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
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
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
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