Book Review

The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a secret army, and a war at the ends of the earth, by Mark Mazzetti

“Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness. The scalphunters were the exception to his own rule. They weren´t gradual and they weren´t gentle either…”

With this very quote, from John le Carré´s brilliant Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Mr Mazzetti has fittingly chosen to headline the introduction. The Way of the Knife makes it painfully obvious that if one were to go by Controls definition of good intelligence work, the CIA has rather failed to do their job. In fact, the Central Scalp Hunting Agency might be a more fitting name, since gentleness and caution seems to be suspiciously absent from the CIA´s activities. Venture past le Carré and you will be presented with a Dickensian gallery of madcap rouges on the CIA payroll firing from the hip and a plethora of crackpot schemes so mad that you would find them unrealistic if they featured in an airport novel. 

This wasn´t always the case, however. Like the tides of the ocean, the US intelligence services are forever being thrown hither and dither by capricious political winds and external pressure. Once upon a time the CIA was really about analysts doing their job of delivering intelligence with the utmost accuracy and truthfulness. The watershed moment that enabled this happy state of affairs, according to Mazzetti, were the so called Church hearings of 1975. Democratic senator Frank Church led a team investigating the covert activities of the CIA following information gleaned from the Watergate affair. The necessity of doing this was amply illustrated by a picture of Church holding up a poison dart gun the CIA had built, presumably because they thought microfilms and secret rendezvous in murky East Berlin pubs were a dull way to carry out the Cold War. When the CIA´s activities during this period became known, President Gerald Ford effectively banned the CIA from carrying out targeted assassinations abroad. This worked reasonably well, Mazzetti tells us, and for many years the corporate culture at the CIA was one that abhorred murder by poisoned dart. Unfortunately this state of affairs was not to last forever. The CIA, I feel compelled to add, has always played some part in clandestine operations abroad, but it wasn´t until after 9/11 that they started to morph into a secret army waging a shadowy war across the globe, in many cases without congressional approval or oversight. 

The seeds of this gung ho approach to intelligence were sown during the William Casey era of the 1980s. When I reviewed The Untold History of The United States on this blog, I didn´t have time to delve into the actions and motives of the former head of the CIA, but here goes a quick summary. Casey, a staunch conservative who hated communism with every fibre of his being, was given free reign by President Reagan to pursue a global war against a perceived threat from the Soviets. Indeed, one could say that Casey was appointed almost solely for that purpose and not for the task of improving intelligence gathering. If an analyst uncovered with information that didn´t fit Casey´s own preferences then that person could look forward to a very brief career at the CIA. It was during the eighties that one of the abovementioned madcap rouges climbed through the ranks of the CIA. Duane “Dewey” Claridge was a man who fitted perfectly into the CIA of the Casey-Reagan era. A dapper gin drinking rogue with a penchant for pinstripe suits and pocket squares, he soon acquired something of a cult following among the organization’s younger members. Dewey threw himself into the job of sponsoring various right wing guerillas in Latin America and the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan with undisguised enthusiasm. Often traveling under fanciful codenames and pretending to be an international businessman, Dewey set up a network of slush funds to supply the Contras in Nicaragua with weapons and ammunition that often ended up being used against the civilian population. His days of gun running for Uncle Sam only came to an end when congress got wind of a plan he´d hatched to mine Nicaragua’s harbors. This daring plot, that Dewey later claimed he´d dreamt up over a glass of gin and a cigar, led to him being relieved of his duties in South America. Although Dewey was just one cog in a larger clandestine machine, his Nicaraguan story highlights perfectly how the CIA managed to forget the lessons from the Church hearings  (or buckled under political pressure, a case can surely be made for that conclusion as well) and started to lurch back into being a motley band of cloak and dagger men.   

The cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001, fundamentally changed the way the CIA worked. If Bin Laden´s terrorist plot hadn´t been carried out, the odds are high that there wouldn´t even have been any The Way of the Knife for me to review. The need to respond and strike back at an enemy hiding in the shadows highlighted the malfunctioning relationship between the Pentagon and The CIA, as well as the blurred lines that were the limits of their authority. When I say The Pentagon I am referring to the United States Department of Defense, the name originating from the pentagon-shaped building that is their headquarters. These both agencies had often been at each other’s throats in the past and in the eyes of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Pentagon´s authority and capability to carry out clandestine operations around the globe had to rapidly scaled up. Astute readers will no doubt think that this sounds very much like what the CIA is doing these days, and they would be right. Even after reading the book and doing some quick research, deciding where the CIA ends and the Pentagon begins is as bafflingly complex as a game of cricket. Suffice it is to say for the sake of this book review that those two agencies have both carried out secret operations and conducted drone strikes in faraway lands.

Three days after George W. Bush, a former baseball team owner and Texan oilman, was elected, air force engineers carried out the first successful weapons test of a Predator drone. The technology was now in place to meet the terrorist threat head on. We may laugh at how President Obama joked during the White House Correspondent´s Dinner in 2010 that he would kill the attending Jonas Brothers with a Predator drone if they took any liberties with his daughters, but to the people of Pakistan the drone threat is deadly serious. The only thing more complicated in this book than the Pentagon-CIA rivalry are the uneasy relations between long-time frenemies America and Pakistan. As one CIA agent quoted in the book famously said: “Every day you wake up in Pakistan you know a little less than you did the day before.”

