A unique perspective on how war policy was formed by two very different presidents.
A former member of both Bush administrations compares the two Iraq wars.
Now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Haass (The Opportunity: America’s Moment to Alter History’s Course, 2005, etc.) is one of a very select group—which includes Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Bob Gates and Paul Wolfowitz—that was involved in making high-level decisions in both major Iraq conflicts. Haass makes the case that the 1991 war, spurred by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, was a necessary and well-planned operation. The current Iraq conflict, he says, was a poorly executed war of choice. Haass backs up his assertions with firsthand knowledge. He was in the room when many of the initial plans were hashed out, for example, and he was standing next to Bush I when he famously said, “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.” Bush I’s foreign policy was of a more practical, “realist” bent, the author argues, and its aims during the first conflict were concerned with reestablishing the status quo in the region. Bush II and his circle, on the other hand, had much more ambitious, difficult and dangerous goals: They wanted to truly transform the Middle East, and do it in one bold stroke. Haass admires then–Secretary of State Powell for his caution during the 2003 rush to war, but it’s clear that Powell’s (and Haass’s) push for a more diplomatic approach with Iraq had few advocates in Bush II’s inner circle. The result, he argues, was slipshod war planning. Haass also astutely notes the two presidents’ differing management styles. While Bush I welcomed rigorous and inclusive policy debate, Bush II was far less careful and more informal, which, Haass argues, led to disastrous postwar oversight in Iraq.
A unique perspective on how war policy was formed by two very different presidents.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4902-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorker staff 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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