The occupation, Phillips urges, has been characterized by sheer incompetence. Though there’s little news in that...
Might does not always equal power, strength does not always yield influence, and “winning the peace requires cooperation from freedom’s beneficiaries.” So warns policy expert Phillips (Council on Foreign Relations) in this justly gloomy report.
Saddam was no friend of the Iraqi people, allows Phillips. In areas of Kurdish settlement, he introduced ethnic cleansing methods meant to “Arabize” the population and destroy political opposition; areas of Shia control were bloodily repressed. Despite ethnic divisions that lead some observers to wonder whether Iraq can really be a country at all, Phillips suggests that federalism may be the best hope for an independent nation. Complicating this are all the old scores to settle—not just Shia versus Sunni, Baathist versus Kurd, but also, back across the waters, neocon versus paleocon, nation-builder versus bomb-into-submission old Cold Warriors. In this respect, picture Paul Wolfowitz, who fancies himself an expert on Islam and is demonstrably a hawk, rumbling with Colin Powell, who characterized the weapons-of-mass-destruction ploy as “bullshit”; though Phillips reminds us that Powell eventually bowed to the will of President Bush, it is clear whose side he believes the angels and devils stand. Phillips, like so many others, wonders how it could be that the U.S. backed such a wrong horse as Ahmad Chalabi, who has stood trial for embezzlement elsewhere in the Arab world and seems now to be favored only by a small set of neocons. One answer, he suggests, is that State Department analysts who knew anything at all about Iraq, rather like the “China hands” of old, were systematically frozen out of agencies such as the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, a civilian and military clearinghouse for transitional management of Iraqi affairs. One result: good military campaign, bad postwar management, with neocons like Wolfowitz brushing aside the concerns and warnings of career soldiers who presumably know something about war.
The occupation, Phillips urges, has been characterized by sheer incompetence. Though there’s little news in that argument—and indeed, little news here—his narrative does a good job of recording a long series of missteps, naming names as it does.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8133-4304-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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