(11) Rogelio Alonso, "Killing for Ireland: The IRA and Armed Struggle (Cass Series on Political Violence)"
Publisher: Routledge | ISBN: 0415396107 | edition: 2007 | PDF | 228 Pages | 2 Mb
The IRA is one of the longest-established terrorist organizations in the world and conducted a ferociously violent campaign for almost 30 years. Now deeply enmeshed in the Northern Ireland peace process, this new book asks how one of the bloodiest terrorist movements of our time decided to swap weapons for the ballot box?
Killing for Ireland presents an unparalleled investigation of the motives and opinions of Irish republican activists. Based on over seventy interviews conducted with former and existing members of the IRA, the author also provides a rigorous evaluation of the personal and political consequences of the IRA's campaign of violence. The analysis of these interviews radically challenges the dominant academic analysis of Irish terrorism. This book includes a strong criticism of the armed struggle constructed around the discourse of those who waged it and answers the question faced by many armed revolutionary movements: "Was the war worth it?"
Translated from the critically acclaimed Matar por Irlanda and available in English for the first time, this volume provides a provocative and new approach to understanding the IRA. It is essential reading for readers and researchers with an interest Irish politics and history, terrorism and political violence.
(12) Jeremy Black, "Trade, Empire and British Foreign Policy, 1689-1815: Politics of a Commercial State"
Publisher: Routledge | ISBN: 0415396069 | edition: | PDF | 2007 Pages | 1,8 Mb
This new volume examines the influence of trade and empire from 1689 to 1815, a crucial period for British foreign policy and state-building.
Jeremy Black, a leading expert on British foreign policy, draws on the wide range of archival material, as well as other sources, in order to ask how far, and through what processes and to what ends, foreign policy served commercial and imperial goals during this period. The book is particularly interested in the conceptualization of these goals in terms of international competition, and how the contours and contents of this conceptualization altered during this period. Trade, Empire and British Foreign Policy, 1689-1815 also analyzes how the relationships between trade, empire and foreign policy were perceived abroad and how this contributed to an analysis of Britain as a distinctive state, and with what consequences.
This book will be of much interest to students of British imperial history, diplomatic history and international history in general.
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(13) Ray Murphy, "UN Peacekeeping in Lebanon, Somalia and Kosovo: Operational and Legal Issues in Practice"
Publisher: Cambridge University Press | ISBN: 0521843057 | edition: 2007 | PDF | 392 Pages | 2,2 Mb
The concept of UN peacekeeping has had to evolve and change to meet the challenges of contemporary sources of conflict. From a practical, operational and legal perspective, Murphy examines the problems faced by UN peacekeeping operations. Three case studies (Lebanon, Somalia and Kosovo) are used to demonstrate the problems associated with the command and control of UN forces, the use of force and rules of engagement, and the implementation of international human rights and humanitarian law by such forces.
(14) David Ryan, "Vietnam in Iraq: Lessons, Legacies and Ghosts (Contemporary Security Studies)"
Publisher: Routledge | ISBN: 0415405629 | edition: 2006 | PDF | 240 Pages | 1,5 Mb
The Vietnam War has exerted a considerable influence over US foreign policy, its method of engagement, and its sense of credibility, military tactics and overall strategic initiatives since 1969. The Bush administration's intervention in Iraq 2003 departed significantly from the accumulated lessons acquired since the 1970's. Though Vietnam has been a frequent point of reference in regional conflict, various facets of that war have returned with even more frequency and persistence both within the United States, Iraq and elsewhere. This book aims:
-To examine the impact of the Vietnam analogy on the war in Iraq
-To assess the military tactical lessons that were learned from the Vietnam War
-To examine the broader strategic lessons and the US concern with their credibility in fighting 'ground wars'.
-To examine the influence and persistence of Vietnam's legacy in US politics, culture and diplomacy and its ability to continue to exert influence on Washington's tactics.
-To examine the impact of US foreign policy on both Vietnam and Iraq.
(15) Challenges to Global Security: Geopolitics and Power in an Age of Transition (Toda Institute Book Series on Global Peace and Policy)
By Hussein Solomon
Publisher: I. B. Tauris | ISBN: 1845115279 | edition 2007 | PDF | 240 pages | 1,1 mb
Ours is an age of great upheaval where change sometimes appears to be the only constant. Three of the most important forces driving such change are globalization, regionalization and democratization. This substantial work makes a concerted attempt to understand these forces, and to show how they impact on the vitally important question of global security in the USA, Latin America, South Asia, South East Asia, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Africa. Each discourse receives substantial coverage: from economics and politics to religion, religious fundamentalism and human rights.
