Fiasco by Thomas E Ricks Available in Audio Book

This is a "must read" book for any voter in the USA. Ricks takes us through the run up to the war, the early occupation (or CPA), and the ongoing occupation. It is not a pretty picture and will scare the daylights out of anybody who thinks about what is going on. Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority could rightly be labeled "war criminals." Just read chapter 8 if nothing else. They went in and dismantled everything, institutions and organizations, that might have kept Iraq from imploding after "Mission Accomplished." Tom Ricks is the Military Correspondent for the Washington Post. He is a superb writer and knows all the players. He has spent a lot of time in Iraq both researching the book and as a war correspondent. In the interest of full disclosure, I know Tom a little bit. I have asked him about reaction to the book and specifically if he had been challenged on any of the subject matter. His reply? "Not once on anything." Some excerpts that I found particularly interesting: On troop levels going in:

The debate was far more than a technical squabble about troop numbers. Andrew Bacevich observed that Shinseki's comments amounted to a broad attack on Wolfowitz's entire approach to the Middle East. "Given that the requisite additional troops simply did not exist, Shinseki was implicitly arguing that the U.S. armed services were inadequate for the enterprise;' Bacevich wrote...

On the occupation:

Concern about a longterm occupation-that was discounted. The people around the president were so, frankly, intellectually arrogant;' this general continued. "They knew that postwar Iraq would be easy and would be a catalyst for change in the Middle East. They were making simplistic assumptions and refused to put them to the test. It's the vice president, and the secretary of defense, with the knowledge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the vice chairman. They did it because they already had the answer, and they wouldn't subject their hypothesis to examination. These are educated men, they are smart men. But they are not wise men."

On dissolving the Iraqi military:

Central Command was taken aback by the announcement. "We were surprised at the dissolution of the army;' said Maj. Gen. Renuart, adding mildly, "so that gave us a challenge." It is a verbal tic of the u.s. military that officers tend to say challenge when they mean problem.[ed] Agoglia, working as the military liaison to Bremer, told his boss, "You guys just blindsided Centcom." That was the day, he recalled, "that we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and created an insurgency."

If you want to understand what has happened in Iraq read this book. Pair it with Bob Woodwards's "State of Denial" and you get a very good picture of the Fiasco that is the Iraq war.

Isaac's Storm Katrina Repost: What might have been. by Erik Larson

In September 1900 a storm blew through Galveston TX that leveled the city. The dramatic photos in this book tell a story all their own. In the end, it wasn't wind or debris that caused the destruction but storm surge flooding.

Unlike a tsunami, a storm surge doesn't arrive all at once but is more gradual, hours instead of seconds. Still deadly and still destructive.

In 1900 storm warning was practically non-existent, the residents of the Gulf Coast were very lucky today. Here's what could have happened.

Original Review:

Isaac's Storm is relevant to the tsunami of 2004 which may explain why this 1999 book is back on the Bestseller lists.

True account "blends science and history to tell the story of Galveston, its people and the hurricane that devastated them. Larson follows individuals through the fateful day and the storm's aftermath."

He is a great storyteller and has done his research well.

A Pretext For War by James Bamford Available on Audio Book

Like Bamford's other books, Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, Pretext for War is well written, well documented, and very readable. The other books did not scare me; this one did.

Either the Bush administration chose to believe what they already believed in spite of the facts they learned after coming to office or, worse, they carried out a personal blood vengeance attack that cost thousands of US soldiers their lives. Not to mention the maimed and disabled veterans and the civilian casualties.

George W Bush came to office with a grudge against Saddam Hussein rooted in the assasination attempt on his father in 1993.

[George H W ] Bush called the reception "terribly emotional and wonderfully fulfilling" and seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself as he toured oil fields once torched by Iraqi forces and greeted American troops. Then it was time for the major ceremony at Kuwait University. On the stage, Bush introduced his daughter-in-law.

"Laura Bush's husband," he said, "is the owner of the Texas Rangers team. Now that I am just a citizen, I can root for any team I want." No one on the stage or in the audience knew how close they might have come to death. Through a series of misadventures, the assassins had been caught shortly before Bush went to the university. Had the plan worked, there is little doubt that George W's father, mother, wife, two brothers, and one of their wives would have been killed.[italics mine]

According to a senior official from the Clinton administration, "From all the evidence available to it, the CIA [was] highly confident that the Iraq government at the highest levels directed its intelligence service to assassinate former President Bush." As a result, about two months later, President Bill Clinton ordered twenty-three Tomahawk guided missiles, each packed with a thousand pounds of high explosives, fired at the downtown Baghdad ...