The Americans were so desperate for any intelligence on Pakistan that our old friend Dewey was let in from the cold. After being dismissed from the CIA after the Iran-Contra affair, Dewey was now working off the books with a close knit cadre of retired special operations officers to set up a private intelligence network in the region. Presumably he´d come up with the idea for this covert business while sipping a G&T and smoking a small cigar. Naturally this volatile arrangement couldn´t be in place for long, and patience was running thin after a plot by Dewey was uncovered to smear the president of Afghanistan. The lunatic plan consisted of infiltrating the presidential palace in Kabul and gather beard trimmings from the president which would then be tested for drugs to prove that he was a heroin addict. The plan was unceremoniously dropped after a, presumably rather venomous, telling off from the Obama administration. When Dewey´s handler, an unscrupulous and now disgraced CIA officer, was told by his superiors that it was time to pull the plug, he even kept his spy ring going with his own private funds and some of his cronies reported his findings to the Fox News Channel. If you ever thought that gathering intelligence is something done with caution by professionals under a watchful governmental eye, and that you have to be sane in order to operate inside a nuclear capable hostile country, it seems you were wrong.    

Everything that is good and everything that is bad about the drone policies and the signature strikes carried out under Bush and Obama can be found in Pakistan, Mazzetti argues. Originally it was seen as necessary to combat terrorists and insurgents in the isolated mountain regions of Pakistan and to stem the tide of Al Qaeda fighters fleeing from the war in Afghanistan. Then Pakistani president Musharraf did authorize the use of drones in certain regions of his country and under certain conditions. This went hand in hand with an uneasy cooperation between US intelligence and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. Like the many layers of a matryoskha-doll, the motives of Pakistan and the ISI were myriad and impossible to discern even from the beginning. Some factions wanted to help Islamic extremists because they viewed them a possible counterweight to Indian interests, while some wanted to bring the remote tribal areas to heel. Everyone, however, were happy to accept suitcases full of US dollars. Although drone strikes managed to take out several dangerous terrorists without risking the lives of any US servicemen in the process and goodwill-strikes were occasionally carried out against Pakistan’s enemies, the drone strikes were not without some serious problems. Anger and resentment against the US, both among Pakistani government officials and their subjects, grew steadily. Chief among their concerns were the so called signature strikes, which meant that any activity that could be interpreted as being linked to terrorism could become the target of a drone strike. Any gathering of “military aged” males in Pakistan´s tribal regions could, and still can, justify a drone strike without the identities of those targeted being known. Needless to say this has resulted in the deaths of many innocent civilians and infuriated a country armed with nuclear weapons as well as large parts of the Middle East.

Being a journalist from The New York Times, Mazzetti is naturally something of an establishment insider, working for a magazine that has always upheld the status quo. Despite this I feel that Mazzetti has done an exceptionally thorough job investigating this new kind of warfare and you don´t get the feeling that he is pulling his punches to protect the CIA. There have been both successes and failures attributed to this type of warfare and he doesn´t underplay the dangers of the latter. Naturally when it comes to these types of books I am forced to leave interesting portions out, in this case a glamorous heiress from Kentucky who ends up negotiating the release of hostages from Somali pirates and the operation to capture Bin Laden, but it´s all in there if you read the novel in its entirety. Mazzetti manages to keep the pace high and the reader interested, something that can be difficult with books like these, and I would definitely recommend The Way of the Knife to anyone interested in history or international affairs. The final chapter in this story, however, remains to be written. Only yesterday I heard about a new generation of anti-drone weapons nearing completion, a futuristic looking laser cannon among them. Perhaps if the people they keep going after would get their hands on hardware like that, the CIA and the Pentagon might at long last be forced to find a way to coexist and work together out of necessity.

What about Dewey, then? The former CIA operator is now a man in his twilight years comfortably living in an upmarket retirement village outside Washington. He tells Mazzetti in their final interview that he is determined to preserve some of his spy network, albeit on a shoestring. As he leaves the Italian restaurant where the interview has taken place, Dewey stays to finish his cigar. When Mazzetti walks away into the night, he spies Dewey sitting alone at their table and staring wishfully out of the windows while smoking his cigar.      

      

Book Review

The Sword of Attila, by David Gibbins

David Gibbins is a New York Times bestselling author with several historical novels already under his belt as well as a Ph.D from Cambridge University. The Sword of Attila is a collaboration with SEGA and The Creative Assembly, meant as a complement to their best-selling video game Total War: Attila. Whether the novel is able to stand on its own two legs or not is an interesting question. Collaborations across the artistic spectrum, especially those involving video games, have met with varied success in the past. Indeed, when Ataris E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial flopped catastrophically, the game based on Steven Spielberg´s iconic film, the entire video game industry almost collapsed. Atari was forced to ignominiously dump 700 000 unsold cartridges of their game in a landfill in the badlands of New Mexico. Clearly then, the stakes are high for Gibbin´s The Sword of Attila, and if the book is a dud I might have to grab my shovel and head for the desert.

By the time of the fifth century, the Roman Empire in the west was beginning to collapse. Historians typically separate the Caesars of the early Roman Empire, great warrior kings like Trajan and Marcus Antonius, with the feeble emperors who ruled mostly without distinction during their short reigns. After decades of corruption and barbarian incursions, Rome was weak and the good times were well and truly over. Climate change meant that migrating tribes of barbarians poured into roman lands to plunderer and pillage.  

