The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them – Amy Goodman and David Goodman

The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them – Amy Goodman and David Goodman, Hyperion (2004) 342pp. (S) ***

Amy Goodman has been a reliable constant on radio and satellite television, broadcasting the news of the day, five days a week, on the Pacifica network. Now, with the assistance of her brother, David, she has written a book, taking a sober look at those in power while relaying some of her experiences over the years. In the first pages, she comes out swinging in describing the Bush administration, “politicians who never met a war they didn’t like (and in the case of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, never fought in any of them) . . . ”(p.8) This is the essential key to understanding the neo-con set – the chickenhawk factor. For if any of them had actually experienced first hand the horrors of war, it’d be safe to assume that more of them would have the reticence of Colin Powell when it came to initiating armed conflict.

In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the Iraqi government in the end of 2002, submitted its 10,500 page weapons declaration to the United Nations. Strangely, this document was intercepted by the Bush administration and was subsequently whittled down to 3,500 pages after being heavily redacted. Perhaps the world will never know the content of those 7,000 missing pages, but nonetheless, it is important to document yet another example of how the Bush administration executes information control to advance its own goals, and Goodman must be praised for pointing this out. Unfortunately, Goodman doesn’t continue to exclusively level her guns at the neo-fascist Bush regime, the greatest threat in itself to American democracy and international order.

It is not only Republicans that come under Goodman’s fire. “The Republicans and Democrats establish the acceptable boundaries of debate. When those groups agree – which is often – there is simply no debate.”(p.206) Later, she describes a spontaneous interview with president Clinton, in which she laid into him with difficult questions regarding the Iraq sanctions, the death penalty, racial profiling, NAFTA, and other unpleasantries. This appears to be Goodman at her self-righteous worst. Couldn’t she at least give the guy some credit and deference for making himself available to begin with, not to mention in an informal media format. Could anyone imagine George W. Bush doing anything remotely of the like, risking exposure to the unfamiliar, outside the realm of scripted and choreographed press conferences? In her zealous drive to demonstrate her journalistic independence, Goodman goes for the jugular, rather than recognizing a good faith effort of outreach on election day, made in the interest of getting the “get out the vote” message out.

There are two other instances noted by Goodman of persons exhibiting ideological intransigence to absurd levels. She describes an incarcerated American by the name of Allan Niarn making a statement denouncing by name his captors (among them high ranking Indonesian generals) for atrocities in East Timor and elsewhere. It’s hard to believe that this person actually survived his self-righteous posturing. The other example comes at the end of the book, where Democracy Now co-worker Jeremy Scahill attempts to shout down Richard Holbrooke at an awards ceremony. Again, there’s a sanctimonious tone here, as if nothing else is good enough for these people on the sidelines, that one will find upsetting. It’s easy to imagine that if everyone abided by all their criticisms, nothing in this world would ever get done. I suppose this is where this reviewer has major differences with Goodman. It’s a hell of a lot easier to hold your nose on the sidelines, incessantly repeating that nothing is good enough, than to take a risk of faith, demonstrate a little good-humored compromise, and join the rest of humanity

In the final analysis, the Goodmans have put together a fair work. But when Amy berates Bob Kerrey over his service in Vietnam, telling him that by contrast an eighty year old Dan Berrigan has no regrets, she is going over the top. Instead of recognizing her position of privilege and using it sympathetically, she repeatedly takes the path of the overly-sanctimonious. And in the end , this is what makes The Exception to the Rulers a disappointing work.

Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib – Seymour Hersh

Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib – Seymour Hersh, Harper Collins (2004) 394pp. (S) ****

