posted
i just bought it and am in the middle of it, and am dumbfounded and pleasantly surprised. after his allegations of a secret program to capture and torture people fell on its face a few months ago, i sort of dismissed him as one of the many "journalists" with an axe to grind against the administration using their access to the media to contribute to the misinformation we have to wade through on a daily basis.
on the contrary, i find him to be an incredibly professional and well spoken journalist. he's fairly well respected for breaking the my lai story, and i'm starting to see why. his writing is concise and seems both extensively researched and extremely professional. his reluctance to name sources bothered me as i read his earlier piece from the new yorker, and at first in reading this book, but i'm starting to understand it. he mentions that many of his sources are retired military/intelligence officers who have intelligence access which could be cut if they publicly criticized policy, and i also read an article about the fact-checking that the NY Times (i think) did on his articles, which seems to have been extensive.
a few things that have struck me so far:
1) our pre-9/11 intelligence was dismal. after all the hearings this shouldn't come as a surprise, but reading about it just brings it all home, sort of like the difference between hearing about prisoner abuse and seeing photos. we see movies all the time in which secret offices of the CIA operate a big-brother type organization with spy sattelites and embedded operatives and have big fancy rooms full of computers and geeky operators who can hack into anything: this seems to be an optimistic delusion. the reality is that the intelligence service seems to have been run about as effectively as any other giant agency (i'm speaking as the son and boyfriend of public school teachers), which is to say not at all.
2) i am amazed at the ineptitude with which we fought the afghan war. i was out of the country for most of it and didn't have access to by beloved npr, so most of what i heard was through snippets of cnn or british tabloids, and considering that the whole thing has sort of faded away thanks to iraq, i had this impression that the whole affair was a beautifully executed invasion that conquered the pathetic taliban in a few weeks with little or no casualties on our side. while this may be true, it seems that there were a lot of lesser incidents of unbelievable stupidity and egoism in the process. maybe this always happens in a war, but we constantly hear about how we have an army of professionals. i've only read about two specific situations: the initial deployment of special forces and a mission to flush out fighters entrenched in the mountains, and both cases were awash in beuracratic in-fighting, horrible communication, and general lack of professionalism and talent on the case of the commanders and mission planners. whats the most infuriating about it is to read in detail about what happened and all the mistakes that were made, and then to hear the official (in most cases rumsfeld's) description of what happened, and the outright lying that happened in hopes of making the whole operation look like it was successful. i guess it's not the lying that bothers me so much as the fact that the media took it hook line & sinker.
3) i've always been facinated with seeing the underbelly of what's really happening. one of the reasons i liked the shadow series of the ender story was that it focused on examining the real politics and power dynamics that hid underneath the rhetoric and spinning. hersh does a superb job of not only describing the mistakes that were made, but of putting them into political context and showing why they were made, and why at the time they seemed like the best choice. specifically he describes the administration allowing the pakistanis to conduct an airlift in afghanistan to evacuate their military officers who had been serving with the taliban and had been surrounded by US forces. it seems that Musharraf made the case that he was in a dangerous position supporting our invasion and needed to retain military control in the border region and therefore could not afford to loose hundreds of troops, including some generals, as well as intelligence operatives. the administration agreed and established an air corridor for the evacuation. unfortunately, the evacuation got out of hand, and in the end 3/4 of the 8000 pakistanis and taliban fighters who had been surrounded were allowed to leave.
has anyone else read any of this book? the first chapter is online somewhere. i'm curious to see what other people think of it, and how much credence people give to its claims.
Posts: 380 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
I haven't read it, but it sounds interesting. I'll check it out. Thanks!
Regarding your first point: I think the failure of other countries' intelligence agencies to find confirmatory evidence in support of ours was a big reason why they were not willing to get on board with the WMD justification. They had no compelling evidence, so they could not justify the movement in on those grounds.
The accusations instead of cravenness or unwillingness to do the right thing must have stung pretty bad, and I think the US is still paying the price for that.
I wonder if we'd made the case on humanitarian grounds to begin with, would there have been more of an alliance? Hard to say now, I guess.
Posts: 2919 | Registered: Aug 2004
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yeah, the developing situation in iran is really bothering me. we've gone and botched our intelligence credibility, and our military is so far extended that we can't really threaten the use of force, giving tehran clost to a carte blanche to do whatever they want. the same for n. korea. i feel like we're just now starting to see hints of the real cost of our mistake in going in under falsly optimistic expectations and horrible intelligence.
Posts: 380 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I don't know how to assess how things would have gone differently, as I just am not informed enough in those matters to say with any degree of certainty. Since meeting my husband, though, I have been making it a point to read non-US perspectives, and that has helped. CBC online and the BBC are pretty good about linking to outside countries' media coverage, too.
Anyway, thanks for the recommedation. I'm sending it on to my husband, too.
Posts: 2919 | Registered: Aug 2004
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