It was against this backdrop of steadily mounting darkness and despair that Attila the Hun swept in for the kill. A man whose very name caused corrupt roman senators to flop off their couches and run for the hills in abject terror. Our brave protagonist and Rome´s last hope is the young Tribune Flavius, a fictional character who is the nephew of Flavius Aetius, commander-in-chief of the western roman army. If you are confused by the similarities in name you are not alone, I myself initially thought the book was about Flavius Aetius, but recovered from this mildly confusing conundrum and soldiered on for your sake.

After a brave last stand in front of the walls of Carthage, Flavius flees the city before the teeming Vandal hordes. Back in Rome, Flavius is given a dangerous and presumably top secret mission by his famous uncle and namesake, to travel into barbarian lands with a ragtag band of friends and capture the relic known as the sword of Attila. This will give Rome and her reluctant Visigoth allies the morale boost they need for the upcoming showdown with Attila.

At the battle of Chalôns, the aforementioned showdown, a roman army together with a loose collection of barbarian allies fought Attila to a bloody stalemate. Although the battle was not a decisive victory for Rome, Attila was forced to withdraw. The Huns nomadic lifestyle proved to be ill-suited for prolonged campaigns, and The Scourge of God never again marched on Rome.

Gibbins covers these momentous historical events with a deft grasp of what it was like to live in the fifth century, and fact-wise he ticks all the boxes. The action is delivered convincingly enough, the terror of a charging Hunnic horde rendered in stark detail. I will definitely not head out into the desert to bury The Sword of Attila alongside Atari´s ET cartridges. Yet if I am honest I am not entirely satisfied. It leaves me feeling slightly unfulfilled, wanting more. I usually never deign to comment if a book is two, three, or four hundred pages long. It´s more often than not a poor indicator of whether it´s good literature or not, and Attila’s 250 odd pages is certainly longer than The Old Man and the Sea. The feeling I get, however, is that there were more drops of excitement to be wrung out of the material available to the author. I never really started to care deeply for any of the characters and the promised showdown with Attila didn´t quite manage to make me tick like it should have. Bernard Cornwell´s eminently readable prose about the viking warrior Uhtred takes place during a period of British history that seems rather dull at a casual glance. Yet Cornwell manages to skillfully weave together a series of novels where you are always on the edge of your seat, too engrossed in the story to find it cheesy that Uhtred has named his longsword Serpent´s Breath. A kind of unpopular king fighting a drawn out and succesfull-ish conflict against the Danish sounds far less dramatic than the Scourge of God rampaging towards Rome and the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Which is exactly why I am struck by how the story in The Sword of Attila could have been so much more epic, intriguing and involving. Maybe some of the steam is lost when the plot sometimes skips several years ahead between chapters, maybe this was just a necessity to make the story go together, but in the end it doesn´t matter. The Sword of Attila is certainly an entertaining read, but not a future classic by any stretch of the imagination. 

Book Review

The Untold History of the United States, by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick

Untold History is a vastly ambitious collaboration written by two people who, once upon a time, couldn´t possibly have imagined themselves working together. Yet, like in all buddy-cop films, the duo eventually settles their differences and gets on with fighting crime, or in this case imperialist oppression. The fruit of this ambitious yet unlikely joint endeavor is, at least according to Mikhail Gorbachev indispensable. And he ought to know what he´s talking about.

Untold History aims to tell the American story in a way that is has never been told before, exposing common misconceptions and proposing an entirely different view than that told by most school textbooks. Shunned by most of the mainstream media, publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post have savaged the book in their reviews and more or less implied that Stone and Kuznick are closet pinkos who can´t get over Vietnam. I don´t doubt that Stone may have woken up on someone else’s lawn in 1971 with a bottle of Jack Daniel´s, but one rather gets the feeling that they don´t want to address the big picture when their reviews are mostly filled with loose slander.      

Stone and Kuznick´s backgrounds are as different as they could possibly be. His father a staunch anti-New Deal conservative, the young Oliver Stone served on the front lines in the Vietnam War. He was wounded twice and awarded with a purple heart for his service. Kuznick´s parents were both left wing intellectuals, and he spent the Vietnam War leading protests and manifestations against capitalism and imperialism. Over the years Stone gradually changed his mind gained a more nuanced view of the world, something similar to what happened to his main character in his 1990 film Born on the Fourth of July. Despite making a slew of critically acclaimed films like Wall Street, Platoon and JFK, Stone has always been something of a renegade, never fully part of the glitzy establishment in Hollywood, and always questioning those in power. This is something Untold History definitely won´t change. The two men met at the university where Kuznick was teaching a history class called Oliver Stone´s America, centered around the critique of American society that most of his films revolve around, but it wasn´t until many years later that they both started working on a massive feature series on television, later aired on Showtime, and the book was released as a companion to the series.

Starting with colonial wars in South America in the late nineteenth century and finishing with Barack Obama´s divisive presidency, Stone and Kuznick treats the reader to a thorough revision of US history, mercilessly shattering your vague conceptions of Nixon and the first George Bush being more or less decent presidents. Untold History leaves no stone unturned. In a fashion not entirely dissimilar to the rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland, the deeper you delve into the sordid mess of imperialism, and the more heinous acts you uncover. As Stone himself puts it “When George W Bush said that he admired Harry Truman more than any other president…I knew there had to be something wrong with Truman…And as it turned out, I was right”.