That someone would order the killing of his wife, parents, and most of his immediate family-and almost succeed-would burn in George W Bush, as it would in anyone. In private, his raw hatred for Hussein was evident. "The SOB tried to kill my dad," he snarled at one surprised visitor. "I was a warrior for George Bush," said George W at another time. "I would run through a brick wall for my dad." Despite the magnitude of the crime, Hussein had never been brought to justice. Now, as president himself, George W Bush would have a chance to bring justice to Hussein.[italics mine]

On Jan 30, 2001, barely ten days in office, the administration was planning to attack Iraq. Listen:

Then Bush addressed the sole items on the agenda for his first high-level national security meeting. The topics were not terrorism-a subject he barely mentioned during the campaign-or nervousness over China or Russia, but Israel and Iraq. From the very first moment, the Bush foreign policy would focus on three key objectives: Get rid of Saddam Hussein, end American involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and rearrange the dominoes in the Middle East. A key to the policy shift would be the concept of "preemption." [italics mine]

The blueprint for the new Bush policy had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisors. Soon to be appointed to senior administration positions, they were Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser. Ironically, the plan was originally intended not for Bush but for another world leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Bamford also talks about the strategy put together by Feith, Perle, and Wurmser for establishing US hegemony in the Middle East. Even if this was not a blood vendetta on the part of Dubya, there was a lot of American imperialism going around. Perle et al had this in mind:

As part of their" grand strategy," they recommended that once Iraq was conquered and Saddam Hussein overthrown, he should be replaced by a puppet leader friendly to Israel.[ed] "Whoever inherits Iraq," they wrote, "dominates the entire Levant strategically." Then they suggested that Syria would be the next country to be invaded. "Israel can shape its strategic environment," they said.

This would be done, they recommended to Netanyahu, "by reestablishing the principle of preemption" and by "rolling back" its Arab neighbors. From then on, the principle would be to strike first and expand, a dangerous and provocative change in philosophy. They recommended launching a major unprovoked regional war in the Middle East, attacking Lebanon and Syria and ousting Iraq's Saddam Hussein.[italics mine] Then, to gain the support of the American government and public, a phony pretext would be used as the reason for the original invasion.

Whether you choose to believe that the administration came to office with War in Iraq as its primary purpose or not, the book is a well-documented history and analysis of the failure of intelligence after the end of the cold war.

The Secret Man by Bob Woodward Available on Audio Book

There is not a lot of new information here. Some personal stories about how Bob Woodward got started and how Mark Felt helped that process. There is some insight into Felt: the internal conflict about what he was doing, the angst about how his colleagues would view him, and how the public would perceive his actions.

Felt as an old man is a sympathetic figure, as a younger man and agent he is still a bit of an enigma even after reading this book.

As with all of Woodward's books, this one is well written and readable. It is also fairly short and fast. A must for anyone interested in Watergate.

Blink : The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell Available on Audio Book

The Tipping Point was one of the best books I've ever read. Blink is better.

Gladwell explains in a readable and understandable way why that snap decision you made turned out to be correct. He also tells us why "less is more" in some decisions. For example,

Quite the opposite: that all that extra information isn't actually an advantage at all; that, in fact, you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon. The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters. John Gottman took a complex problem and reduced it to its simplest elements: even the most complicated of relationships and problems, he showed, have an identifiable underlying pattern. Lee Goldman's research proves that in picking up these sorts of patterns, less is more. Overloading the decision makers with information, he proves, makes picking up that signature harder, not easier. To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit.

"Thin-slicing" is the art of observing small bits of behavior and developing the ability to predict outcomes based on that information. John Gottman has done extensive research with couples and predicting how their marriage will turn out. Another practitioner is Vic Braden who can predict a tennis serve "double fault" with stunning accuracy. He doesn't know how he knows, he just knows.

A more subtle concept is "priming." Simply put, this says that what you see first influences your opinion later. Consider:

This test was devised by a very clever psychologist named John Bargh. It's an example of what is called a priming experiment... [they] staged an experiment in the hallway just down from Bargh's office. They used a group of undergraduates as subjects and gave everyone in the group one of two scrambled-sentence tests. The first was sprinkled with words like "aggressively," "bold," "rude," "bother," "disturb," "intrude," and" infringe." The second was sprinkled with words like "respect," "considerate," "appreciate," "patiently," "yield," "polite," and "courteous." ...After doing the test - which takes only about five minutes - the students were instructed to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment in order to get their next assignment. Whenever a student arrived at the office, however, Bargh made sure that the experimenter was busy, locked in conversation with someone else - a confederate who was standing in the hallway, blocking the doorway to the experimenter's office. ...The people primed to be rude eventually interrupted - on average after about five minutes. But of the people primed to be polite, the overwhelming majority - 82 percent - never interrupted at all. If the experiment hadn't ended after ten minutes, who knows how long they would have stood in the hallway, a polite and patient smile on their faces?

