA Today</I> on books about the Iraq war
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- Written by Henry Adams
On Monday, USA Today reported that "more than 300 books have been published about the [second Iraq] conflict," but named only seven of them. -- Two of those seven have been featured in "Digging Deeper," the UFPPC book discussion series (Evan Wright's Generation Kill and Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack)....
BOOK REVIEW: Steven Kinzer's flawed analysis of the Iranian situation
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- Written by Donna Quexada
Steven Kinzer, the author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Wiley, 2003; paperback, 2004), writes in the current issue of the New York Review of Books that American difficulties in Iraq have made "an invasion of Iran all but impossible." -- He views this conclusion with relief, but notes that the idea of some sort of military action against Iran is again "reemerging." -- Kinzer is correct to conclude that "It is in the urgent interest of the United States to turn Iran away from a [belligerent] course that will endanger many nations, including Iran itself," but the analysis upon which his conclusion is based is extremely partial and inadequate. -- For Kinzer, what happens in the world is really all about us -- all about the U.S. -- and his conception of what constitutes "democracy" is typically American in its self-serving character. -- "When the United States engages countries politically and economically, they move toward democracy," he writes. "Countries that the United States treats as pariahs, like Cuba, do not." -- Long a New York Times correspondent, Steven Kinzer knows that mainstream success in U.S. media markets requires that one accept a benign view of the U.S. role in the world, and nothing in his sympathetic review of Christopher's de Bellaigue's Iran-bashing In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs strays from that line. -- Kinzer endorses the view that all the U.S. wants with respect to Iran is to "promote regional stability, dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons, preserve reliable energy supplies, reduce the threat of terror, and address the 'democracy deficit' that pervades the Middle East," to quote from a 2004 Council on Foreign Relations reports co-authored by two senior statesmen of the U.S. national security state, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA Director Robert Gates, which he cites approvingly. -- The CFR report's view, though, is mostly for public consumption, and scarcely begins to address the U.S.'s true geopolitical aims. -- A more accurate assessment of the significance of Iran's place in the strategic vision of the U.S foreign policy elite requires that the central necessity of dominating Middle Eastern energy supplies in their eyes be grasped, together with fact that the 1979 Iranian Revolution represented, for them, the epochal failure of the 1969 Nixon Doctrine as a tactic to realize that strategic goal. -- The 1980 Carter Doctrine and the subsequent build-up and reorganization of the U.S. military were responses to this, and while some past administrations may have been willing to entertain the notion of détente with Iran, every sign today is that the neoconservatives who are guiding U.S. foreign policy intend to devastate Iran's nuclear program in the coming months by means of a unilateral attack either by the U.S. or Israel (but with U.S. weaponry and at U.S. expense in either case) while hoping also to overthrow the Iranian regime....