The story of Harry Truman and the atomic bomb is the focal point that the whole premise in Untold History revolves around. Here we meet one of the central protagonists in Stone and Kuznick´s story, a man named Henry Wallace. Serving as Secretary of Agriculture during the New Deal and Vice President under Francis D. Roosevelt, Wallace very nearly became the 33^rd President of the United States. “There is no one more American than Henry Wallace” as FDR is believed to have said. Yet despite this ringing endorsement, Wallace´s political views were decidedly unpopular among conservatives and centrist democrats. Wallace called for a common man´s revolution, where the fruits of science and technology where distributed to the many in order to ensure peace and prosperity. Any conflict with the Soviet Union would be fought without weapons, the winner being the one whose citizens´ enjoyed the highest standard of living, liberty and public health. This bold vision was diametrically opposed to that of conservative newspaper magnate Henry Luce, who declared that the coming century must be an American Century, where the USA dominated the world militarily and economically. As the 1944 election drew near, 65% of democrats preferred that Wallace remained vice president and only 2% supported Harry Truman. The stakes were high since Roosevelt´s health was poor and many believed that he would not survive the next for years, making it almost certain that his VP would succeed him before long. Kicked of the democratic ticket by corrupt party bosses who were later sentenced to jail for corruption, Wallace was replaced by Truman, an insecure man who was easily manipulated by the hawks and anti-communists in his party.

This controversial election made sure that Truman became the 33^rd President of the United States. This was to have dire consequences, the authors argue, since it was Truman who made the final call when two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Most school textbooks say this was because Truman wanted to spare the many American lives that would be lost if Japan was invaded, but the Stone and Kuznick makes a credible case for the fact that Japan desperately wanted to surrender even before the atom bombs were dropped. I myself remember how surprised I was when I read Stalin´s General, by Geoffrey Roberts, and discovered that the Russians did in fact invade the Japanese held province of Manchuria shortly after Germany had capitulated, and smashed Japan´s last intact military formations. The atom bombs, contrary to popular belief, were meant primarily as a deterrent towards the Soviets and as a way for the US to tell them that they were now the ones who called the shots. With Wallace at the helm, Stone and Kuznick argues, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved and the cold war might have been avoided. This is of course impossible to know for certain, but one cannot help but wonder how different things could have turned out had Wallace become president instead of Truman.  

As the pages keep on turning and you read about CIA sponsored coups overthrowing democratically elected leaders in Greece, Iran, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentine, El Salvador, Indonesia and countless other countries, it is easy to become jaded and slightly depressed. As the book makes abundantly clear, US interests does not mean the interests of ordinary American citizens, but rather the interests of large corporations. This is amply illustrated by the CIA led coup in Chile in 1954 that replaced the democratically elected leader Jacobo Árbenz Guzman with a military junta. The coup was necessary since Guzman’s ambitious social reforms jeopardized the profits of the United Fruit Company, who practically had a monopoly on the country´s produce and also had plenty of friends in high places.

It is worth mentioning that the prologue clearly says the book focuses on the dark parts of US history, leaving the details of the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, the Lend-Lease Act and other, nobler deeds, for other scholars to write about. Neither is it America itself or it´s people that are the culprits, but moneyed interests and neoconservative fundamentalists. Because America won the war they are right, and because they are right they are therefore just. That kind of thinking doesn´t allow for any nuance or any other perspective. That is the point that Stone and Kuznick tries to bring forward, as their eight hundred plus page brick delves into what so drastically changed about the United States after the second world war and what could have happened instead. A key point that I miss in the book is what they say in the last episode of the series. Despite smug pundits and politicians who think that they always know what´s going to happen, the curve of the ball can break differently. Such as when Henry Wallace nearly became president or when Mikhail Gorbachev saw the madness of the cold war race to the bottom. These moments can come again, Stone and Kuznick argues, it is up to us to be ready when they do.

Although many people may disagree with Stone and Kuznick, Untold History is fascinating, controversial and thought provoking. Some facts, as The New York Times and The Washington Post have gleefully pointed out, are wrong here and there, and well informed readers probably already know about some of the “untold” stories. None of this diminishes the central point that Stone and Kuznick are trying to make, and their magnum opus of recent US history is, just like Mikhail Gorbachev have said, indispensable.         

                   

Book Review 

The Bully Pulpit – Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism

By Doris Kearns Goodwin

These days’ political debates tend to be rather dull affairs. The candidate wearing a blue tie says more or less the same thing as the candidate with the red tie seated across the table. There are very seldom any fistfights or chanting throngs of die-hard supporters and the chances of a riot breaking out among the crowds are slim, unless the moderator has just announced that the debate will last an hour longer than scheduled. Larger than life characters are in short supply and no one running for office will have been a decorated war hero, a cowboy or a big game hunter. Theodore Roosevelt were all three of those at some point in his life. He also served as a State Assemblyman, New York City Police Commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York, Vice President and President of the United States. Since spare time is for the faint hearted, Roosevelt also published a wide body of text and novels covering many different topics and edited the Outlook Magazine.

Just like he did in real life, the towering and almost comically charismatic and masculine presence of “Teddy”, crowds out everything else. That´s why I have to hurry and tell you about Mrs. Kearns Goodwin’s magnificently splendid new book before I lose the plot and start to talk about Theodore Roosevelt again.