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(16) Clarence Lusane, "Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century"
Publisher: Praeger Publishers | 2006 | ISBN 0275983099 | PDF | 288 pages | 1.5 MB
Lusane has created a groundbreaking analysis of the intersection of racial politics and American foreign policy. This insightful work critically examines the roles played by former Secretary of State Colin Powell and current Secretary of State (and former National Security Advisor) Condoleezza Rice in the construction of U.S. foreign policy, exploring the ways in which their racial identity challenges conventional notions about the role of race in international relations. Neither Powell nor Rice consciously allowed their racial identity to substantially influence or characterize their participation in the defense and projection of U.S. hegemony, Lusane argues, but both used their racial identity and experiences strategically in key circumstances to defend Bush administration policies. This is but one sense in which their race, despite their reluctance to be seen as racial figures, is significant in relation to U.S. foreign policy. Locating Powell and Rice within the genealogy of the current national security strategy, and within broader shifts under George W. Bush, this work argues that their racial location in the context of the construction of U.S. foreign policy is symbolic, and that it serves to distract from the substantive part they play in the ongoing reconfiguration of U.S. global power.
(17)
Thomas M. Franck, "The Power of Legitimacy among Nations"
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA | 1990-07-26 | ISBN 0195061780 | PDF | 320 pages | 16.48 MB
Although there is no international government, and no global police agency enforces the rules, nations obey international law. In this provocative study, Franck employs a broad range of historical, legal, sociological, anthropological, political, and philosophical modes of analysis to unravel the mystery of what makes states and people perceive rules as legitimate. Demonstrating that virtually all nations obey most rules nearly all of the time, Franck reveals that the more legitimate laws and institutions appear to be, the greater is their capacity for compliance. Distilling those factors which increase the perception of legitimacy, he shows how a community of rules can be fashioned from a system of sovereign states without creating a global leviathan.
(18)
Jabari Asim, "What Obama Means: ...for Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future"
Publisher: William Morrow | 2009 | ISBN 0061711330 | PDF | 240 pages | 6 MB
This is our moment. This is our time," Barack Obama declared in his victory speech on November 4, 2008. Such a moment is an opportunity to explore who we are, where we've been, and what the emergence of a leader like Obama can tell us about our culture, our politics, and our future. In What Obama Means, Jabari Asim, author of the acclaimed The N Word, provides the context needed to understand what the Obama presidency means to Americans of all backgrounds.
(19) Heather Lehr Wagner, "The Central Intelligence Agency (The U.S. Government: How It Works)"
Publisher: Chelsea House Publications | 2007 | ISBN 0791092828 | PDF | 112 pages | 2.7 MB
The headquarters of one of the world's most powerful and secretive intelligence services can be found in Langley, Virginia, about eight miles outside of downtown Washington, D.C. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) serves a critical role in the shaping of American policies by providing foreign intelligence related to national security issues to the U.S. president and senior U.S. policy makers. The process of gathering and analyzing intelligence involves spies and satellites, foreign agents, and researchers working at the CIA's headquarters. While the threats against the United States have changed since the CIA was founded in 1947, its mission remains the same: to provide the information that will keep Americans safe. This thrilling new title takes readers on a journey through the historical corridors of the CIA. From the days of Wild Bill Donovan and the OSS to the war against terrorism, "The Central Intelligence Agency" introduces some of the CIA's key players and reveals how intelligence has been a critical component in America's foreign policy.
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The Culture of Terrorism: Noam Chomsky
South End Press | ISBN: 0896083357 | 1999-07-01 | djvu (ocr) | 269 pages | 2.84 Mb
Summary: The great universalist strikes again...
While this might not be the best book to read if you've never before met this astounding intellect in print, it still serves to succinctly elucidate the most salient hallmarks of Chomsky's approach to world affairs and, more specifically, his country's foreign policy. These hallmarks include an incisive dissection of the subservience of intellectuals to state power, the flagrant hypocrisy of the US government, in this case the Reagan administration, as their public pronouncements project an image of inviolable nobility while their actions tell quite a different story, and the concentration of private power in a few hands which underpin, thus making possible, these disturbing aspects of American intellectual and political culture.
