Bowling alone

Bowling alone : the collapse and revival of American community / Robert D. Putnam.

printout dated 3/19/2009, 3pm. Reviews

The great good place

The great good place : cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day / Ray Oldenburg.

printout dated 3/19/2009, 2.59pm

Exploring Argentina's Anti-Semitic Past

3/19/2009, 3.51pm


sample:
The Wall Street Journal: How do you research your books?
Philip Kerr: When I started with the first two, Germany was very different. The Berlin Wall was still up. Information about Germany's role in the war was still hard to find, and that encouraged me to write a detective story. I had to spend a lot of time walking Berlin streets and visiting libraries. Research, with the Internet, has gotten easier to find, and the Germans are more reconciled to talking about it.

A great idea at the time

A great idea at the time : the rise, fall, and curious afterlife of the Great Books / Alex Beam.
3/18/2009, 2.23pm

A Counterinsurgency Primer

By MAX BOOT

From The Wall Street Journal Asia
Almost everyone, even if otherwise ignorant of military affairs, has heard of Karl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Very few people, though, have heard of C.E. Callwell, David Galula or Robert Thompson. Yet they, too, wrote immortal works on military strategy -- but on unconventional, or guerrilla, conflicts.
For all their timeless wisdom, their books were also a product of their times -- Callwell of the imperial wars of the late 19th century, Galula and Thompson of the wars of "national liberation" in the mid-20th century. Because of the global jihadist insurgency, the early 21st century has produced a new epoch in the annals of low-intensity struggle. It is fitting, then, that to help us understand the current conflict another soldier-scholar has emerged in the tradition of Callwell, Galula and Thompson.
In "The Accidental Guerrilla," a combination of memoir and military analysis, David Kilcullen looks at the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor, Indonesia and southern Thailand, all of which, excepting the last, he has seen first-hand. He then draws lessons from his experiences and those of other soldiers.

The Accidental Guerrilla
By David Kilcullen
(Oxford, 346 pages, $27.95)

As a former Australian army officer, Mr. Kilcullen may seem to have an odd background for this task, since Australia is hardly a central player in the global war on terrorism. Yet the Aussies have a long, distinguished history of involvement in guerrilla wars, from Vietnam to Indonesia. Mr. Kilcullen, having studied the Indonesian suppression of Muslim separatists in the 1950s and 1960s (he has a doctorate in political anthropology), went on to command an Australian infantry company in East Timor during its independence struggle from Indonesia in 1999. In 2007-08, he served as a counterinsurgency adviser for Gen. David Petraeus and for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In those jobs he spent considerable time with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq observing what works and what doesn't.
The result is "The Accidental Guerrilla." The title is a reference to the distinction between hard-core jihadists and their less ideological fellow travelers. The former, Mr. Kilcullen writes, are "implacable fanatics" animated by Islamist ideology. The latter, by contrast, "fight us primarily because we are intruding into their space." Ironically, we intrude into their space -- tribal territories from the southern Philippines to Pakistan's Northwest Frontier -- primarily because it has become a hideout for al Qaeda and its ilk. By trying to fight these globe-trotting terrorists, Mr. Kilcullen worries, we may be making needless enemies among their tribal hosts.
"Accidental" may not be quite the right word to apply to these local fighters, since it is no accident that they have been fighting against local authorities and no accident, either, that groups like al Qaeda have drawn them into their net. But Mr. Kilcullen is right to point to an important distinction -- one that he helped commanders in Iraq to recognize -- between "reconcilable" foes who can be brought into the political process and "irreconcilables" who have to be eliminated by force.
This is only one of many valuable lessons that Mr. Kilcullen passes along. Another concerns the need for "population-centric" rather than "enemy-centric" operations. Enemy-centric operations involve trying to kill as many terrorists as possible. As U.S. commanders discovered in Iraq, this strategy tends to alienate the population and thereby produce more enemies than it eliminates. Population-centric operations, adopted in 2007, have been more successful. They put U.S. troops into smaller outposts in urban centers, where they can work on safeguarding the population. Now that Iraqis feel protected, they are willing to rat out insurgents.
Notwithstanding the lessons of Iraq, operations in Afghanistan have not followed a population-centric model because there have been too few troops to do the job. (That difficulty should ease with the arrival over the next few months of 17,000 additional U.S. soldiers.) Thus, even as Iraq was stabilizing, Afghanistan was becoming more dangerous. Given recent woes, Mr. Kilcullen writes, "a concerted long-term effort is needed -- over ten years at least -- if we are to have any chance of building a resilient Afghan state and civil society that can defeat the threat from a resurgent Taliban." The cornerstone of this effort must be "providing human security to the Afghan population, where they live, twenty-four hours a day."
While preaching "best practices" for counterinsurgency, Mr. Kilcullen stresses that there is no "one size fits all" formula. He throws cold water on the myth that there is some magic troops-to-civilians ratio that is necessary for success. But while he writes that "there is no such thing as a 'standard' counterinsurgency," there are some standard texts on the subject. "The Accidental Guerrilla" is sure to become one.
Mr. Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is writing a history of guerrilla warfare.

The sword and the shield

The sword and the shield : the Mitrokhin Archive and the secret history of the KGB / Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.
3/12/2009

Mitrokhin Archive

• BOOKS
• MARCH 3, 2009

Bookshelf

Newspaper Wars

How the press – brash, irreverent, partisan – served early America.