Charting the lives and fortunes of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, two fascinating men who would both serve as commander in chief and play a major role during the so called “Progressive Era” in the United states, The Bully Pulpit also tells the rags to riches story of one visionary publicist and his equally visionary magazine, McClure´s, which played a major role in influencing public opinion at the time.

Taft and Roosevelt both came from privileged backgrounds and they were both staunch Republicans of a sort that you wouldn´t find in today’s political landscape. Despite these similarities they were as different as two human beings can possibly be. The young Teedy was the runt of the litter, a weak and asthmatic little boy whose odds of surviving infancy looked slim. Yet the future Rough Rider refused to give in, and embarked on a strenuous regime of exercise to hone and strengthen what little nature had seemed fit to give him, in time becoming the epitome of masculinity and indeed of the American outdoorsman. Taft, on the other hand, was born in the pink but squandered his health and struggled with obesity for most of his life, a condition which sapped his energy and stamina. Roosevelt was known for being indefatigable, and once delivered nine campaign speeches on a single day, without showing the slightest sign of tiring. Roosevelt loved to get physical with his opponents and never shied away from a tough debate, while the introverted and analytical Taft despised politics. He only became president thanks to an ambitious wife and was much happier serving on the Supreme Court after he had left office. Where Roosevelt pummeled his opponents mercilessly and used the bully pulpit of the presidential office (as the name of the book implies) to rally public opinion, Taft frowned on such displays and preferred to in the same subdued and diligent way as he did when working as a prosecutor in Hamilton County, Ohio. His friendly and genial nature made him friends with everyone he met whereas Roosevelt’s larger than life character tended to divide people in two camps, those who revered him and those who despised him.

Sam McClure was born to abject poverty in Ireland but immigrated to the United States with his family at an early age. Like Roosevelt he was a larger than life character and had a highly gifted mind, but his mercurial tempers and volatile psyche meant that he was just as likely to act like a raving madman as he was to come up with an idea that was pure genius. With these flawed gifts McClure stated McClure’s Magazine, which became the leading progressive voice in the United States and published such a wide body of investigative journalism of such quality that it makes you wonder what The New York Times have been doing all these years. Mr. McClure´s magazine employed several of the most gifted journalist of the time, who became known as “Muckraking Men” due to their ceaseless habit of uncovering corruption and injustice.

Regrettably, corruption and injustice were not exactly rare occurrences in the early days of the twentieth century. Most of the country´s wealth was tied up in the business empires of a handful of powerful men, John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil being the foremost of these and a major antagonist throughout the book. The progressive era saw a downtrodden American populace revolt against the conservative business interests and Roosevelt, Taft and McClure’s all championed the popular cause. Roosevelt, aided by his vigorous constitution and the bully pulpit of the presidential office, managed to pass several pieces of landmark progressive legislation. Bitterly regretting his decision to resign after his second term even before it had been made, he anointed Taft, his secretary of war, as his successor. Even though Taft was a progressive, albeit a more moderate one than Roosevelt, their close friendship soon withered. Returning from a yearlong African safari, Roosevelt shortly threw down the gauntlet for the republican presidential nomination of 1912. Far from being a high minded debate about the issues, the struggle quickly became a brutal, blood and guts affair where no quarter was asked and none given. When Roosevelt lost the nomination, largely because of cronyism and a conservative Old Guard in the GOP, he proceeded to start his own party rather than throw in the towel. In the ensuing showdown, the former friends tore each other apart, shattered the progressive wing of the Republican Party and secured a victory for the Democratic challenger, Woodrow Wilson.

That the film rights have already been sold to Stephen Spielberg is no surprise, the 1912 presidential election is only the final thrilling chapters of an eight hundred plus page epic that will have you laughing and crying as the pages disappear in a blur of love, friendship, war, drama and intrigue. Occasionally Mrs. Kearns Goodwin delves a little deeper than necessary in the minutiae of parliamentary procedures from the early 1900s, but her autobiography is both skillfully written and staggering in scope and ambition.

                                                                    

                                                                                                              

Book Review

After Empire, by Dilip Hiro

November 9^th 1989 must have been a fairly good time to be George H.W Bush. After nearly five decades of Cold War, America and its NATO allies were finally victorious. As The Berlin Wall came tumbling down, thousands of East Germans poured over to the west, eager for blue jeans, Coca Cola and Rock & Roll. Historian Francis Fukuyama even called that momentous occasion the end of history. Like a victorious demigod, Bush 41 now towered over the rest of the world, and America was the world’s sole superpower. Historians were suddenly out of a job as the only thing left to record for posterity was the onward march of western capitalism, or so it seemed at the time.

Dilip Hiro is one of the world´s leading experts on the Middle East and Central Asia and has written several critically acclaimed books on global affairs. After Empire aims to explain what type of world we can expect to inhabit in the coming decades and what this will mean for global affairs.

During the Cold War we lived in a bipolar world. That meant that there were two great powers who squared off for global dominion, The Soviet Union and their Warsaw pact allies against The USA and Nato. With the fall of the Soviet Union The USA became the world´s only superpower and proceeded to briefly lead a unipolar world. This dominion, however, proved to be short-lived, and as Mr. Hiro explains, US dominion had in fact been declining steadily since the end of WWII. This might sound alarming some people, but Mr. Hiro argues why this is not a doom and gloom prophecy. Rather, he points out, it´s unavoidable that The USA, who controlled half of the world economy immediately after WWII, would see their share of global wealth shrink as war torn countries and the third world starts to grow and develop.