Seymour Hersh’s reputation as an outstanding investigative journalist with a long standing history (most notably as the lone reporter who courageously broke the Mai Lai massacre story) is certainly formidable, and thus makes reviewing the work of such a giant no small task. That said, one of the greatest frustrations in reading Hersh is his over-reliance on anonymous, un-named sources in the intelligence and military community, along with the absence of any notation that might help bolster his reporting. Yes, he is delving into highly sensitive areas, and on occasion will name a name – usually already generally known, though in some instances, more obscure ones as well, but sometimes one gets the impression that Hersh has been at the game for so long, that the rigorous standards held to many journalists simply no longer apply to him. Hersh’s writing also often suffers from a sometimes over-dramatic emphasis on the contemporary, by which the historical context of a given foreign policy becomes lost. To the less informed reader, this lack of context may prove to be a frustration. Be that as it may, what Hersh does he does exceedingly well – if the game is digging up insider, alternative analysis, then he is its master. Time and again, Hersh has been at the forefront, breaking stories the mainstream media either refuse to touch altogether, or only get around to covering months, sometimes even years, later. Without him, we all would be much the worse off for trying to better understand what makes this much maligned administration tick. (Nay, if more people of influence had been reading Hersh prior to the Iraq invasion when he was calling the WMD bluff, we could’ve spared ourselves of all this mess altogether.

Basically, Chain of Command is a collection of Hersh’s New Yorker pieces with updated edits where he has added additional information and analysis. Hersh makes disturbing revelations aplenty, among them the politicization of the Special Forces: “ . . . the various Special Forces units on the scene [in Afghanistan in 2001-2002] – including Navy Seal teams and Delta Force – had been routinely going around the military chain of command and placing calls directly to the White House office of Wayne Dunning, a retired general who ran Special Forces during the Gulf War and became a presidential adviser on combating terrorism after September 11^th.”(p.138) Later in Chapter Six, Hersh describes Rumsfeld’s drive to politicize the Special Forces.

Most striking is how Hersh describes the genesis of the Iraq invasion policy. “In late 2001, [Richard] Perle and [James] Woolsey inspired a surge of articles and columns calling for the extension of the Afghan war into Iraq.”(p.169) Going deeper, Hersh gives a clearer picture of the ideological underpinnings that got us into Iraq. Hence we are introduced to Leo Strauss, the “noble lie,” and the neo-con following. Here are some excerpts: “The person who whispers in the ear of the king is more important than the king.”(p.220) “ . . . philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians.”(p.221) “They [the Straussian neo-cons] see themselves as outsiders – there’s a high degree of paranoia, they’ve convinced themselves that they’re on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool.”(p.222) Hubris, thy name is neo-con, indeed!

With regards to cooked intelligence there is this: “if it became known that Rummy wanted them to link the government of Tonga to 9/11, within a few months they’d come up with sources who’d do it.”(p.224) “It’s bait and switch . . . bait them into Iraq with WMD and, when they aren’t found, there’s the whole bullshit about the weapons being in Syria.”(p.241) Indeed, chapter five, “Who Lied to Whom” reflects some of Hersh’s most solid work on the cooking of intelligence and the dissemination of propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Hersh also provides an excellent description of how through the tactics of evasion and procrastination, Rumsfeld’s pentagon has been able to get away with as much as they have – constantly changing the debate and moving the goal posts in policy objectives.

And as to the tremendous cultural divide between U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, Hersh leaves us with this image; U.S. troops chucking turkeys into the homes of Iraqis on Thanksgiving. Only under such gross mismanagement at the most senior levels does policy at the private level reach such an astounding state of absurdity. Perhaps this image of offensive profligacy and brazen, arrogant ignorance is the most telling for a policy ill conceived, weakly led, and executed on the ground in the most haphazard and careless of ways. This can’t bode well for the future.

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet – James Mann

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet – James Mann, Viking/Penguin Group, (2004) 426 pp. (S) ***

During every administration, for every journalist who will try to give you the story straight, there seems to be always a thousand well-paid stenographers, the more savvy ones being those who seek to address the concerns of the political opposition under the guise of contextualization and moral relativism. Sadly, James Mann belongs to this breed. As a paid apologist for the Bush administration and its radical foreign policy of aggressive war and rampant disregard for international law, Mann has assumed the role of semanticist – the logic being, it really isn’t all that bad, if you sprinkle your text with enough euphemisms and comparisons to the Clinton administration’s foreign policies, no matter how erroneous or non-existent such correlations may be. (Astute observers will recall a cavalier Paul Wolfowitz justifying the unprovoked invasion of Iraq by suggesting that the policy was really no different than that of his administration’s predecessor – it being only a continuation thereof.) To be fair, Clinton was no friend to the Iraqi people given the rigors of a tightly controlled economic embargo and periodic air raids a la “Desert Fox” and other such operations. But despite the urging of the vocal neo-con right, most notably in their 1999 manifesto for securing U.S. global dominance called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (which goes oddly absent without mention in Mann’s text) the pressure was always there, be it the Iraqi National Accord or the PNAC (the Project for a New American Century) for Clinton to fully take the bait and chomp down on the bit of an all out invasion, a temptation he wisely took a pass on.

