The Generals Have No Clothes: The Untold Story of Our Endless Wars - Softcover

Arkin, William M.

 
9781982131005: The Generals Have No Clothes: The Untold Story of Our Endless Wars
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1982131004 ISBN 13: 9781982131005
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The definitive book about America’s perpetual wars and how to end them from bestselling author, military expert, and award-winning journalist William M. Arkin.

The first rule of perpetual war is to never stop, a fact which former NBC News analyst William M. Arkin knows better than anyone, having served in the Army and having covered all of America’s wars over the past three decades. He has spent his career investigating how the military throws around the word “war” to justify everything, from physical combat to today’s globe-straddling cyber and intelligence network.

In The Generals Have No Clothes, Arkin traces how we got where we are—bombing ten countries, killing terrorists in dozens more—all without Congressional approval or public knowledge. Starting after the 9/11 attacks, the government put forth a singular idea that perpetual war was the only way to keep the American people safe. Arkin explains why President Obama failed to achieve his national security goal of ending war in Iraq and reducing our military engagements, and shows how President Trump has been frustrated in his attempts to end conflict in Afghanistan and Syria. He also reveals how COVID-19 is a watershed moment for the military, where the country’s civilian and public health needs clash with the demands of future wars against China and Russia, North Korea and Iran.

Proposing bold solutions, Arkin calls for a new era of civilian control over the military. He also calls for a Global Security Index (GSX), the security equivalent to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which would measure the national and international events in real-time to determine whether perpetual war is actually making the nation safer. Arguing that the American people should be empowered by facts rather than spurred by fear, The Generals Have No Clothes “builds a damning case against the status quo” (Publishers Weekly) and outlines how we can take control of the military…before it’s too late.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William M. Arkin is one of America’s premier military experts. His investigative work has appeared on the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and has won many awards. He served as an NBC News analyst and reporter for thirty years and is the bestselling author of more than a dozen books, including Top Secret America and History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11. Arkin served in Army intelligence in West Berlin during the Cold War and has been a consultant to wide-ranging organizations, including the US Air Force, the United Nations Secretary General, Human Rights Watch, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One: Perpetual War chapter one PERPETUAL WAR
In today’s perpetual news machine, the unspoken first commandment is to never stop. I’ve borne witness to this, working as an on-air analyst, journalist, and national security expert over two decades. I’ve been in the news trenches covering the 9/11 attacks, wars in the Middle East and Africa, and everything from nuclear weapons to domestic watchlists.

During the 2016 presidential campaign season, NBC News asked me to join their new investigative reporting unit. My job was to bring in the big national security stories—beyond the day-to-day.

What I proposed to report on was perpetual war, a deeply entrenched and inherently invisible system that has taken hold of our government and our society—one that not only controls how we navigate our way in the world but also influences every other priority. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have spread throughout the Middle East and into Africa. Somehow, no matter what happens in the countries where we are fighting, despite continual declarations of success—killing terrorist leaders, winning battles, freeing territory—the fighting never diminishes. And, to put it bluntly, despite so much activity, despite the sacrifice of so many lives, despite enormous cost, and despite countless excuses and justifications behind why we cannot stop fighting, we are neither defeating our enemies nor do we ever become more secure.

Then Donald Trump happened.

When in the first week of the administration a disastrous special operations raid went down in Yemen and the new national security advisor, retired general Michael Flynn, rushed to the microphone to threaten Tehran, I thought, with 9/11 fading and a seemingly more aggressive president taking over from Barack Obama, that America might finally pay attention to its many wars, that this system would finally have its reckoning. Pentagon sources told me that officers felt pressured to produce a quick win for Donald Trump and that, in rushing to do so, a Navy SEAL died unnecessarily. An operation justified to weaken Al Qaeda was dragging America into Yemen’s civil war. What is more, these same sources said, the raid would never have happened had the Obama White House not approved it.