In After Empire, Mr. Hiro gives his candid account of the key regions of the world, The USA, South America, Europe, Russia, China and Iran. He retells their recent history and gives his predictions over what the future will hold for each of them. Most writers who write these types of books are inevitably Anglo-Saxon and unabashedly cheer for team star spangled banner. Mr. Hiro´s account offers a somewhat different perspective. Although I should add that I feel he is sometimes a bit too zealous in condemning the USA. Russia, Iran and China get off the human rights violations hook relatively easily, while the USA is judged much harsher consistently throughout the book. Iran and China, however, have never claimed to be global superpowers, and that is quite possibly why the USA is subjected to the most intimate scrutiny.

A large part of Mr. Hiro´s narrative concerns the tumultuous first decade of this century. When Bush 43 was handed the keys to the car, he inherited a surplus budget and the only superpower in the world. A detailed analysis of the two terms Bush 43 served as commander in chief is outside the scope of this review but it will suffice to say that when Mr. Obama was sworn in as president he inherited a massive deficit, the largest financial crisis since The Great Depression and a catastrophic quagmire in Iraq that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The family station wagon had crashed into a tree and was gliding into a ditch. These unfortunate events were not the cause of The USA no longer being the undisputed master of the world, they simply accelerated the underlying trend, Mr. Hiro argues. A country that makes up one twentieth of the world’s population cannot hope to reign supreme forever.

Although Mr. Hiro methodically goes through each part of our blue planet and gives his best predictions for what a multipolar world will mean for them, the main narrative inevitably centers on the somewhat less than cordial relationship between China and The USA.

When Mr. Hiro writes about China, he chronicles the spectacularly rapid rise of a sleeping dragon. Staying truthful to Deng Xiaoping´s maxim “Hide your capabilities and bide your time”, China has strived to grow in prosperity and stature without becoming engaged in costly foreign entanglements. The Chinese have instead adopted a Confucian strategy of using all the means at their disposal, diplomatic, paramilitary, cyber, subterfuge and military, to blunt and diminish The United States influence. Like a rampant red dragon barring it´s fangs and hissing menacingly at a bald eagle with a bad hip, it requires no detective work to understand what the writers opinions are of the current state of global affairs.

While China is the only other Country that in itself can become a serious rival to the United States, the future global order will be a patchwork of regional actors, sovereign nations and imperial pretenders. Before the First World War, the writer reminds us, this was more or less what the world looked like. Back then a number of global actors and regional powers wrestled with each other for supremacy, all of them keen to make sure that no single nation became powerful enough to subdue the others. This prediction doesn´t come straight from Mr. Hiro, it´s partly yours truly having to fill in the blanks, since the writer tends to loose himself in the minutiae of global politics. This makes the overall picture somewhat blurry and uncertain at times. While I´m complaining I might as well point out that Mr. Hiro must have written the chapter concerning Europe on a Friday afternoon when he was eager to nip down to the pub. It´s mostly a depressing account of the Greek sovereign debt crisis and doesn´t really address any of the more fundamental problems that Europe faces. This might be because Mr. Hiro was unable to understand the byzantine bureaucracy of our dear European Union, or because Europe is simply too boring and since he lives in London he figures that in the near future he might not be part of it anymore.

After Empire is well worth reading, since it gives an interesting and refreshingly nuanced account of global affairs, even if you sometimes drown in all the details and the author could have taken a step back and looked at the bigger picture a bit more often. When he does so, however, the book offers many valuable insights. 

Book Review

1000 Years of Annoying the French, by Stephen Clarke.

At the very outskirts of the world, at least until America was discovered, a narrow channel of water separates the misty island of Britannia from the continent. Although both the British and the French were once a part of the Roman Empire, they have come to develop significantly different ways and customs over the years. Like a pair of young siblings who can´t agree on who gets to play with the train set, the history of these two countries is one fraught with gleeful taunts, tears, loathing, betrayal, treachery, regicide, backstabbing and murder.

When the Chancellor of the Exchequer declared in the recent British election that a vote for the opposition would result “Rising unemployment … as seen under France´s socialist president”, he was merely continuing a proud British tradition of bashing the French whenever possible. For those who lust after a detailed and humorous account in the same vein, stretching across a thousand years, this book is most definitely for you.  

As a Briton who has spent several years living in France, Mr. Clarke is ideally suited to writing a through historical account of the two countries shared history. His bestselling A Year in the Merde depicted his struggles when he had arrived in Paris fresh from the Eurostar, and in this new book he brings his familiar humorous and irreverent, yet diligently researched style, to bear.

It should be noted that Mr. Clarke is by no means anti-French and that this book is written as a labor of love rather than a reason for Britain to leave the EU. Not hating the French meant that he took some flak when he was promoting A Year In the Merde in the US back in 2005.  Following their invasion of Iraq, anti-French sentiment was running high, and a radio presenter got so upset with Mr. Clarke when he wouldn´t call the French “uncivilized froggies” the he promptly cancelled their interview. A noble gesture to be sure, although I suspect he is still waiting for his Legion d´Honneur.  

