JM Book Blog: toukokuuta 2008

JM Book Blog

5/19/2008

Hersh: Chain of Command

Seymour M. Hersh: Chain of Command

Paperback: 404 pages
Publisher: Penguin 2005
ISBN: 0-141-02088-1

Legendary The New Yorker investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is a mastermind in mapping trail of events: from cabinet meetings of foreign policy decision making elites into practices on the ground by political blue collar workers - soldiers.

From the White house to the infamous Abu Ghraib, Hersh shows how the Bush Administration turned the United States, victor of the Cold War and the leader of the Free World, into a, if not the, pre-eminent human rights violator. Apart from the mishandling of the unnecessary Iraq war, Hersh remembers to remind us also of the "other war", Afghanistan:

"The U.N. worker added that among Afghans President Karzai was perceived as "a weak leader with very little street credibility." He told me that, again and again, when he met with village elders as part of his work, "the old people say, 'Hamid is good man. He doesn't kill people. He doesn't steal things. He doesn't sell drugs. How could you possibly think he could be a leader of Afghanistan?'" p. 161

The world, without a doubt is a, dangerous place. Afghanistan is not a mess that will be solved easily. However, pre-emptive interventions, especially when they fail, create a more dangerous world - (political) freedom is a process, not an endgoal. But, then again, we have we been here before... Iraq is not the first American (human rights) debacle Hersh has reported to the wider public. On November 12, 1969 Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre (Pinkville) in the Vietnam War.

Second Opinion: Michael Ignatieff / The New York Times

¶ 5/19/2008 07:07:00 ip.

5/07/2008

Theory of World Security

Ken Booth: Theory of World Security

Paperback: 489 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press 2007
ISBN: 978-0-521-54317-0

Ken Booth, not to be mistaken for Ken Boothe, is a political scientist at Aberystwyth University in Wales, who has worked to develop a theory of critical security studies. Theory of World Security can be regarded as the attempt at a magnum opus of CSS, where Booth advances his emancipatory realism.

"...every person faces the existential challenge of having to live a life" p. 352

Emancipatory realism attempts to trascend the crude world of power politics with the means of cosmopolitan democracy. Booth attempts to politicize security issues and switch the focus from the traditional and static levels of state, military power and balance-of-power to individuals, human rights and international community levels.

The epistemological background if a mixture of phenomelogy and post-positivist understandings of science - the normative and motivational aspects are provided by critical theory and historical sociology. In the end, Theory of World Security is, unfortunately, just a collection of buzzwords and slogans and the end-product is utopian well-wishing. Apart from a couple of promising concepts, Booth's book is disappointing.

The concept of transcendence (of power politics) is, I'd argue, useful in evaluing foreign policies. What states try to transcend crude realism, how and why they do it? These questions could well be researched more in-depth and the answers might give us a hint towards a better world.

"But realism never really went away. Some mistook the power politics of the Bush/Blair push for war against Iraq for a revival of realism, though the fact is that leading academic realists in the United States opposed the war. Good realists do not allow themselves to become embroiled in unnecessary, unwise, illegal, and unpopular wars. The commitment of good realists to the prudent use of state military power is by no means always contrary to the political orientation of critical security thinking." p. 33

¶ 5/07/2008 09:40:00 ip.

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