Chalmers Johnson: Imperialist Propaganda. Another anti-imperialist screed about Charlie Wilson's War. Of course, Johnson is right (as is Tom Engelhardt, in his intro). Steve Coll's Ghost Wars is a better source on the conflict, which neither started nor ended with Charlie Wilson. (Interesting that Wilson retired to a lucrative job as a lobbyist for Pakistan: "mostly tradition," as he explained in the movie.) Johnson quotes a previous review that he wrote of the book:

The Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished record of screwing up every 'secret' armed intervention it ever undertook. From the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 through the rape of Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the 'secret war' in Laos, aid to the Greek Colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973 killing of President Allende in Chile, and Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a single instance in which the Agency's activities did not prove acutely embarrassing to the United States and devastating to the people being 'liberated.' The CIA continues to get away with this bungling primarily because its budget and operations have always been secret and Congress is normally too indifferent to its Constitutional functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale of a purported CIA success story should be of some interest.

According to the author of Charlie Wilson's War, the exception to CIA incompetence was the arming between 1979 and 1988 of thousands of Afghan mujahideen ("freedom fighters"). The Agency flooded Afghanistan with an incredible array of extremely dangerous weapons and 'unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower [in this case, the USSR].'

The author of this glowing account, [the late] George Crile, was a veteran producer for the CBS television news show '60 Minutes' and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper. He argues that the U.S.'s clandestine involvement in Afghanistan was 'the largest and most successful CIA operation in history,' 'the one morally unambiguous crusade of our time,' and that 'there was nothing so romantic and exciting as this war against the Evil Empire.' Crile's sole measure of success is killed Soviet soldiers (about 15,000), which undermined Soviet morale and contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period 1989 to 1991. That's the successful part.

However, he never once mentions that the 'tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists' the CIA armed are the same people who in 1996 killed nineteen American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew a hole in the side of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden Harbor in 2000, and on September 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It makes sense that Johnson would focus on the blowback, but this foolish war hurt us far worse than it hurt Afghanistan, which after more than 25 years of constant war is worse off than ever. The war also adversely affected every other country it touched, and it takes a pretty cold hearted bastard to exclude the former Soviet Union from that list.

Matt Taibbi: Merchants of Trivia. The target here is not the presidential candidates, although they provide plenty of illustrations, so much as the media that covers, and trivializes, them. For example:

This relentless fragging from the media led to the current state of affairs in Iowa, in which all of the candidates are enjoined in a seemingly endless piss-fight over the most mind-numbing minutiae imaginable. Clinton and Obama spent days haggling bitterly over, of all things, tea. When Obama insisted that his foreign experience went beyond who "I had tea with," the Hillary camp actually went through the trouble of releasing a statement from Madeleine Albright insisting that Hillary, in fact, drank many different beverages in her travels.

It's unlikely that politicians would be such shitheads without the media egging them on, although the media certainly favors some natural shitheads, GW Bush being an obvious example. Taibbi's book, Spanking the Donkey, is already the best book on this presidential campaign -- it was written about 2004, and the candidates have changed this time, but its main subject, the media, is very much the same.

Ari Berman: The Democratic Foreign Policy Wars. Useful review of which foreign policy mandarins are plugged into which Democratic candidate ears. None are likely to push the sort of serious rethinking US foreign policy needs, but the one that makes me most nervous is Richard Holbrooke and his "muscular liberalism" -- humanitarian-masked imperialism is more like it: "In the 1990s Holbrooke warned of 'Vietnamalia syndrome,' the aversion to using military power because of failures in Vietnam and Somalia, and says we cannot retreat now, either." He's reason enough to oppose Clinton, although he's hardly the only one (e.g., there's also "the mighty and the almighty" Albright).