The book began life as a "postscript" to a number of foreign editions of Chomsky's Turning the Tide, which dealt with many of the same points raised in this book, though The Culture of Terrorism deals with the Iran-Contra scandals at some length which the earlier text did not. Although the actual facts detailed in often exhausting rigorousness are well out of date, one is thoroughly exposed to the brazen dereliction of basic journalistic duty by those that Chomsky derisorily refers to throughout as representatives of the Free Press. They fall so effortlessly in line with state doctrine that the achievements, again noted by Chomsky, would make a totalitarian regime proud. That this happens in one of the freest countries in the world is nothing short of sickeningly scandalous. In case there are those that think Chomsky is a conspiracy nut or a devotee to the school of hyperbole he provides ample evidence which shows that even the so-called liberal press, namely the New York Times and the New Republic, are guilty of obscene apologetics for, and often advocates of, aggressive state terror.
The Culture of Terrorism deals predominantly with the campaign of subversion and harsh repression conducted by the Contras in Nicaragua who were armed, trained, and constantly supplied throughout this terrible period by the US government. There were flights over the countryside on an almost daily basis and the examples of their weaponry cited in the book would put most armies in other third world countries to shame, let alone the guerrilla forces who were fighting in nearby El Salvador, a country Chomsky also sketches in much socio-political detail. In 1979 the Nicaraguans overthrew the brutal dictator Somoza, a member of a dynasty stretching back to the middle of the 1920s, whose reign ended with a "paroxysm of violence claiming the lives of 40-50000 people". This tiny Central American nation elected the leftist Sandinistas regime which immediately caused the big neighbour to the North considerable consternation. The Reagan Administration proceeded to destabilise this government by employing the Contras, many of them previously employed as members of Somoza's abysmally vicious National Guard, to raid innocent villages, destroy houses, steal livestock, and even kill Americans who had come to aid this miserably poor country that was improving dramatically under the Sandinista regime. These leaps ahead in terms of health care, education and reduction of poverty were documented by such aid agencies as Oxfam at the time who compared the situation in this country with that of Guatemala and El Salvador. The picture created in the US media was quite different, however, as that charnel house Guatemala, along with El Salvador where political violence, including rapes, mutilation, tortures, and `disappearances', were endemic, were described as "fledgling democracies". Conversely, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas was portrayed by the Free Press as a totalitarian state who was one of the tentacles of the Soviet Union. How interesting that by ordering an economic embargo of Nicaragua, and forcing allies to do the same, the Sandinistas are forced to turn to Russia for help which provides a retrospectively convenient basis for the Reagan Administration to scream from the roof tops that the Evil Empire is upon them. Also very intriguing, illuminated by copious quotations from leading journals and newspapers, that a country such as Guatemala, where it is estimated that around 150000 people may have been killed during the Reagan era, and El Salvador, the site of 50000 politically motivated murders during the same period, raise no impassioned denunciations of their odious socio-political conditions, or even an acknowledgement of these figures cited by human rights organizations and specialists of the region. Ignorance is indeed strength, as Chomsky notes in a very apposite evocation of Orwell, whom he often refers to throughout the book as the noted linguist creates for the reader a truly terrifying Orwellian world, all the more horrifying because it actually exists and is not only an acutely perspicacious exercise in allegory, where "democracy" implies regimes friendly to US business interests and "moderates" are people such as El Salvadoran president José Duarte who just happens to preside over a regime that assassinates Archbishops, union leaders, students, journalists of opposition newspapers, and just about anyone who dares to question the economically polarising policies of this staunch proponent of the US "development model", another term Orwell would be proud of as the development in question applies to rich folk while the poor become demonstrably poorer, as is still much the case today in our world of ever "freer" markets.
The picture, as usual with Chomsky, is bleak, though when you have this much factual knowledge at your command, and have none of the necessary illusions required of the mendacious elites, then it is a tall task to be sanguine about world affairs, particularly those directed by the biggest terrorist state. The problem with reading a book published almost two decades ago about events that were then much publicized, is that much of the currency is unavoidably lost. At the very least the book provides an abundantly extensive historical overview of a time not all that different from our own, the primary deviation being the names of the victims and perpetrators, and at its most elevated altitudes of significant scholarship The Culture of Terrorism cogently demystifies the key characteristics, established by the voluminous historical and documentary record, of the most influential institutions in US society. This has always been Chomsky's greatest gift and this book amply, though not definitively, showcases his remarkable ability to not only render events in breathtakingly astounding detail, but always ensures that they are related to a wider context of previous incidents and current practices.
This is not a book for those individuals who still foster illusions that the United States is the most benevolent super power the world has ever known. For those willing to look beyond the purposely constrained bounds of the mainstream media, as well as the limits of their own often self-willed ignorance, the book provides ample insights into past practices and their very grave implications for future conduct by the globe's sole remaining hegemonic force. Chomsky may be less a voice in the wilderness than he was when the book was published, but still not enough people are hearing his extremely vital message.
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