A profoundly insightful account of why we’re mired in forever wars, and likely will be long into the future.
A primer in how to lose the war on terror.
National security expert Bergen shows how intelligence agencies, politicians, and the military misread the world after 9/11—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost roughly $6 trillion and 7,000 American lives. One serious misstep was attacking Iraq on the assumption that it was involved in the 9/11 attacks; another, by Bergen’s account, was relegating the war in Afghanistan to secondary status, a diversion that, he charges, resulted in the Taliban’s return to power 20 years after its initial defeat. “The dual debacles of the Iraq War and the Afghan withdrawal signaled that the US superpower had little idea what it was doing when it came to foreign policy,” he writes. He elaborates: Even though the brass was wary of sending troops to “faraway countries they had little understanding of,” presidents from Bush to Trump pushed for war or, at least in Obama’s case, kept the status quo. Other missteps that the author enumerates include disarming the Iraqi military and purging members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, which put a million disaffected and well-trained fighters out on the street, strengthening Al Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS (“the pool of potential terrorists expanded quite dramatically because of the Iraq War”). Bergen explodes numerous assumptions: Pakistan, he writes, did not shelter Osama bin Laden, as the CIA asserted, and torture such as waterboarding produced almost no actionable intelligence. Most damning of all, however, was that in both Afghanistan and Iraq, “there was no real plan for the ‘day after.’” As Colin Powell said, “You break it, you own it,” to which Bergen adds, “Make real plans for the ‘day after’ the war appears to be won, or you will likely lose the peace.”
A profoundly insightful account of why we’re mired in forever wars, and likely will be long into the future.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781324124061
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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