America's War: For The Greater Middle East, Bacevich - B

                                                      This is a damning critique of the last forty years, written by a 1969 West Point grad, combat vet, PhD., and father of a son lost in Iraq.  He acknowledges upfront that for all our high-minded eloquence, our involvement in the Middle East is about oil. Although the US's oil hegemony was challenged with the 1973 embargo, the actual militarization of US policy in the Middle East was never under consideration until the Iranian Revolution. Ironically, the event that forever changed American policy, the takeover of the embassy in Tehran, was a student, and not government, initiated activity. When the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was added to the mix, Carter announced that the Persian Gulf was considered strategically critical to the US and any interference with our access to oil would be met with a forceful military response. Danger and dependence drove the conclusion. The US military response was to create Central Command (Centcom) for action in the Middle East.
                                                     The first failure in the author's eye in our preliminary war in the Middle East was Afghanistan because our success against the Soviets led to the Taliban. Next was Reagan's optimistic intervention in Beirut that led to the bombing of the Marine barracks and our quick departure. The stated intent was to provide a peacekeeping force in the midst of the civil war in Lebanon. No one anywhere would ever conclude our men accomplished anything. The Reagan administration followed up with the multiple bombings of Libya in response to an act of terror in Berlin, but it did not prevent the sabotage of Pan Am 103 a few years later. The mishmash of the Iran-Iraq War saw the US declare neutrality under Carter, back surreptitiously, and then outright, Iraq under Reagan. Eventually we provided arms to Iran through Israel all of which led to a deadly attack on a US destroyer by Saddam Hussein. Saddam apologized, we blamed the Iranians with no particular rationale and initiated a shooting naval war against them that culminated in our shooting down of a commercial passenger airplane. A ceasefire ensued and all of America patted itself on the back for keeping the Straits of Hormuz open and enforcing the Carter Doctrine with  firmness and force. In 1991 in the First Gulf War, the American led coalition utterly destroyed the armed forces of Iraq.  But we ended it early, without a follow-up plan. Kuwait was freed, but Hussein and the remnants of his army were still intact. Indeed, they engaged in a violent suppression of a Kurd and Shiite rebellion against Saddam that we stood by and ignored. Many believe the US left Saddam in place as a counterweight to Shiite Iran.
                                                      Whatever our intent in letting Saddam stay, we paid a heavy price for the decision for over a decade. We started what the Air Force has labelled an 'air occupation', by enforcing a no fly zone over the country that entailed hundreds of thousands of sorties. The 1990's saw the US Everywhere concept evolve. The Soviets were defeated and we could solve many problems with our awesome military power and good will.  In Somalia, we had our nose bloodied while trying to intervene in a tribal civil war. We intervened twice in the former Yugoslavia. The decade closed with Clinton declaring war on Al Qaeda.
                                                      After Sept.11, the new Bush administration, seeking to eliminate evil, declared a global war on terrorism.  A brief air war in Afghanistan led the Taliban to abandon the country's principal cities and  forced bin Laden into hiding in Pakistan. Bush declared matters resolved and turned to Iraq. Clearing away the platitudes and lies, we invaded Iraq to establish the effectiveness of preventive war, to show that we could effectuate regime change, and to show the Muslim world it was not exempt from the same governing themes that the rest of the world lived by. Iraq was not a danger, it was an opportunity. The regime and its army were disposed of in three weeks. We had no plan for the occupation. The insurgency immediately ensued. It would be another decade before we left. The following year, 2004, saw the insurgency deepen and the theme of bringing freedom and democracy to the Muslim world thoroughly undermined by the photographic evidence of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Thereafter, the insurgency morphed into a Shiite-Sunni civil war, with jihadists from nearby countries joining in. A full six years later, in the second year of the Obama administration, the US combat mission was declared over. By 2011, there were no US troops left in Iraq.
                                                     During the campaign in 2008, Obama had declared that the war we needed to fight was not in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. So, in 2009, he increased the number of American troops, but not to the degree that his commanders desired. He also stated that the surge would be of limited duration. It only accomplished an increase in US and civilian casualties. At the end of 2014, Obama declared that our longest war had come to a responsible conclusion, even though 10,000 Americans remained there. As Obama backed away from the two wars, he expanded drone operations and extended American activities to Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon. When ISIS struck in 2013, we were back in Iraq as the hawks in the US screamed about Obama letting American control of the Middle East slip away. The author suggests that the US foreign policy establishment has a collective memory of about ten days.
                                                       From the time of George Kennan through the end of the Cold War, the US established and maintained massive wealth and military power with the objective of outlasting the USSR and averting war. "Freedom, abundance and security went hand in hand." Shaping the future became the new mantra and rationale for the massive military establishment. We believed that the determined use of our power would set all things right. We defeated fascism and communism and should be able to defeat or fix all else that comes along. We have power and we wield it righteously. And the war for the Greater Middle East has become a way of life.
                                                        The author  feels very strongly that everything we have done has failed and his principal rationale is our inability to fix the underlying problems of the Middle East: absurd post-Colonial borders, poverty, religious conflict, corrupt regimes, Israel's existence and the Iranian Revolution. The problems are intractable and cannot be resolved by intervention. Nonetheless, every president from Carter to Obama delusionally attempted to do the impossible. He closes very strongly by arguing that there is nothing for us to do in the Middle East. Between climate change and the rise of China, there are much more important things to attend to elsewhere. This book is well-written, relatively brief and quite thorough. It will remind you of some events that have slipped away from our collective memories, and sadly, points out that we have been actively fighting for a very long time, and have very little, indeed virtually nothing,  to show for it.

