Doonesbury.com's The War in Quotes Review

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(More customer reviews)"The War in Quotes" clearly and simply documents the Orwellian double-speak that has characterized the Bush administration and the multiple strings of lies that brought us the quagmire in Iraq.

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Doonesbury.com's The War in Quotes is a startling account of the Iraq War, told entirely in the words of those who conceived, planned, advocated, and executed it. Presented in chronological order in thematic groups against a timeline of key events, this astonishing record of remarks both public and private speaks for itself, chronicling the dramatic unfolding of America's first preventative war.THAT WAS THEN"Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you put in place. How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the U.S. military?" --Dick Cheney, 1991MIND-SET"F*** Saddam. We're taking him out." --George W. Bush, to three U.S. senators, March 2002WMD"If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so." --Alan Foley, director, CIA Weapons Intelligence, to staff, December 2002THE PLAN"There was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring that the judicial system was operational." --3rd Infantry Division's official after-action reviewINSURGENCY"I really qualify it as militarily insignificant. They are very small. They are very random. They are very ineffective." --Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, June 18, 2003REALITY"Does [the Iraq war strategy] make America safer?" --Sen. John Warner"I don't know, actually." --Gen. David Petraeus, in Senate testimony, September 11, 2007

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The Nick Adams Stories Review

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(More customer reviews)To me, this book is so eloquent I am reluctant to review it because it will be impossible to do it justice.
It is a collection of short stories from earlier works of Hemingway. In each of them, a thoughtful reader can gain insight into Hemingway and him/herself.
The following is from "Indian Camp." In it, Nick is a very young boy, and, with his physician father, he has been present at a difficult childbirth and found the victim of a suicide. Dawn is approaching and he is in the canoe with his father rowing back across the lake.
Quote:
"Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?"
"Not very many, Nick."...
"Is dying hard, Daddy?"
"No, I think it's pretty easy Nick. It all depends."
They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Unquote
Regardless of how you feel about Hemingway, this is a poignant look into the soul of the man, and ourselves. Hemingway's family was plagued by suicide, including that of his physician father, and, like all of us, Hemingway was once a young child coming to grips with the idea of mortality, in a world still fresh and fascinating and frightening.
Other stories deal with the joys of a life full-lived, an appreciation of the natural world around us, and our "quiet desperation," in love, life, and death.
"The Nick Adams Stories" is high on my "Top Ten List."

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The famous "Nick Adams" stories show a memorable character growing from child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent -- a sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway's life.

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Hope Is Not a Plan: The War in Iraq from Inside the Green Zone (Praeger Security International) Review

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(More customer reviews)In July 2004, the Major General in charge of the Strategic Political/Military section in Iraq asked the Superintendent of the Air Force Academy to send him some "Strategic Thinkers" to help with the war effort. Within two weeks, military academics with advanced degrees began arriving in Baghdad. They were embedded with headquarter units in the Green Zone and their assignment was to look at the planning process. "Hope is Not a Plan" is an anthology written by the participant observor academics. The book's scope is the critical months of late 2004 to early 2005.
What makes this book interesting is that it covers the operational aspects of the war. This is the critical intermediate step between the strategic and the tactical. The operational aspects of the war are not as inherently interesting as the behind scenes power struggles in Washington DC or as dramatic as the stories the men and women who are doing the fighting. Yet it is at the operational level that war is planned and ultimately either won or lost.
What Thomas Mowle and his fellow authors found was a disorganized planning effort that was not up to the task of rejuvinating a failed nation state. The irony is that a military that dedicated itself to learning the lessons of Vietnam discovered that at the critical moment it forgot nearly everything that it had learned about counter-insurgency in Vietnam. It is a depressing performance and one can only hope that American military is beginning to turn itself around in 2007.
"Hope is Not a Plan" is an academic work and it will require members of the general public to have patience to get through it. The United States military will be analyzing what went wrong in Iraq for a generation. The value of this book is that it is a first attempt to describe what went wrong at the operational level. "Hope is Not a Plan" will be a starting point for future historians. Recommended.


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