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“A must read.”
Mark L wrote this review Friday, November 13 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“In America’s Secret War, George Friedman of Stratfor examines events leading up 9/11 and follows the geopolitical and military consequences of that event over the following few years, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. What he does well is explain what really motivated Al Qaeda, the US and other players to take the action that they did. It is fascinating to read about the intelligence they did or didn’t have, the mistakes that each side made and the different ways in which they tried to achieve their goals.”
Stephen W wrote this review Tuesday, October 27 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Deep”
VernDude wrote this review Tuesday, September 8 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“This book explains one thing that I had never understood: why on earth did the US waste time, resources and its image on seemingly so absurd a war as Iraq? No sensible person bought the WMD nonsense, and the Al-Qaida explanation seemed equally ludicrous since it was pretty obvious that Bin Laden would never be allowed in Saddam Hussein's Iraq because of the menace he would be to that regime. Friedman explains US Middle Eastern policy from 9/11 until 2004 in this very readable book indeed, why Afghanistan, why Iraq and the complicated relationship the US has with Saudi Arabia. A must for anyone who wants to understand current affairs.”
Cryonica wrote this review Sunday, August 23 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Has some interesting content, especially on what was happening inside the "intelligence community" and the US government.
TheophileEscargot wrote this review Monday, June 9 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
From this, it appears that after the September 11th attacks, the intelligence services went into arse-covering overdrive and started flooding their superiors with scary stories about possible attacks. These were taken seriously by the governments. On this reading, the security scares are not attempts to maintain political control by creating public insecurity, but sincerely believed by the politicians. This book doesn't have much on the UK, but it makes me wonder if Gordon Brown possibly sincerely believes in his 42-day terror limit.
The book also has some interesting angles on what was going on inside the White House. According to this, the Rumsfeld/Powell disagreements were overplayed in the media. Eventually the State Department and the Pentagon reached an uneasy compromise on the Iraq invasion plan: a bigger force than Donald Rumsfeld wanted, smaller than Colin Powell wanted. However, according to this Rumsfeld was later sidelined, well in advance of his actual departure.
Also according to this, rather than "rushing to war", George W. Bush dithered for months over it.
However, the book has an absolutely huge problem in that it never gives any indication of its sources; not even hints about whether they came from intelligence sources or the media. Critically, it doesn't even give the time that they received this information. This lack casts everything in the book into serious doubt.
(The book also complains about an insistence on sources as a failure of US intelligence services. In Friedman's view, insisting on sources meant that analysts ignored valuable data which could only come from aggregating weak sources.)
In particular, he makes claims about the Real Goals of Al-Qaeda, which are notoriously hard to make out since they tend to say different things to different people. Friedman's view is that Al-Qaeda's primary goal was to institute revolutions in the what they saw as corrupt governments in the Moslem world. Believing that these governments derived their credibility from US protection, they decided to attack America to weaken then. This would then cause the US to invade moslem countries. which would then cause uprisings in the moslem world leading to the desired caliphate.
This seems like a curiously indirect way of going about things. That's why it would be nice to know the timing of this information. Did their Al-Qaeda sources say they wanted to provoke invasions before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, or afterwards? To me, this interpretation seems a bit like an after-the-fact rationalization.
So too, he hints that the US was worried about making bin Laden a martyr, and so preferred a "bin Laden in limbo" option where he was free but isolated. Again, I'd really like to know the timing of this source. This also smells a bit like a "we didn't really want to catch bin Laden anyway" rationalization after the fact.
Some of the analysis also seems a little inconsistent. In the later half of the book, Friedman claims a primary motivation behind the Iraq war was that America was seen as hopelessly weak in the Arab world, and needed to demonstrate its strength. But if America is seen as so weak, why did Al-Qaeda think American support was so critical to Arab/moslem governments as claimed in the first half of the book?
Overall, I get an impression that this book is trying to shoehorn messy real-world events into overly-tidy frameworks of strategy.
This is especially true in the analysis of Iraq. Friedman presents events in a very top-down manner; almost as a chess game played between the leaders of various factions. In this view the Sunni and Shia insurgencies waxed and waned as they jockeyed for influence in the government. He assumes that the leaders have a high degree of control over what happens.
There's virtually no discussion of bottom-up factors that influenced Iraqi individuals; such as the economy, high crime in a law-an-order vacuum, infrastructure problems, instant unemployment as the giant state sector ceased to exist overnight. The strange insistence on immediately creating a free-market capitalist state isn't addressed either.
I find Friedman's interpretations much less convincing than those of Ali A. Allawi and Paddy Ashdown. In particular, Ashdown's view of interventions in general is that there is "golden hour" at the very start, in which it's necessary to for an intervening force to establish security right at the start. If that isn't done, local organizations will emerge and start challenging for power.
Overall, while this book has some interesting theories, it seems far too much like a rigid game-theory analysis of rational actors, without the messiness of the real world. The lack of any kind of source information makes this even less plausible. ”“Friedman and Stratfor are simply unsurpassed for current events and a serious, detailed look at current events and the war on terror.”
lightningbaron wrote this review Friday, October 5 2007. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
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