All For Nothing, Kempowski - B

                                                      This superb German novel is about a well-off family on a small estate in East Prussia in 1945.  Eberhard is away with the Wehrmacht in a civilian capacity, the beautiful Katharina dreamily floats through every day, Peter is twelve, and Auntie pretty much runs the place. Life goes on. All is peaceful and quiet even though war has raged in Europe for five-and-a-half years. The occupants of the Georgenhof know the Russians are not far away, but the question remains 'if' not 'when'. "Our men will throw them straight back to the Urals" was the consensus of the village. One late night, Eberhard calls from Italy and tells them to get out immediately. Katharina exhibits no enthusiasm to leave and delays consideration for some time. Auntie sees to it that a cart is piled high with as many of their possessions as it will hold. For sheltering a refugee for one night at the request of the local pastor, Katharina was taken in for jail and questioning. Auntie and Peter leave with Vladimir, the Polish laborer assigned to the estate, and Vera, the Ukrainian girl also working there. Soon, Vladimir takes all their goods and leaves them behind. Peter sees him a few days later hanging from a tree with a looter sign draped over him. They are walking when Auntie is killed by a bomb. Peter continues west. With help from various people, he survives and is still on the move  in May, when the Nazi functionary who had reported his mother gives up his place to Peter in the last escaping motor launch.
                                                     This is an excellent book, one that skillfully depicts the trials and tribulations of the millions who took to the roads at various times throughout the war. Three-quarter of a million Germans fled Prussia.  Almost half perished in the flight. The author witnessed the refugees arriving in Rostock, where he lived as a boy, and watched his father, a ship's captain, ferry them from the east. Over the course of the author's life, he compiled a twenty volume collection of reminiscences, letters, diaries and other written memorabilia of the war.