The first piece of cherished French history Mr. Clarke tears into is the Norman invasion of 1066, when the namesake of yours truly, William the Conqueror, invaded England. As the writer frequently reminds us throughout the book, there is a French version of what happened, and then there is the truth. If you were to stop a perfumed Parisian strolling down the Place de la Concorde, he would probably tell you that the William and his Normans were French and that ever since their invasion Britain has, de facto, been ruled by Frenchmen. Before our Parisian friend could light up a Gitanes and take a delighted puff, Mr. Clarke would point out that the Normans were anything but French. Back in the days when an enfeebled French king could barely hold onto half of modern day France, the savage successors of the Vikings who roamed the northern coasts were a serious threat to his somewhat feeble kingdom. Even though our Parisian friend might spill some ash over his Louis Vuitton shoes when he gasps in shock at that bold statement, the Norman invasion of England set the stage for a thorn in France’s side that continuous to sting to this day.

The hundred year’s war saw the flower of France’s nobility, resplendent in their shining armor, slaughtered time and time again by English peasants wielding longbows. One has to assume that the sparkly luster the most ornate cuirass rather goes away after it´s been pierced by a bodkin arrow and it´s owner has died in a muddy field outside Agincourt. While the flower of France was repeatedly deflowered, a succession of English monarchs happily plundered and rampaged through their country. When Joan of Arc, France´s great saint and savior, was captured by Burgundians, the French king saw this as an opportunity to remove a growing threat and promptly allowed her to be ransomed to the English. Her archenemies were naturally not disposed to showing her any clemency, and our unfortunate Joan was promptly burned at the stake for wearing men´s clothing.  To say that the thirty year´s war ended with a French victory, Mr. Clarke suggests, is a bit like saying that every outbreak of the bubonic plague has ended in a human victory.

The most striking British triumph, by a country mile, is the fact that they delivered the coup the grace when France was poised for world domination. That Napoleon´s hundred days return to power was brought to an end at Waterloo is common knowledge, but the story of the suspicions deaths of the Grand l´Empereur and his descendants has enough drama in it to deserve a novel of its own. Not one, not two, but three Napoleons have all died in British custody under suspicious circumstances. Napoleon I died on the distant pacific Island of Saint Helena. The official cause of death was stomach cancer, but suspicion has long abounded that he died due to the poor care of the British, arsenic poison being a stubborn conspiracy theory that refuses to go away. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, or Napoleon III, also died while in British care, residing in a manor in Chislehurst outside London after he had fled France following the disastrous battle of Sedan. The exact cause of his death remains unknown, but the lead water pipes in the villa is the chief suspect. Louis Napoleon´s son, the hapless young man who was later nicknamed Napoleon III ½, died in an ambush while serving with the British in the Anglo-Zulu war.  Accidents, as the saying goes, happen all the time.

Fascinating facts leap at you from every page of the book and the stories I have just told are but a tiny fraction of the thousand year feud. If I were to share all the gems from the book we would be here all night, but it will suffice to say that Mr. Clarke must have gone through a legion of musty tomes when he did his research. His uniquely British sense of humor ensures that six hundred plus pages passes by in a blur and the book manages to be both highly entertaining and provide a comprehensive lesson in European history. My only question is how differently the story would have been told if it had been written by a Frenchman? That, however, is a question that will remain unanswered until some enterprising Frenchman, possibly our Parisian friend, decides to take up the pen in anger and strike back at Mr. Clarke. 

Book Review 

A Fighting Chance, by Elizabeth Warren 

Elizabeth Warren is the Senator of Massachusetts, and something of a political rock star in America. YouTube videos where she tears into hapless Wall Street bankers has attracted several millions of views and when she recently appeared on The Daily Show, John Stewart asked her what if felt like to have her own wing of the Democratic Party. This Teddy Roosevelt-like progressive zeal naturally means that Warren has her fair share of enemies as well as a given place in the media spotlight.   

Mrs. Warren´s story seems inextricably tied with the concept that her country has always held most dear, that of the American dream. Born in Oklahoma in 1949 to working class parents, Warren´s lofty aspirations of going to college and becoming a teacher seemed far out of reach for her family´s modest means. Coming from a country where all education, including university, is free, I was already misty-eyed and rooting for Warren at this point. Her mother, as she explains, was neither cruel nor did she doubt her daughter´s potential, she merely thought that the life of a housewife would be a much safer bet. Warren did marry and have children at an early age, but when her father gave her a fire-extinguisher for Christmas after she had set the kitchen on fire while trying to make toast, she decided to give her lifelong dream another go. The married suburban bliss of the nuclear family´s housewife, that Don Draper and his cohorts from Madison Avenue where peddling in their glossy 1960s ads, clearly wasn´t meant for her.       

Warren graduated law school and eventually ended up as a professor with a burning passion to teach. In 1995 she found herself working on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. This was where her interest in politics was born when she fought a long drawn out rearguard action to try to prevent tougher bankruptcy laws that would be a severe blow to those who needed a fresh start in life. At first, Warren writes, she viewed these people as irresponsible, their undignified shuffle to the bankruptcy court being due to a carelessness with money and a lack of responsibility. Many of those she met, however, were just regular people who had fallen on tough times. A job lost or a sick family member could mean that someone who had worked hard and played by the rules their whole life was suddenly standing on the precipice of a vast economic abyss. Their only hope to escape the steadily growing tide of bills they couldn´t possibly afford to pay, was to take the plunge and wipe their slates clean. As Warren painfully admits, those who fought the good fight were not nearly as well funded as their adversaries, and the pressure from a Republican held congress to sign the new bankruptcy legislation was mounting steadily. Bill Clinton vetoed the bill in the final days of his presidency, but a newly inaugurated W signed it into law with the stroke of a pen shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, thanks to Warren and her colleagues dogged determination, they managed to hold off the poisonous bill long enough to save thousands of families. Despite their bitter sweet loss, Warren didn´t lose faith. Assuming the mantle of David fighting against a well-heeled Goliath had only whetted her appetite for public service. I suspect that her go to rallying cry of “The system is rigged in favor of those with money and power”, originated from this desperate yet noble struggle.

