[lit-ideas] 2006 reading lists
- From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2006 00:31:02 EST
Hi,
Well, changing the subject a bit, I will ask:
What were some of the books you read in 2005?
and the...was there a political or philosophical book that influenced your
thinking during this past year? Or, were you introduced to a new way of thing?
I cannot answer now as I am too busy thinking about what Bush is reading
<wry look> as well as reading about the founding folk belief systems of those
who were involved in the US Constitution. However, since it is the 300th
birthday year of Ben Franklin, I am planning on several books about him this
year.
Any ideas on which ones to focus?
Best,
Marlena in Missouri
_http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31601_
(http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31601)
POLITICS-US:
Anti-Imperialists Beware - Bush Is Reading Again
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) - The Reader-in-Chief is at it again, and
anti-imperialists around the world have reason to be concerned.
According to the White House, U.S. President George W. Bush has taken two
books with him to Texas for his holiday reading, which he will presumably
indulge between his favourite ranch pursuits -- clearing brush and biking.
The first is about his most admired role model, Theodore Roosevelt, the
other on the wonders being achieved by U.S. soldiers around the world.
The choices are not unimportant. Indeed, Bush is known to read so little --
both for official business and for diversion -- and to be so impressed by the
few books he does read that it is imperative for people who are paid to know
what's happening in Washington to find out what's on the president's
nightstand when he turns out the light.
As the U.S. was gearing up for war in Iraq in the summer of 2002, for
example, reporters noticed that Bush had tucked under his arm a rather
scholarly --
and hence unlikely -- book, "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and
Leadership in Wartime", a book by Elliot Cohen, a neo-conservative military
historian and friend of then-Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
The book argued that great civilian leaders, including Abraham Lincoln,
Winston Churchill and Georges Clemenceau, made far better commanders than the
generals who demanded that they be given a free hand in conducting the war. It
was perfectly timed for persuading Bush to stand up to the recommendations of
the top brass that he deploy far more troops to invade and occupy Iraq than
what Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and prominent neo-conservatives were
calling for.
Similarly, Bush was given a copy of right-wing Israeli politician and former
Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharansky's "The Case for Democracy: The
Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror" immediately after its
publication in late 2004, and was so impressed by its argument for an
aggressive
pro-democracy policy in the Arab world that the White House asked the author
to
interrupt a book tour for a personal visit. "I'm already halfway through your
book," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reportedly told Sharansky when he
showed up the next day. "Do you know why I'm reading it? I'm reading it
because the president is reading it, and it's my job to know what the
president is
thinking." Passages in the book were subsequently incorporated into Bush's
2004 inaugural address. It is in this context that Bush's latest selections
should be analysed. The first, "When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After
the
White House", concerns his favourite presidential antecedent, whose famous
or infamous 1904 Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine shortly after the
Spanish-American War heralded Washington's claim to great-power status and its
right to
intervene unilaterally anywhere in the Americas against "chronic wrongdoing,
or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of
civilised society".
The choice may suggest that Bush, who clearly subscribes to the "great man"
theory of history that was the rage in Roosevelt's time, is contemplating a
very active retirement. If it doesn't take him on safari in Africa or on
scientific expeditions to the Amazon (unlikely pastimes for a man who by all
accounts is an unenthusiastic and incurious traveler), it could make him a
permanent force in the Republican Party and for the kind of aggressive
nationalism
that Roosevelt espoused through much of his career.
The second book on Bush's reading list, "Imperial Grunts: The American
Military on the Ground" by Robert Kaplan is far more worrisome in its
implications, at least for the remaining three years of his presidency.
Kaplan, who began his career as a self-described "travel writer" in the
1980s, has evolved into a political thinker whose outlook is explicitly
imperialist -- a term that he has used and re-used in recent years with
unabashed
approval -- and, in the words of one conservative reviewer and retired Army
colonel, Andrew Bacevich, "reactionary".
In his view (and one that would be shockingly familiar to Roosevelt in his
"Rough Riding" days in Cuba more than 100 years ago), the "war on terror" and
associated conflicts is simply a repeat of the U.S. Army's Indian Wars, but
on a nearly planetary scale.
Instead of the Great Plains and western reaches of the 19th century U.S.,
however, today's "Injun Country", as Kaplan calls it, consists of the entire
Islamic world, from the southern Philippines to Mauritania, as well as other
un-governed or misgoverned areas in desperate need of order and civilisation.
And who best to civilise these places and their inhabitants than the U.S.
military, specifically the "imperial grunts" with whom Kaplan embedded himself
-- no doubt with the enthusiastic support of the Pentagon and probably
Rumsfeld himself -- for weeks at a time in various parts of the world on three
continents, and who, not incidentally, bear a striking resemblance to Bush's
own
self-image?
In contrast to the "elites" and "global cosmopolitans" who dominate the
media, the State Department, Washington think tanks and academia, and the
Democratic Party, these soldiers are "people who hunted, drove pickups,
employed
profanities as a matter of dialect, and yet had a literal, demonstrable belief
in the Almighty", according to Kaplan.
He offers remarkable praise for the war-fighting traditions of "the gleaming
officers corps of the Confederacy" -- that is, the military arm of the
slave-owning southern states, including Bush's Texas, during the Civil War --
and
for the present-day "martial evangelicalism of the South".
In a "Hobbesian world" where U.S. military commands and deployments span
every continent, U.S. imperialism is not a choice, but rather a necessity,
just
as it was for the British in the late 19th century, according to Kaplan, who
argues that Washington's "righteous responsibility (is) to advance the
boundaries of free society and good government into zones of sheer chaos".
In one telling piece of analysis, he describes the presumed thoughts of a
Filipino in Zamboanga, presumably a descendant of Moro who resisted, at the
cost of tens of thousands of their lives, U.S. imperialism 100 years ago: "His
smiling, naïve eyes cried out for what we in the West call colonialism."
With a message like that, it's not difficult to imagine Bush, who has met
with Kaplan at least once before in the White House, requesting a return
visit,
in which case it may be useful to review the kinds of policy recommendations
he is likely to make.
A U.S. withdrawal from Iraq now, Kaplan has predicted, would result in a
"real bloodbath" and a reversal of liberalisation in the Arab world, including
the reconstitution of Lebanon by the Syrians "in their own totalitarian image".
He has also cautioned against China's growing political and economic clout
in the world. "Unless we begin military cooperation with Indonesia, for
instance, at some point the Indonesian military will be captured by the Chinese
in
some form." *****
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