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Title: The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military by Dana Priest ISBN: 0-393-01024-4 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 24 February, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.68 (19 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A Riveting Account Hijacked by Faulty Analysis
Comment: Dana Priest writes very well. No matter the subject in this book -- whether its CINCs, Special Forces, or peacekeeping -- she captures your attention. She knows how to tell a story, and write colorful vignettes of the people in it. (Whether they're accurate or not, I have no idea, but they are fun to read.)
Unfortunately, Priest wants her collection of well-written reports to mean something, and it is here -- whenever she moves from narrative to analysis -- that her book runs aground. Her main notion seems sound enough: that the U.S. military is too often in the front lines of diplomacy and peacekeeping, both because it is so strong and the U.S. diplomatic corps is so weak. This condition, she claims, attenuates both the U.S. military and U.S. diplomacy.
But Priest's details do not support her thesis. In one chapter she writes about the confrontation between the new U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, Robert Gelbard, and the U.S. military commander of the forces in the Pacific, Dennis Blair, on what policy the U.S. should take with Indonesia's military over human rights abuses in East Timor. Gelbard wants to cut off military-to-military contacts while Blair wants to maintain them. Despite his lack of nominal authority over U.S. policy in Indonesia, Blair's view wins out.
Priest thinks this is an example of how the U.S. military is able to overpower U.S. diplomacy because of the military's greater funding. But is it? In her summary of events, Priest makes clear Blair did not so much overpower Gelbard as outmaneuver him. Blair had to push the matter up to the National Security Council in Washington before it was finally decided in his favor. That kind of bureaucratic infighting is both common and acceptable to the policy-making process. One hardly needs to be well-funded to excel at it.
Priest also recounts the sad tale of the rape and murder of a Kosovar girl by a U.S. military "peacekeeper". It is one of the centerpieces of her account in the last third of the book showing the ineffectiveness of the U.S. military at handling peacekeeping duties in Kosovo. At times she seems to suggest that U.S. troops should just be out killing things rather than trying to keep the peace. In this section, she even gives an anecdote of some U.S. troops in Kosovo who, while driving their tank through traffic, lose their patience, and demand to be given immediate passage through a red light.
Priest seems too easily offended to imagine what the situation might have been like without U.S. troops on the ground in Kosovo. Unable to successfully carry out their mission of protecting the minority Serbs in Kosovo from reprisal attacks, the troops' presence at least gave some orderliness to what would have certainly been much worse if they had not been there. And it's very difficult to come up with a plausible scenario where U.S. diplomats would have been more successful at completing the near impossible mission the troops were given.
An isolated rape case and some impatient troopers at a traffic stop shouldn't be emblematic of U.S. military peacekeeping efforts. It's unfortunate that Priest doesn't show a better appreciation of how difficult these missions are, and the unlikelihood that U.S. diplomats - even when armed with cash and executive support - would be any better at solving them.
Rating: 2
Summary: Disappointing after the build-up
Comment: This book disappoints. After several people told me how great it was, I forked over the cash for the hardcover. The book was a quick read, but I was left with little of substance. Ms. Priest makes her whole argument in the first chapter, and the rest is just disconnected anecdotes, with little analysis of the various stories. For example, the book starts off talking about the proconsular role of the US Combatant Commanders (formerly known as CINCs until Rummie outlawed the term for everyone except George W.) but then inexplicably switches to various lengthy accounts of soldiers on the ground all around the world, culminating in an extensive -- but superficial -- depiction of the peacekeeping mission in the Balkans (and a long discussion of Frank Ronghi's rape of a young Albanian girl). Ms. Priest seems to alternately praise and blame the military for the current emphasis on the use of military force over diplomacy in US foreign policy, but neglects the issue of how this situation came about (why doesn't the State Department get the funding that DOD gets? why do civilians trust the military to solve all of their problems, and not their fellow civilian leaders & foreign service personnel?). Ms. Priest also spends an inordinate amount of time commenting on what various highranking military officers are wearing and the trappings of their office (Wesley Clark wears Burberry blazers, but Anthony Zinni likes Hawaiian shirts) as if this provides some deep insight into their psyches, and then glosses over substantive issues such as the apparent willingness of military officials to circumvent the law as they try to accomplish their missions. The book ends abruptly without a real conclusion. Ms. Priest also needed a better editor -- the book is full of typographical errors. I suspect this book was rushed into print. If you must read it, borrow it from the library.
Rating: 4
Summary: Whither the US Military?
Comment: I was intrigued by the subtitle: "Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military" after trying to think of how many countries (dozens) the United States has committed its military forces to over the past couple decades, and why. Dana Priest had top-level access to various military personnel, visited a number of the countries she discusses, and from this creates an informative document around a major issue confronting our military/civilian leadership; namely, what is "The Mission"? She is mostly uncritical (contrary to the impression of previous reviewers who sound offended by the subject matter, as though the military were too holy a subject for any civilian to tackle) and highly complimentary, and informative about our soldiers, and CINc's (Commanders in Chief/theatre command generals). I think the book would've benefited from a more personal, opinionated account after having done all this research, however, like Mark Bowden ("Black Hawk Down", "Killing Pablo") she's a reporter at heart and keeps it pretty straight-forward.
"The Mission" raises fundamental questions about our government's ever-changing world-concept, and the role of our military in advancing goals better suited for diplomats and the UN. More specifically, she brings up the trend of using our forces for "peace-keeping" & "nation-building" missions which they're obviously not well suited for (at this time). Yes, our military is the best at what it does in most cases, but it has serious limitations when we attempt to use it for unclear post-war objectives in countries with broken infrastructure. She provides detailed accounts of Kosovo, where one Lt. Col. wanders the streets and is reminded of his experience in the 1991 debacle of Somalia. There is a brief and disturbing account of an Army soldier who raped and murdered a young Albanian girl, and details of other negative encounters between young, un-worldly American soldiers and their Serb & Albanian "protectees". One interesting chapter deals with the complex world of a female Albanian-American translator trying to fit in with her fellow American soldiers. Priest also touches on the nature of covert, Special Ops. military training and relations with various troubled countries such as Colombia, Nigeria, and Indonesia.
Fundamental questions arise throughout the book: What exactly is nation-building, and should we be engaged in it? Have we already abandoned Kosovo and Afghanistan? Do we have the funds, military resources, will-power, justification, or desire to play international policeman? Will we keep our promises to the peoples we set out to protect? The answers aren't here, but "The Mission" sets the table from which this crucial discussion will definitely continue.
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Title: The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria ISBN: 0393047644 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy by A. J. Bacevich, Andrew J. Bacevich ISBN: 0674009401 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order by Robert Kagan ISBN: 1400040930 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 28 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership by Zbigniew Brzezinski ISBN: 0465008003 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 02 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet by Jim Mann, James Mann ISBN: 0670032999 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 08 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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