A Bell For Adano, Hersey - B

                                                      This novel won the Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1944. Hersey was a war correspondent in Italy when he penned this classic. Adano is a small fictional town in Sicily. An American major from the Bronx is put in charge and quickly, humanely, and with deft touches, reverses the policies of the recently departed Fascists and wins the hearts of the locals. He is a gracious and gifted manager who makes Adano a very good place to live in again. He dispenses justice dispassionately and seems to always do the right thing. Although his romance with the daughter of a local fisherman is an important part of the story, the two compelling side stories to his magnificent work are his attempts to replace the town's bell and his run-in with Gen. Marvin*. The bell, which had regulated life in Adano for 700 hundred years,  had been carted off a few months before and made into a cannon. The totally mean-spirited and obnoxious Marvin had ordered carts off the only road in and out of Adano after one had slowed him down, and he had the carter's mule shot. The town could not survive with the road closed and Maj. Joppolo reversed the General's order. The MP's duly reported the reversal of the order to HQ, but hoping to save Joppolo, mailed it to Algiers. Unfortunately, the information eventually came to Marvin's attention and he ordered his adjutant to replace the little wop. The day the Navy dropped off a bell for the good folks of Adano, Joppolo's relief order, signed by Gen. Marvin, arrived. John Hersey was obviously one of America's great writers, and his admiration for men like Joppolo, the men who selflessly tried to do right by those they interacted with during the war, is a refreshing reminder of why we call them the 'greatest generation.'

*Marvin is clearly George Patton and just as clearly, Hersey was no fan of Old Blood and Guts. The movie, which came out in 1945, politely skips over the General's  conduct.

Directorate S: The C.I.A. And America's Secret Wars In Afghanistan And Pakistan, Coll - B +

