Nation review of Winning Modern Wars

[ajacobson]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031208&c=1&s=fitzgerald

[kalashnikov]

1. Holy #$%@!

The man is a genius! Another reason to vote for him. HEe understands foreign policy better than just about anyone out there

[helleborient]

2. Yes, this book has been well reviewed in the book industry as well...

It is better than the average campaign bio. put out by a presidential candidate.

[KittyWampus]

3. The Military Industrial Complex

The Army, he writes, has long resisted
investing or engaging in peace operations, even though every recent conflict,
from Panama to Kosovo, has required such operations to attain the desired
objectives. One reason for this failure, he suggests, is that the Army's mandate
and historic task has been to fight high-intensity wars. Another is that the
military-industrial complex makes its money off high-tech weaponry and not off
such things as language training or the development of skills to deal with policing
and legal systems. Furthermore, the Republican-controlled Congresses of the
1990s could be counted upon to vote against anything that smacked of
"nation-building." In the mid-1990s the Clinton Administration tried to create an
interagency capability for dealing with failed states, such as Haiti and Somalia,
but the effort never got very far, and the Bush Administration brushed it aside.
Thus before the invasion there was no structure or organization within the US
government with the expertise to plan for the future of Iraq--much less one with
the resources to implement such a plan. Then, too, Clark writes, by going to war
without international support and by refusing to cede any power over the political
process afterward, Bush forfeited the help he might have received from other
governments and from international organizations that had expertise and
resources to contribute. The Army and the Iraqi people are now paying the price
for these failures.

[helleborient]

4. And we received the warnings about the dangers of the

Military-Industrial complex from, of all people, a Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, in the 1950s.