To me, that Yemen raid seemed a tangible way not just to illustrate our lack of attention but to serve as a metaphor for how the never-ending fight sustained itself. Over the months that I worked on the investigation, I uncovered the clandestine fabric of American special operations, secret agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia—even a clandestine war with Iran. And yet because Donald Trump had taken over the news, all the public heard was former Obama administration officials and national security gatekeepers telling them how Donald Trump was doing everything wrong and how they had done everything right.

Over the next six months my investigation into perpetual war grew increasingly out of step with this now singular message. A long investigation scheduled to appear on Dateline, NBC’s marquee prime-time investigative program, got cut back and buried to air on a weekend morning. And even there, a story that I thought should span two administrations and show an autonomous system operating regardless of who was president transformed into one centered on an interview with the dead sailor’s father, who was denouncing Donald Trump.

Then North Korea rocketed into the news. As the Navy built up an armada, and as the Air Force brought in bombers, news coverage skewed. It was as if Donald Trump were at the helm of every aircraft carrier and the pilot of every airplane. And even worse, in the frenzy to convey how dangerous Donald Trump was, as if he were responsible for Pyongyang’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon, the news media filled with scaremongering and superficial accounts: that North Korea could not only now attack Hawaii and the West Coast but that it could also destroy a powerless South Korea and defeat any American counterattack. News stories lazily reported that Kim Jung-un possessed “the fourth largest army in the world,” the exact formulation used decades earlier to justify war with Iraq. It was a misleading picture of military might. The message conveyed was that America had no real options other than a perpetual standoff. No one seemed interested in the fact that over the last twenty years the U.S. military had transformed its war-fighting capacity, accruing advantages that not only explained the North’s fears but also paved the way for new solutions.

Then interest in North Korea waned as the next story took over. By the end of Donald Trump’s first year, reporting anything that did not feed the breathless machinery of presidential missteps and wrongdoings floundered. And not only that, but NBC and the rest of television was saturated with former national security bigwigs and retired generals telling America how things should be done. I tried to point out that these paid commentators, Obama and Bush administration officials alike, were the very makers of our global mess. On their watch, everything—everything—had gotten worse. They had presided over quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq. They had overseen North Korea going nuclear. Under their tenure they had watched as the Islamic State rampaged, lodged the United States in Yemen, and moved perpetual war into Africa. They had even presided over the creation of a new cold war with Russia and China, backing a new generation of nuclear weapons.

Stranger still, then, was a subtle narrative building (not just at NBC) that somehow these makers of perpetual war and the secret agencies of government that they represented—the so-called deep state—were going to save America from the new president’s recklessness—or, even worse, his supposed treason. Forgotten in the deification of these supposed saviors were their legacies, their histories of misdeeds, their violations of civil liberties, and, more recently, their forays into torture and secret prisons and warrantless surveillance. Former officials now spouted purported wisdom about the world and the threats, those giving them airtime ignoring how they and their very agencies had proven wrong so many times in the past, misinterpreting everything from the fall of the Soviet Union to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the very emergence of ISIS.

When I say Donald Trump happened, what I mean is that he is such a gigantic presence that he shifted our definition of national security. As the new president proposed a Muslim travel ban and pushed a border wall, as he attacked friends and allies, as he insulted his own intelligence community while complimenting Vladimir Putin, he came to embody instability. Amidst mounting allegations of wrongdoing and even lawbreaking, and with a backdrop of Russian interference in America’s domestic affairs, many people came to believe that President Trump was the greatest threat to America. And not only that, but that the new president was going to blow up the world.

But to give him some credit, Donald Trump, in his own impetuous way, was also questioning what he called America’s endless wars. He was right to do so, just as many in the national security establishment were right to worry about how he would go about withdrawing. And yet the debate became the national security status quo versus Donald Trump. And whether they intended to do so...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982131004
ISBN 13 
9781982131005
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781982130992: The Generals Have No Clothes: The Untold Story of Our Endless Wars

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1982130997 ISBN 13:  9781982130992
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2021
Hardcover