                                                      Once again, back to Af-Pak and this time, for 688 pages. The book is named after the Directorate S buried deep within Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency. They were the group that covertly provided funds for the Taliban and other Islamic radicals. "Our failure to solve the riddle of ISI and its interference in Afghanistan would prove to be our greatest strategic failure."
                                                       There was no surprise at the C.I.A. when the Sept.11 attacks came. The question the US posed to President Musharraf of Pakistan immediately after 9/11 was whether Pakistan was with the US, and would help with our actions against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or against us. There were seven specific requests and Musharraf answered yes to all, but clearly the Pakistani's would view the issues through their own lens and act in their own best interests. The continuing issues for the Pakistanis were a need to maintain peace along the shared border region with Pashtuns on both sides, the desire to have a friendly Muslim neighbor to the north and their ongoing fear and hatred of India. The Pakistanis and the Americans were involved in a very awkward partnership. When Mullah Mohammad Omar, Taliban emir, would not turn over Bin Laden as requested by the Pakistanis, the US began its pursuit of the two men, and began the air war in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001. It was over very quickly.  Before year-end, the Taliban left Kabul and Bin Laden and 2,000 of his men escaped to Pakistan. Hamid Karzai and a coalition government were soon in place.  One of the issues second-guessed ever since was the decision made by Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld to not put troops on the ground in Tora Bora to capture or kill Bin Laden or Omar. Although at the time all seemed well, the truth is that Afghanistan, after thirty years of war and turmoil, was not able to stand on its own feet and the 2,000 members of Al Qaeda who escaped to Pakistan would further destabilize an already unstable country.
                                                        The CIA's mission in post-Taliban Afghanistan was to find the surviving members of AQ. There were a few thousand American and NATO troops there to assist in the process. Fear of a recurrence of 9/11 haunted everyone in the war on terror. Concurrently, the US was desirous of establishing a stable government, but put little time and less money into the effort. Under Karzai, the country reverted to its racketeering tribal past, and finding no AQ jihadis left, the US started shooting suspected Taliban members. Finding no one from AQ and gleaning virtually no intelligence about it, the Americans in Afghanistan began to torture and abuse anyone they thought might have information. The US made a commitment to support Karzai's newly elected government in 2004, but the Pakistanis renewed their old habits of trying to destabilize the Pashtun dominated border areas by assisting the Taliban. They feared the US would leave just as we had in the 1990's. They were also concerned that Karzai would be friendly with India. The 2006 US accord with India and the decision to turn over most of the ground work to NATO forces further complicated relations and put the two countries at cross purposes. The Taliban took the offense in 2006 and successfully began to re-occupy their country. By 2007, it was apparent that we had accomplished very little, if anything, in Afghanistan. The Taliban had not only re-taken most of the southern part of the country, but they had destabilized the border lands within Pakistan. The Taliban was growing so quickly in Pakistan that there was fear they could topple the secular government. The US's frustration with the ISI and the entire Pakistan government led to US drone attacks on Pakistan soil. In the waning days of the Bush administration, seven years on, a strategic assessment confirmed that the Taliban needed to be defeated in order to make certain that AQ, then safely operating out of the Pakistani Tribal Areas, did not have a fallback safe haven in Afghanistan. This tortured logic led to consideration of a substantial troop increase in Afghanistan the following year. Obama had campaigned criticizing the Iraq war as the wrong place to fight AQ. The Afghanistan war was the one to be pursued, so he approved  the Pentagon's request, but only for half of the troops they desired. Those troops found a landscape in which the Taliban, well-funded by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, were welcome in the countryside because of the corruption and perceived indifference of the northerners in Karzai's government. The new American military team decided to deploy their recently used counterinsurgency practices from Iraq in key areas in order to clear-hold-build-transfer. Transferring to the Afghanistan government was a delusional dream. The Generals asked for an additional 80,000 men. Obama gave them 30,000 and announced that they would start leaving in 2011. Once again the US decided to not abandon Afghanistan, and to pursue AQ, but would not confront ISI and acknowledged that the Taliban could not be defeated. The plan of the Obama team was to allow the Afghans to build up the capacity to rule and police their own nation.
                                                              In 2010, prospects for a political settlement were in the air. The Taliban reached out to the US by contacting a colleague of Richard Holbrook, special US envoy for Afghanistan, while at he same time ISI was talking to the Karzai government. Meanwhile, Gen. Petraeus prepped a major effort in and around Kandahar, featuring the 101st Airborne. Reminiscent of Westmoreland in Vietnam, he heralded body counts. Late in the year,  low level representatives of the US and Taliban met in Germany. As the year closed though, new clouds were darkening the horizon. The Pakistanis were fed up with being blamed for our failure and  Hamid Karzai had come to despise the US for many reasons, the paramount one being our investigations into the rampant corruption at the top of the country, particularly amongst his family. Relations with Pakistan plummeted after our May, 2011 killing of Osama Bin Laden, while it gave President Obama the political cover to start the troop drawdown.  As the fighting dragged on, the US, Pakistan and Afghanistan continued to mistrust and blame each other for the endless deaths. Karzai refused to believe the Taliban was an indigenous insurgency. He considered them a tool of the ISI. The Pakistanis characterized the Bin Laden raid as their biggest national embarrassment since losing Bangladesh over forty years earlier, and no one in the US trusted anyone in either country. 2014 saw a fraudulent, violent election go to Mohammad Ghani to succeed Karzai. Ghani was a southern Pashtun and may or may  not have actually defeated the northern candidate. That year also saw the handover of most of America's and NATO's equipment and bases to the Afghans. Obama declared US combat operations to be over in December.
                                                      This book was reviewed for the NYTimes by a military historian with experience and extensive knowledge about our wars in the Middle East. He calls it "a book of surpassing excellence that is almost certainly destined for irrelevance". In December of 2017, this administration's  VP told American troops in Afghanistan "We're here to stay until freedom wins. I believe victory is closer than ever before."
                                                        This is an extraordinarily discouraging tome to read because of the delusional decision making that led to the loss of 2400 American lives, countless Asians and an estimated trillion dollars. One comes away incredulous at the thinking that went, and still, goes into endless attempts to quell the Taliban and shore up one of the most incompetent, of the many incompetent, regimes we've backed over the last seventy years. It is heartbreaking to read this. Amazingly, almost seventeen years after we started in Afghanistan, today's newspapers carry a story about the Taliban handing a resounding defeat to the central government.
                                                   

The Hypnotist, Kepler - B-

                                                       This is the first novel in the series about the Stockholm detective Joona Linna. A physician hypnotizes a traumatized 15-year-old boy whose family has been slaughtered. It turns out that the boy was the perpetrator. When he escapes, news of the hypnotism reaches the front pages and unleashes the emotions of a few very disturbed former patients of the doctor. The doctor's son is kidnapped.  Joona uncovers the past and chases down the perpetrator to the north of Sweden. This is pretty good.