A few years after her doomed fight for bankruptcy legislation, events conspired to place Warren in the spotlight once more. This time she would come face to face with Timothy Geithner, whose biography, Stress Test, was the first book I reviewed on this blog. After the financial meltdown of 2007, senate majority leader Harry Reid placed her on the TARP oversight committee, her task being to oversee the implementation of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. I remember from reading Stress Test how Geithner felt that Warren was out of her depth in this role, and that her senate hearings were geared more towards YouTube-sensationalism than serious inquiry. The YouTube bit may not have been entirely false, but Geithner never seems to have gotten on very well with Warren, nor did he seem to take her very seriously. In his mind she was more or less the kind of swivel-eyed lunatic who tells the mob with pitchforks to burn down the witch’s hut.

The humble and unassuming Geithner who featured in Stress Test is, however, suspiciously absent from Warren´s account of the TARP-proceedings. She tells us a gem of an anecdote about how Geithner invited her to a lunch meeting at a nearby restaurant in the capitol. They were both seated in the back of Geithner’s colossal SUV, with a couple of burly Secret Service men by the wheel. Since they were going at a breakneck pace, Warren had wisely fastened her seatbelt, and advised the Secretary of the Treasury to do the same. When he responded smugly that both his bodyguards carried firearms and were trained to use them, Warren sensibly pointed out that wouldn´t help him if the SUV got into an accident and rolled over. Geithner, Warren notes dryly, didn´t fasten his seatbelt until they had already eaten lunch and were on their way back.

Although the two of them didn´t see eye to eye on most things, there was something they both agreed on, that the Dodd-Frank legislation passed after the crash was not enough to reign in the excesses of the big banks. They may very well be right in their jointly held assumption, but all was not doom and gloom. One has to assume she liked to make toasts when the oversight panel took their afternoon break, since her old misfortune with the toaster that caught fire during her housewife days came back with a vengeance.  In the years that followed those perilous times when you could smoke in your car and drink scotch and soda in your office, someone founded a government agency responsible for making sure that toasters didn´t catch fire. Why was it, Warren asked herself, that same protection didn´t apply to mortgages and other financial products? Surely you should be able to expect that, as a consumer, the financial products you buy doesn´t have a ticking time bomb buried among all the fine print? The same people who had lobbied for the cruel bankruptcy bill were obviously opposed to this as well, but luckily this time she had President Obama and several other influential people on her side. Initially Warren was poised to lead this agency, but powerful voices opposed her. This turned out to be a good thing, because if they hadn´t you wouldn´t be reading this review. 

The bankers, thinking they had finally gotten rid of Warren, praised their luck and continued business as usual. Their capitalist nirvana of long days spent fundraising, golfing, laughing out loud for no apparent reason and gradually picking away at Dodd-Frank, however, turned out to be short lived.

A long time ago (2013), in a land far away (Massachusetts), Republican senator Scott Brown sat on the senate seat that the late Ted Kennedy had occupied for forty seven years. Kennedy, a renowned liberal lion, had been one of Warren´s few allies when she fought the bankruptcy bill. The seat had been narrowly lost to the Democrats and the people one Wall Street who Warren fought on a daily basis now had a stern ally in Scott Brown. Brown was a former National Guard colonel who had previously served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and won Cosmopolitan Magazine´s America’s sexiest man competition in 1982. He was the kind of square jawed jock who drives a Ford Mustang convertible and dates the prom queen in every High School film that´s ever been made. Even the Massachusetts firefighters association, who later endorsed Warren in the election, admitted that they would rather sit down and have a beer with Scott Brown than with Mrs. Warren. Holding one´s liquor, however, is not the only skill a Senator has to master, even though it is certainly more impressive than balancing the budget.

The long and tough senatorial campaign of Warren vs Brown garnered national attention and Scott Brown´s affluent supporters poured untold millions of dollars into his campaign. The mood turned ugly quite a few times and every aspect of Warren´s life was examined by her opponents in search of something they could smear her with. Super Pacs led by Karl Rove, a longtime conservative strategist, attacked her Native American ancestry as well as her policies, which they tried to paint as a greatest hits compilation of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin. In the end Warren prevailed, Massachusetts was in Democratic hands once more and her fiery rhetoric would continue to be viewed by millions of people on YouTube.

Warren´s autobiography is a thrilling read. Small wonder, since her life could more or less be made into a rags-to-riches Hollywood film without any airbrushing. Just like you would expect from a book in this genre, A Fighting Chance is written in clear, simple language with an emphasis on ease of reading instead of Shakespearian flourish. The plot may be on the serious side, but it´s filled with enough anecdotes and wry humor to liven things up after all the misery of inhuman bankruptcy laws and financial meltdown. Ultimately, it tells the tale that people have always found fascinating, that of an underdog and an unlikely hero, and it does it remarkably well.