Blink is a terrific book that will help you with decisions, relationships, and getting what you want. It's a fast read and well done.

Fatal Flaw by William Lashner

I don't post a lot of fiction reviews because most of the fiction I read is intentionally "mindless." Sometimes I stumble on an exception. Lashner's use of language and his insights are exceptional.

The book is essentially about irrational men irrationally in love with a woman who suckers them all.

Lust will make a fool of any man, but it is only love that can truly ruin him.

Nostalgia is a fire fueled by failures of memory.

There are several threads in the book and most of the characters alternate between despicable and sympathetic.

Nothing existed to temper his desire. Whatever he wanted was right, whoever opposed him was wrong, everything he did was justified and proper, everything in this universe existed for the purpose of serving him. You could see it in the way he dealt with people, the way he dealt with problems, the way, finally, he dealt the cards. It was subtle, but not too subtle for someone trained to see the flip of the finger and the distinct sound of cards slipped from the bottom of the deck at crucial points in the game.

He manages to state the obvious and make it funny:

"All very technical, Officer Cantwell" "Most of our work is. That's why we're called technicians."

I'll read the rest of Lashner's catalog.

I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

"Caricature in words" is what Tom Wolfe renders to the reader. The characters are always bigger than real life yet believable. They are always exaggerated yet they are real. They always tell us something about life.

Anyone who has been to college as an adolescent and paid any attention to the social surroundings recognizes at least some of the people in these pages. You'll also remember the rituals... and at least some of the lessons learned.

Some excerpts. On college sports:

"...What is it with this sports mania in the first place? Why does anybody get excited because Dupont is gonna play Indiana in basketball? Either our hired mercenaries will beat their hired mercenaries, or vice versa. Why does anybody care? It's a game between two groups of guys who have no connection with our lives whatsoever, and even if they did, it's only a game! Why does a game get students so emotionally involved? Or anybody else for that matter. What does it mean to them? I don't see how it could mean anything, but obviously it does. It's a mystery. It's completely irrational."

On the Coach and the College President:

But [the President] could only do so gingerly, with his own job in his hands - because there was one thing he couldn't do. He couldn't fire [the Coach]. Only the board of trustees could do that-and they could also fire the President.

On coeds:

The groupies pranced forward, pretty white girls whose faces, had they chosen to leave them unpainted, could have been those of the sweetest, most dedicated day-care-center volunteers. As it was, their eyes shone from way down in Night Life black occipital craters. Their eyelids bore cantilevered store-bought lashes, their lips gleamed with an astonishing range of hues, the waists of their jeans were below the tops of their hip joints, and the jeans were so tight, their belly buttons so conspicuously pierced with silver rings from which hung a short string or two of pearls. . . that they looked like hookers.

On language:

...Shit Patois. Charlotte had been aware of Fuck Patois from the day she arrived at Dupont, but it was not until spending hour after hour after hour cooped up in this SUV that she realized how cool it apparently was to use shit in every way possible: to mean possessions ("Where's your shit?"), lies or misleading explanations ("Are you shitting me?" "We need a shit detector"), drunk ("shit-faced"), trouble ("in deep shit"), ineptitude ("couldn't play point guard for shit"), care about ("give a shit"), rude, thoughtless, disloyal ("really shitty thing to do"), not kidding ("no shit?"), obnoxiously unpleasant ("he's a real shit"), mindless conversation ("talking shit," "shooting the shit"), confusing story ("or some such shit"), drugs ("you bring the shit?"), to egest ("take a shit"), to fart in such a way that it becomes partly egestion ("shart"), a trivial matter ("a piece a shit"), unpleasantly surprised ("he about shit a brick"), ignorance ("he don't know shit"), pompous man ("the big shit," "that shitcake"), hopeless situation ("up Shit Creek"), disappointment ("oh, shit!"), startling ("holy shit!"), unacceptable, inedible ("shit on a shingle"), strategy ("oh, that shit again"), feces, literally ("shit"), slum ("some shithook neighborhood"), meaningless ("that don't mean shit"), et cetera ("and massages and shit"), self-important ("he thinks he's some shit"), predictably ("sure as shit"), very ("mean as shit"), verbal abuse ("gave me shit"), violence ("before the shit came down" or "hit the fan," "don't start no shit," "won't be no shit"). Still, they didn't neglect Fuck Patois...

This is a great book. Classic Tom Wolfe. A good read.