 

By JAY WINIK

As the economy reels and the Obama administration makes its first calls to action, not a day goes by that we don't hear urgent pleas for thoughtful bipartisan debate as a way of finding our way out of the morass we're in. In the same vein, we are told that the fulminations on 24-hour cable networks and talk radio -- or even on the editorial pages of newspapers -- stifle rather than enhance a proper consideration of "the issues." A subtext of these claims is that there once existed a golden age -- notably the Founding Era -- when Olympian political figures and impartial, public-spirited newspapers guided the nation in its times of crisis.

To get some perspective on such views, one need go no further than "Scandal & Civility," Marcus Daniel's detailed study of the American press in the 1790s. The idea that this critical period was marked by a calm spirit of reasoned debate is a myth, as Mr. Daniel shows, and a deeply misleading one at that. The postrevolutionary age witnessed the unexpected rise of fiercely contending political parties; an increasingly bloody French Revolution that divided Americans into warring camps; a string of crises, such as the Genet affair, the Whiskey Rebellion, the XYZ affair; and the passage of the Alien and Sedition acts punishing dissent. It would not be too strong to assert that every step along the way the very survival of the nation was at risk.
And what role did newspapers play? A profound one. As Mr. Daniel amply shows, they stoked debate with abandon as well as with a mean- spiritedness and partisan passion that make today's scuffles seem tame by comparison.
One of the most famous editors of the age was Philip Freneau, an ardent Republican and once "penniless young poet," and the publisher of the National Gazette, a semiweekly newspaper. What makes Freneau so interesting is that George Washington's secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, hired Freneau to work as a minor clerk at the State Department; however, his real responsibility was to galvanize, through his newspaper, Republican opposition to the administration he served. Rival journalist Richard Fenno, who was himself aligned with Washington rather than Jefferson, accused Freneau of being a "demon of slander," and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who often felt the sting of Freneau's articles, condemned Jefferson for paying Freneau with public funds, though to no avail.

Scandal & Civility
By Marcus Daniel
(Oxford, 386 pages, $28)

Sick of the constant tirades against the government, an outraged President Washington called on Jefferson to put a stop to Freneau. Remarkably, Jefferson refused, insisting the National Gazette had "saved our Constitution." But if Washington felt the pain of Freneau's attacks, it was nothing compared with what he suffered at the hands of another Republican, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who published the Aurora, a newspaper whose inimitable motto was Surgo ut Prosim ("I rise that I might serve"). A grandson of Benjamin Franklin, the worldly Bache was no run-of-the-mill journalist, which only gave more force to his criticisms. He labeled "unconstitutional" Washington's actions on behalf of the Jay Treaty -- a 1794 agreement with Britain, reviled by pro-French Republicans, concerning trade, sovereignty and the looming specter of war -- and called for the president's impeachment. Remember, until then Washington was seen as virtually untouchable.
Nor did Bache stop there. At the same time that his paper praised revolutionary France's bloodthirsty dictator, Maximilian Robespierre, as the "embodiment of virtue," he derided Washington as a "Demi-God of a Turkish seraglio." Others joined the fray: One writer spoke of Washington's "childish ambition"; another said that Washington was "cowardly"; a third that he was "insipid." Bache himself blasted Washington as "guilty of the foulest designs against the liberty of the people." (Victims of Keith Olbermann or Sean Hannity take note: This was some of the tamer stuff.)
Yet if it got personal between editors and politicians, it was equally personal between journalists and journalists. Where Freneau ridiculed Fenno's "court sycophantism," Bache published a scathing account of William Cobbett's personal life -- the eccentric Englishman, who had come to the U.S. in the early 1790s, published the pro-British Porcupine's Gazette -- and one cartoon even pictured Cobbett as acting upon the urgings of the "devil." Dripping with contempt for his adversaries, Cobbett fired back at pro-Jacobins like Bache, labeling them "deluded," among other things.
With almost eerie echoes for today, Mr. Daniel shows how a number of the most prominent newspapers in the 1790s rose and fell, going out of business almost as quickly as they were launched. Richard Fenno watched in horror as the financial affairs of his influential Gazette of the United States deteriorated, and he was even forced to receive a small publishing commission from George Washington. Meanwhile, the publisher of the daily paper Minerva, Noah Webster -- of Webster's "speller" fame -- tired of the rough-and-tumble of journalism and withdrew from public life altogether.
The press had other problems, too. Cobbett became the first editor to be prosecuted for libel by the federal government, losing his case in a "ruinous verdict," and in 1800 returned to England, convinced that America's free press was in jeopardy. And radical journalist William Duane saw his paper slowly strangled by the Sedition Act of 1798. In words that would ring as true today, he moaned that "newspaper debts are the worst of all others."
In an age when our newspaper industry is increasingly embattled, "Scandal & Civility" serves as a timely reminder of just how vital a thriving news culture is to the well-being of our democracy. The book, it should be said, is the outgrowth of a doctoral dissertation and is at times marred by the jargon one finds in graduate seminars. But it neatly presents an animated portrait of the postrevolutionary era, when opinionated, brash, irreverent newspapers were indispensable. They are no less indispensable to us today.
Mr. Winik is the author of "The Great Upheaval" and "April 1865."