What this book essentially tells us is the story of four neoconservatives, who for all intents and purposes are better called chickenhawks than the more regal sounding “vulcans;” I speak here of Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, none of whom have ever heard the proverbial “shot fired in anger” – with the possible exception of Mr. Wolfowitz who once ran into some unpleasantness at a Baghdad hotel – who are long on ideology and short on resources and relevant experience, and two combat veterans (Powell and Armitage) who in fact do have the experience to know something of what they are talking about, but who have come to be nearly ignored in the pretense ridden administration of George W. Bush (and who subsequently, by no accident, no longer serve in their positions). (So long to the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, that had no room in Rummy’s leaner, meaner program.) Toward the end of his book, Mann makes this telling observation, “the invasion of Iraq was in many ways Dick Cheney’s war, just as the George W. Bush administration had been in many respects Cheney’s administration.”(p.369) With that said, this reviewer can’t help himself from making a plug for one of his favorite books, John Nichols Dick: The Man Who Is President. For a man who headed up the vice-presidential search committee only to conclude that he himself was most qualified for the job, is a man that necessarily must be held to the closest of scrutiny. By now it should be no secret that much of the administration’s foreign policy turns on the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis, an axis of two men who have a long history of close government service together going back to Nixon and Ford..

The one over-riding grievance this reviewer must bring to your attention is the very use of the word “Vulcan,” God of steel, forger of armor. This gives an unnecessary and undeserved austerity and if you will, gravitas, to a group of people we could better dispense with by using the moniker “paper tigers.” For all their ideological hot air, they’re really nothing but the bluster of empty suits. Men who played too much Axis and Allies in their youth and read too many World War II history books (hence the tsunami of misnomer comparisons of the “war on terror” to World War II), makes one long for the days when “the wise men” from Wall Street and “the best and the brightest” from academia ran the show, even though sometimes with calamitous results (i.e. the Vietnam escalation). After reading Mann’s work, one comes away with the sense that what we see in the chickenhawk/vulcan contingent are at heart a bunch of amateurs, hell bent on using all the coarseness of hard, military power, without any regard for the subtlety and nuance of what was once called “soft power” (a.k.a. diplomacy). So we get ridiculous phrases like the “axis of evil,” even when North Korea, Iraq, and Iran have signed no security pacts with one another. One can only hope that the next generation will bring new blood and fresh ideas to the table without all the kool-aid and rose colored glasses – that is if the present neo-con set doesn’t completely upset the apple cart, leaving no table to return to. (On a recent airing of The McClaughlin Group, Washington Times writer Tony Blankly, stated point blank without any sense of irony or reserve that the goal of the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East was in fact to “destabilize” the entire region, as a prelude to mystically ushering in a new generation of “democracy.” [What a relief to finally have the real scope and aim of the neo-con agenda out in the open in all its ugly nakedness.] However, this can only leave one scratching his head wondering exactly what part of “neo-conservative” is actually “conservative.”)

A final mention of Mann’s excellent notation, much of it derived from interviews with neo-cons, is warranted. On an aside, interestingly, there is only one lone mention of the 2000 presidential election, which via the Supreme Court ushered in Bush, but there is no statement as to how a president who lost the popular vote, feels compelled that this fact should have absolutely no bearing on moderating his radical foreign policy of aggressive war. After all, what’s democracy to the ideologically driven? Oh, that’s right, it’s only “spreading” “democracy” abroad that only matters with this crowd.