The Cloister, Carroll - B

                                                      Carroll is a well-known author of both fiction and non-fiction, a former RC priest and a man with a keen eye for the intricacies of faith and religion. He has published a book that studied the RC faith's treatment of Judaism, and again in this novel explores the two religions, their shared history, roots and built-in antipathy and contradictions. He weaves together in 1950 NYC the stories of a priest, Michael Kavanaugh, and a French Holocaust survivor, Rachel Vetter, who was a student of Latin and Medieval History and a specialist in the romance of Abelard and Heloise.  Kavanaugh's world is the parish just north of the Cloisters in Manhattan, where he meets Rachel, a docent at the Museum. She was working for the Musee Cluny in France when she was caught up in the 1942 roundup of Paris' Jews. She and her father were transported to Drancy, where she managed to keep her father supplied with medicine until he was transported to the east. She denied he was her father the night he was taken away and thus saved her own life. The shame and guilt would forever haunt her. Kavanaugh struggles with much less baggage as they become friends and he seeks the truth of the banishment of a friend from the seminary a decade and a half ago. He had been told his best friend left because he had 'feelings' for Kavanaugh, which Michael now learns to not have been the truth. The story of Abelard and Heloise, the medieval French lovers, he a priest and she a postulant, is a tragic one, yet filled with inquisitive discussions of the meaning of faith and forgiveness and portrays them as modern humanists centuries ahead of their times. Also explored is the role of anti-semitism in Catholicism, and the absolutism and conservatism of the church hierarchy, because part of the reason Peter Abelard's writings wound up on the Index was that he wrote that Jesus would never condone the castigating of his people as  Christ-killers. Abelard's theme was simple: a loving God was not cruel and did not condone cruelty or violence in his name. The conversations between Michael and Rachel lead them both forward to the next stage of their lives. She comes to grips with her past, sheds her mourning demeanor and become a vibrant school teacher. He parts with the church after midnight mass on Christmas. This is a very well done and thought provoking novel.

The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, Kix - B

                                                      In 1940, Robert de La Rochefoucald was the 16 year old son of a count in Soissons, north and east of Paris. The family estate was partially occupied by the Germans, with whom they now lived in an uneasy truce. In late 1942, Robert decided to try to go to London and join de Gaulle. He received help from the underground, travelled through Vichy, and crossed into Spain, where he was imprisoned. Because he had acted as an interpreter for some downed RAF pilots, the British helped him travel from Madrid to London. He was recruited by and joined Special Operations Executive, the first institution to adopt, teach and sponsor guerrilla warfare on a large scale. In the summer of 1943, he parachuted into France. He  trained local 'resistants' in the use of  explosives and led two successful missions, before a double agent's betrayal led to hundreds of arrests in central France. In December, he was awakened in a barn and captured by the Gestapo. He was interrogated and tortured for four months, escaping on the morning of his scheduled execution when he jumped from a moving truck and hijacked a Gestapo car. After weeks of recuperation in and around Paris, Robert was able to return to Britain and a month before D-Day, he was sent on a mission to Bordeaux. Sabotage was the order of the day and the French severely crimped the German's ability to reinforce Normandy. He spent seven days posing as a worker and cased a factory before setting the explosives that blew it up. In late July, he was imprisoned for a second time by the occupiers. On his second night in prison, he killed three guards, stole a key ring and walked out the front gate of one of the most notorious prisons in the country. Liberation came in August and along with 200,000 'resistants', he joined the French Army. In April of 1945, Robert led his final commando action against the German submarine pens on the Atlantic coast of France. He was in a hospital at the war's end and returned to the family estate later that summer. He received every medal France gave, and was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1997. He died on VE Day in 2012.