Andrew J. Bacevich, America's War For the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016) ("America's War For the Greater Middle East began with failure in the desert. . . . During Operation Eagle Claw, which began and ended on the night of April 24-25, 1980, U.S. fatalities numbered in the single digits. Even before U.S. troops closed with the enemy, Eagle Claw unraveled--the equivalent of a football team succumbing to defeat even before taking the field." Id. at xix. Pages xiv-xv displays a map, "America's War for the Greater Middle East: Selected Campaigns and Operations, 1980-present." I cannot reproduce the map here, but here is a list of those "selected campaigns." Bosnia: Deny Flight, 1993-1995; Deliberate Force, 1994; Joint Endeavor, 1995-1996. Kosovo: Determined Force, 1998; Allied Force, 1999; Joint Guardian, 1999-2005. Lebanon: Multinational Force, 1982-1984. Libya: El Dorado Canyon, 1986; Odyssey Dawn, 2011. Egypt: Bright Star, 1980-2009. Sudan: Infinite Reach, 1998. North/West Africa: Enduring Freedom--Trans Sahara, 2007-. Turkey: Provide Comfort, 1991. Syria: Inherent Resolve, 2014-. Iraq: Desert Storm, 1991; Southern Watch, 1991-2003; Desert Strike, 1996; Northern Watch, 1997-2003; Desert Fox, 1998; Iraqi Freedom, 2003-2010; New Dawn, 2010-2011; Inherent Resolve, 2014-. Iran: Eagle Claw, 1980; Olympic Games, 2007-2010. Afghanistan: Cyclone, 1980-1989; Infinite Reach, 1998; Enduring Freedom, 2001-2015; Freedom's sentinel, 2015-. Pakistan: Neptune Spear, 2011. Saudi Arabia: Desert Shield, 1980; Desert Focus, 1986. Persian Gulf: Earnest Will, 1987-1988; Nimble Archer, 1987; Praying Mantis, 1988. Yemen: Determined Response, 2000. Somalia: Restored Hope, 1992-1993; Gothic Serpent, 1993;. East Africa: Enduring Freedom--Horn of Africa, 2002-. "As the action that initiated that war, Operation Eagle Claw proved an apt harbinger. Here was a portent of things to come: campaigns launched with high hopes but inexplicably going awry. In retrospect, we might see the events at Desert One as a warning from the gods or from God: Do not delude yourself. Do not indulge in fantasies of American arms somehow resolving the contradictions besetting U.S. policy in the Greater Middle East." "At the time, Americans were blind to any such warnings. Or perhaps out of laziness or irresponsibility, they chose not to heed them. We're lived with the consequences ever since." Id. at xii. When in elementary school I first read about The Hundred Year War. It googled may mind then, and for many years to come, that a war could last 100 years. Now I get it! America is in its forth decade of what Bracevich calls "America's War for the Greater Middle East." America may well still be there 60 years from now: America's Hundred Year War?).
David Cole, Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
Bernard Crick, In Defense of Politics, 4th ed., (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1993) ("The man who treats everything a a matter of principle can't be happy with politics. The man who says 'we cannot compromise until we have gained "x" or "y"', or that '"a" and "b" must never be given up' is acting unpolitically, even though he may be playing a part in a political system. Whoever says 'we must never compromise our ideals' is either dooming himself to frustration or pleading himself to authoritarianism. Ideals are valuable as ideals and not as plans for a new order of immediate things. And ideals should not be confused with the means to their attainment. By all means let us never compromise a genuine idea--'true equality' or 'social justice' indeed. But let us not then say that 'more nationalization' or 'democracy' are first principles which can never be abandoned or modified. For these things are only relative means to what we may take to be absolute ends (there is no need . . . for the defenders of politics to take sides on whether such absolute ends or ideals are meaningful or not); their applicability must vary with time and place. The man who speaks the language of absolute demands--say 'a guaranteed living wage' or 'the right of property' (or of compensation for property taken)--should at least be expected to realize that these things are gainable or relinquishable in a multitude of different forms. They are, in a word, negotiable--political, not total, commitments. To entertain politics at all is inevitably to enter into a world of morality in which one is aware of sacrifice as much as of aspirations (and at times 'absolute principles' may have to be sacrificed as much as material goods and personal measures--for some worth-while purpose); and in which one is aware of public responsibility as well as of private conscience. It is said that someone asked Lincoln once why he looked 'so sad and so wise'. He replied: 'because I know I can't get everything I want.'" Id. at 135-137.).
Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("I believe the rhetoric of meritocracy has caused enamors harm." Id. at xii. "In societies that celebrate meritocratic individualism, saying that top earners may have enjoyed a bit of luck apparently verges on telling them that they don't really belong on top, that they aren't who they think they are. The rhetoric of meritocracy appears to have camouflaged the extent to which success and failure often hinge decisively on events completely beyond any individual's control." Id. at xii. "Almost 70 percent of the faculty surveyed at one university believed themselves to be in the top 25 percent of their colleagues with respect to teaching ability. And another survey found that 87 percent of students in an elite MBA program believed their academic performance placed them in the top half of their class." Id. at 71. "False beliefs about luck are also common. [] Another disconnect between evidence and belief is people's tendency to underestimate good fortune's role in success, while being too quick to embrace bad luck as an explanation of failure. [] Some have attributed it to so-called motivated cognition: People want to feel good about themselves, and they're more likely to enjoy the warm glow of a positive self-image. If they think of themselves as highly competent and attribute their failures to events beyond their control." Id. 72-73. Note: Here is the one area of life where I am truly exceptional: I know that anything and everything good that has happened in my life ("my successes") is due to luck, and anything and everything that has gone wrong in my life ("my failures") is due solely to my being a fuck-up. There is great comfort in being the village idiot (as I hum the tune to Van Morrison's song, "Village Idiot.").
Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016) ("Let me confess here a nostalgia for the managerial professionalism that I have just described. It was, after all, the system that administered the country's great corporations, its news media, its regulatory agencies, and its welfare state in the more benevolent years of the American Century. Here and there, in certain corners of our national life, this older organizational form still survives, keeping our passenger jet from exploding and our highway bridges from collapsing." "But generally speaking, that system of professionalism was long ago subverted and transformed into something different and more rapacious. Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care providers, all of them out for themselves." Id. at 26-27. "For successful professionals, meritocracy is a beautifully self-serving doctrine, entitling them to all manner of rewards and status, because they are smarter than other people. For people on the receiving end of inequality--for those who have just lost their home, for example, or who are having trouble surviving on the minimum wage, the implications of meritocracy are equally unambiguous. To them this ideology says: forget it, You have no one to blame for your problems but yourself." "There is no solidarity in a meritocracy." Id. at 32. The doctrine of meritocracy is Social Darwinism updated. "The answer is that I've got the wrong liberalism. The kind of liberalism that has dominated Massachusetts for the last few decades isn't the stuff of Franklin Roosevelt or the United Auto Workers; it's the Route 128/suburban-professionals variety. Professional-class liberals aren't really alarmed by oversized rewards for society's winners; on the contrary, this seems natural tho them--because they are society's winners. The liberalism of professionals just does not extend to matters of inequality; this is the area where soft hearts abruptly turn hard." Id. at 195.).
Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2016) From the book jacket: "American have always loved guns. This special bond was forged during the American Revolution and sanctified by the Second Amendment. It is because of the exceptional relationship that American civilians are more heavily armed than the citizens of any other nation." "Or so we're told." "In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag overturns this conventional wisdom. American gun culture, she argues, developed not because the gun was exceptional, but precisely because it was not: guns proliferated in America because throughout most of the nation's history, they were perceived as an unexceptional commodity, no different than buttons or typewriters." From the text: "Nineteenth-century America left to the twentieth a diffusion of guns. It also left the beginning of a gun mystique that had been forged on a changeling frontier, annealed with a rifle, and machined into a cultural idiom. That mystique may have been incubated in the nineteenth century, but it flourish in the twentieth, when it acquired the obduracy of fact through repetition in the medium of advertisement, story, television, radio, history, and film. At midcentury, the gun prevailed on the American myth market." "Its legacy is a simple but profound one for twenty-first-century gun culture and a striking contrast to the gun's reality: the legend conjures a country, and a frontier, imagined as more gun-violent than it was, not less, and a world of gun violence between good guys and bad guys. This Manichean conceptualization--of Hickok facing down a villain on a dusty town plaza--has proven to be almost a cultural narcotic. It is a conceptualization that construes gun violence as a story of crime versus the abstract, cool metaphysics of justice, with the latter achieved by a paramilitary citizen-soldier, when it is more often the story of a suicidal self-destruction and intimate, angry, intoxicated impulse. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were 31,672 gun deaths in the United States in 2010, and 33, 636 in 2013. The majority in both 2010 and 2013 (61 and 63 percent, respectively) were suicides. Thirty-six percent in 2010 were homicides, and the rest were accidental. Of the homicides, the majority did not occur between strangers, or by criminal. A study of 400 homicides victims from three cities found that in the 83 percent of cases where the perpetrator was identified, he or she was known to the victim in almost all--95 percent--of these cases (although statistics on homicides committed by known or unknown perpetrators is unavoidably and inherently skewed, because it is based on solved homicides--and it is easier to solve a homicide that involves an intimate or known assailant). The majority of women murdered are killed at home by a family member or an intimate partner--a spouse, lover, boyfriend, or intimate acquaintance (64 percent in 2007, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics: 24 percent by a spouse or ex-spouse, 21 percent by a boyfriend or girlfriend, and 19 percent by 'another family member'). More than half of all female 'handgun' homicide victims (57 percent) were killed by an intimate acquaintance. Guns were used in 71.5 percent of spousal murders. Although in theory a gun should equalize and protect woman against violence, case control studies have found that having a gun in the home increases a woman's risk for homicide and has 'no protective effect.'" Id. at 388-367.).
Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War On Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016) ("This book is about an uncomfortable truth: It takes government--a lot of government--for advanced societies to flourish." "The truth is uncomfortable because Americans cherish freedom. Government is effective in part because it limits freedom--because, in the language of political philosophy, it exercises legitimate coercion. Government can tell people they must send their children to school rather than the fields, that they cab't dump toxins into the water or air, and they thy must contribute to meet expenses that benefit the entire community. To be sure, government also secures our freedom. Without its ability to compel behavior, it would not just be powerless to protect our liberties; it would cease to be a vehicle for achieving many of our most important shared ends. But there's no getting around it; Government works because it can for people to do things." [] "But Americans have never been good at acknowledging government's necessary ole in supporting both freedom and prosperity. And we have become much less so over the last generation, We live in an era of profound skepticism about government. Contemporary political discourse portrays liberty and coercion as locked in ceaseless conflict. . . . We are told that the United States got rich in spite of government, when the truth is closer to the opposite: The United States got rich because it got government more or less right." Id. at 1-2. "A government that effectively promotes human flourishing is a government worth fighting for. More than ever, the problems we face demand a sustained and principled defense of a vital proposition: The government that covers best needs to govern white a bit. Americans must remember what has made America prosper." Id. at 369. This books does not say anything you should not already know if you have stepped back and taken a serious, and objective, long-term view of American politics. Unfortunately, few of us step back and take the serious, objective and long-term view.).
John W. Schiemann, Does Torture Work? (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2016) ("There are many decent and reasonable people who do not like the idea of torture but think it is necessary to protect America and Americans from terrorism. If this describes you, then I hope I can convince you that it is worth that it is worth examining through reason and logic the assumption that torture works. If you are someone who already opposes torture, I hope I am able to convince you why it is necessary not to treat proponents as 'moral monsters' but instead to examine the effectiveness claims of torture proponents. Either way, I hope you will agree that this isa question important enough to take seriously and pursue seriously. Torture is no game." Id. at xii. "In short, we have seen the failure of detainees to provide ay information at all, to provide false and misleading information, and to provide some corroborative information, including information that confirms what the same detainee had already provided without torture. . . . And while the CIA and Republican responses are able to point to some minor and corroborative information provided under torture, there is no instance anything near to the sort of information supporting the pragmatic model's claim of reliably generating reliable (valuable) information on imminent threats. Thus, the Bush program failed to meet the Information Reliability benchmark--the only possible justification for interrogational torture." Id. at 250-251.).