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century – Paul Krugman

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century – Paul Krugman, Norton (2003) 426pp. (S) ***** (alternate edit)

While regular readers of the New York Times editorial page may find themselves frequently wondering why someone who unapologetically rallied for the invasion of Iraq, only to see many of his pre-war predictions as to the outcome of so perilous a step in misguided foreign policy fall well to the wayside (sorry, no instant, miraculous “Iraqi miracle” to shine forth its democratic beacon for all her neighbors to follow), someone whose analysis has been so consistently wrong as to rival the judgment of Donald Rumsfeld, why such a publicly self-discredited individual would continue to be offered a column space twice a week in a paper with the largest circulation in the U.S., let alone to be taken seriously at all in any public forum, there has always been an oasis for those wearied of constant dissembling with little thought to consequence and nary a word that would imply admission of mistake; a refuge for the truth-seeker, if you will. Yes, fortunately for us, there are other places to go, other worldviews to consult in those much vaunted pages, than that of the self-proclaimed foreign policy expert, Thomas Friedman. His name would be Paul Krugman, and surprisingly, he is an economist by trade.

In Krugman, we find rather than continuously erroneous analyses, the refreshingly opposite; concise observations that time and again are far ahead of the curve and are more often than not, vindicated by future events. It is quite telling that during the critical months leading up to the now historical, if not equally mysterious, 2000 presidential election, when most of the media was under a Rove-induced hypnosis, gladly giving the pass to the candidate with perhaps the most to hide in a shady past, while excoriating his opponent over otherwise harmless and insignificant slips of the tongue (as opposed to say, “there will be no voluntary army” anyone?), there was Paul Krugman, breaking down the “fuzzy math” of the Bush team’s tax cut proposals, and calling their bluff every step of the way. When an otherwise somnambulant press corps failed America, there was Krugman, one of the few and bold, raising his voice and throwing his red flags. In a time when “newspeak” has become ubiquitous from the press podiums of the White House and the Pentagon, this is an important detail to remember; when Rove, Cheney, and Bush were mixing their special kool-aid and passing it out to a thirsty media, Paul Krugman refused to take a drink. For instance, this was printed on October 11, 2000: “Mr. Bush has made an important political discovery. Really big misstatements, it turns out, can not be effectively challenged, because voters can’t believe that a man who seems so likeable would do that sort of thing.” In one sentence, Krugman has gone to the heart of the neo-con ethos; you can get away with just about anything, so long as the window dressing is right.

When it comes to completely breaking down the Republican m.o. and exposing it for what it really is, there is no second to Krugman.

Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia – Gore Vidal

Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia – Gore Vidal, Nation Books, 2004, 181 pp. (LF) ***

If nothing else, citizens of a country where the trials of O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, and more recently, Scott Peterson, became objects of an incessant, bordering on the hysterical, media fixation owe Gore Vidal a great debt of gratitude for introducing to the modern lexicon the expression “the United States of Amnesia”. It says so much, so succinctly, that nothing need follow it. And maybe that’s where he could have best left his latest work, Imperial America: Reflections On The United States of Amnesia, but indeed a * page text follows, and hence so must this review. The bulk of the book was written in the mid to late 1980s (about two-thirds of the text). Apparently this is designed so that the reader is to marvel at Mr. Vidal’s uncanny abilities of prescience, which he aptly demonstrated in 2003’s Dreaming War, and to be reminded that the present Bush administration has an ideological predecessor and model in the Regan years (i.e. distorted, Christian fundamentalist thinking that defines the world in Manichean terms, where policy is tailored to preparation for, rather than prevention of, the final, apocalyptic showdown with the “evil empire” or whatever flavor of the week foe you may wish to substitute – Bin Laden, Hussein, Jong Il, Zarqawi). Missing is follow-up analysis to Vidal’s 2002 book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, in which he dives headlong into the several inconsistencies of the investigation into the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. With the 9/11 attacks, naturally the stakes are much higher, so where’s his critical eye that should be fixed upon this most anomalous, tragic of events and the many documented peculiarities surrounding this singular outrage that has been exploited to no end for policy advancement purposes by the present administration? While he expresses righteous concern regarding electronic, paperless voting and its grave potential implications for the upcoming presidential election (one of the bold few to do so in print), the usually intrepid and courageous Vidal has decided to sit on his hands when it comes to broaching the possibility, as David Ray Griffin has done in his The New Pearl Harbor, of the very real possibility that there was administration complicity in facilitating the attacks – either by turning a blind eye to the many warning signs and “standing down” response forces by bypassing standard operating procedures, or by assuming a much more disturbing, active role. Other than this glaring omission, Mr. Vidal’s concerns about the solvency of American democracy and its uncertain prospects for the future are all valid, and sadly are daily only being more and more vindicated by the increasingly autocratic nature of the “Cheney/Bush regime,” yet another of Vidal’s linguistic bulls-eyes that has become grossly apparent and manifest.

Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State - Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State - Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Tarcher/Penguin (2004) 264 pp. (S) ****

When a house is burning and a nation’s in crisis, most journalists will give you all kinds of descriptions of the smoke and an occasional glimpse of the blaze. But sadly, all too rare is it that you will find a courageous soul who will venture into the brush, or if you prefer, the bush, to look into actual causalities (i.e. how did the fire start, who might be the arsonist, and what might be his/her motives). In Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America into a One-Party State by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, we unfortunately find an example of the former breed. One possible definition of fascism might be: single party rule of the hard right, characterized by extreme nationalist and militarist manifestations, whereby state and corporate interests are merged to the point of near indistinctness. So it came as a surprise to this reader, bordering on shock, that when one finds the terms “Right Wing” and “One-Party State” in a single title, only to later discover the complete omission of the word “fascism” from its subsequent pages, well, speechless is about the best approximation of his state of mind that he might offer. While Rampton and Sheldon give us a brief history of the radical right in America and some of its more noted personages (i.e. the shameless direct mail shenanigans of Bruce Eberle, the transmogrification of Irving Kristol from Trotskyite to founding father of neo-conservatism, and the “great little racket” honed by his son at The Weekly Standard where they paint themselves as lone, noble defenders of the absurdist notion of “objectivity” in an otherwise biased field of the now infamous “liberal media”), they would have done far better to have widened the scope of their analysis, beyond the borders of the United States and into the fateful years that preceded World War II. That said, this is still a well documented and argued work, even when its approach is too mild and its analysis and conclusions fall far short. Early in the book, we read of a Republican election strategy pamphlet, endorsed on its cover by Bush campaign guru Karl Rove, and circulated in 2000, entitled: The Art of Political War: How Republicans Can Fight to Win. “Politics is war by other means. In political warfare you do not fight just to prevail in an argument, but to destroy the enemy’s fighting ability. . . . In political wars, the aggressor usually prevails,” the authors quote from its pages. Given this red flag, not only of an inappropriate analogy, but of the stated goal of not simply triumphing over one’s foe, but indeed, having the intent to “destroy” him, it is not enough to simply observe the inherent contradiction of conservatism between the “traditionalists” of cultural issues, and the libertarian proponents of least government. As we have seen with the Bush II administration, the brilliance, if you’ll indulge the suggestion for a moment, comes when the agenda of the former is veiled by the public language of the latter, thus averting a probable schism. Not even recognized by Sheldon and Rampton, is that increasingly rarer breed of conservative, the fiscal conservative – apparently nowhere to be found, other than the Clinton administration, since the dawning days of the Reagan administration. Part of the liability of living through such a tumultuous period marked by serious shifts in political tectonics, is the penchant to lose perspective by following the ever-steady flow of obfuscating smoke. A small illustration of this is the author’s cursory mention of the 2002 California recall election, an event they acknowledge more or less by stating it as historical fact, never bothering to ask why a governor who was re-elected only eight months prior was targeted for recall, what is the history of the state’s recall provision, where the money and men behind the initiative came from and why were petitioners paid for their services, what might be the abhorrent precedent for democracy, how an artificially truncated campaign season might have grossly advantaged a seriously inexperienced candidate, and the context into which the recall election fits, when one considers the Texas re-redistricting strategy, and the fact that the President’s brother is Governor of Florida (three electoral power block states that account for nearly a third of electoral votes). Neglected and omitted from mention altogether are the anthrax mailings to major media networks and the offices of two ranking Democratic senators, the leaking of ambassador Wilson’s wife’s identity, the break-in of the Democratic e-mail system by a staffer out of Orin Hatch’s office, the Pentagon’s mysterious Office of Special Plans and how it figured prominently in the cooking of pre-war intelligence, Tom Delay’s zealous fundraising activities, and the detrimental impact DRE (digitally recorded electronic) paperless voting machines and the 2002 HAVA (Help America Vote Act) will have on our electoral democracy. When confronted by the extraordinary string of highly anomalous events of the past four years (the 2000 presidential election, the 9/11 attacks, two wars of aggression), one is better inclined to seek historical perspective and precedents of the past – both domestic and foreign, but sadly for Sheldon and Rampton it still seems to be simply business as usual, that as cynical as politics my be and become, it will always return peaceably once again to the left and center. That the Bush II administration is neither traditionalist nor libertarian but a radicalized, powermad amalgam, may be a truth these writers find either too intellectually disturbing or journalistically and professionally rigorous to indulge. This denial will not deter the astute reader, who will continue his search and look elsewhere for his answers, but it is likely the authors themselves who have yet to fully realize and confront their disappointment. Yes, Mr. Sheldon and Mr. Rampton, there is indeed such a thing as a “vast right-wing conspiracy” and its model is not confined to our shores alone. Maybe your next work might call for a closer examination of the Spain and Italy of the 1930s.

Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency – Robert C. Byrd

Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency – Robert C. Byrd, Norton, 2004, 269 pp. (S) ***

When a man having the distinction of having served more than a half century in the United States Senate hits the wall and decides to write a book, you know there must be serious trouble in America and that his constituents would do well to listen. As the longest standing member of the Senate appropriations committee, Senator Robert Byrd has had his finger on America’s fiscal pulse for decades – enough time to see that the Bush budget doesn’t even come close to passing the smell test and adding up. When America slept, this man, a copy of the Constitution in his pocket, and his lone voice was there, pleading for sanity and reason as an administration high on power jumped the tracks and democracy began its slide into fascism. His written words are as eloquent as those he delivered on the floor of the Senate in those dark days of early 2003 preceding the invasion of Iraq. But the focus of the work is not simply perhaps this gravest of errors by the Bush administration, but rather that near sacred duty as mandated by the Constitution to the legislative body, the power of the purse. He begins with memories from the Depression, before describing the strong-arm methods of the Bush administration that shot-gunned the 2001 tax-cuts through Congress as its first priority of business, introducing what Byrd describes as certain “budgetary Armageddon” in later years (ostensibly when Bush would be close to leaving, or out of office – 2007 to 2014). The contrast between the resourceful frugality so necessary to survival during one of this country’s most trying chapters and an initiative to feed the wealthy with more tax breaks led by a man who has known nothing but privilege his entire life, shows two worldviews in such stark relief that the difference could be best simply stated as one between prudence and profligacy. Prior to Bush, Byrd writes of how he along with five other U.S. legislators, went to court over the “line item veto” which was then oddly championed by Republicans. (To imagine a Democratic Senator going to court against a sitting Democratic President in these days of rigidly enforced party loyalty within a one party framework, almost makes one nostalgic for events only five years past!) But Byrd rightly reserves his severest criticisms for the administration that hasn’t shied from doing its most to usurp Congressional fiscal authority. “I believe that under the guise of creating a new Homeland Security Department the President has succeeded in limiting Congressional oversight and removing limitations on executive power,” he deftly observes of the legislation that was co-sponsored by Senate colleague Joseph Lieberman. Whether giving a heads up on “Patriot II” legislation, warning of the dangers of DOD slush funds when he writes of the $20 billion Iraq reconstruction package that, “Grand schemes were afloat in Washington to remake the Middle East. A cool $20 billion, spent far from prying eyes, could make a heady stew of mischief,” or describing how an obstinate Tom Ridge came to stonewall before the Senate appropriations committee, Senator Byrd in writing this book has performed yet again a critical public service. For a seasoned statesman to boldly proclaim, “Hubris, thy name is Bush,” only to later observe that “A muscle-bound nuclear power that can all but destroy the planet without risking U.S. troops on the ground must never become complacent about the harsh realities of war,” are words that should surely give us all pause.