Matthew R Simmons: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (2005; paperback, 2005, Wiley)

Simmons is chairman of Simmons & Company International, a Houston-based investment bank specializing in the energy industry. He made a big splash with this book, which questions whether claims are true that Saudi Aramco can significantly expand their petroleum production to keep up with projected demand. His background is in business (MBA), not geology, but the book is remarkably detailed in terms of Saudi Arabia's oilfield geology and technology. I figured at first I'd just read the early history sections and skip the fine print, but the latter proved irresistible. Info toward the back of the book on non-Saudi oilfields is also very interesting.

As'ad Abukhalil: The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power (paperback, 2004, Seven Stories)

After reading Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, I wanted some more background history on Saudi Arabia. I picked up this short book, which helped a bit. The problem is not so much that it is intransigently anti-Saudi -- as one correspondent warned me -- as that it raises more questions than it answers. For one thing, the Saudis have gotten very little real value, especially in terms of their own independence and self-sufficiency, out of the huge amount of oil they have shipped to the developed world. As one of the charts here shows, the Saudis from 1987-97 (which were not especially good years for the oil business) spent an average of $10 billion/year on US arms, an investment for . . . what? The money they've spent on supporting anti-communist militias abroad (e.g., Afghanistan) has been a loss. Their religious propaganda has gotten them little if anything. Their private investments in the US and Europe seem to have confused their allegiances. Ever since the founding of OPEC there have been good reasons to nudge oil prices up, both to conserve diminishing supplies and to scratch out a little redistribution of the west's wealth, but the Saudis more often than not have undermined OPEC.

Chris Hedges: Real Journalists Don't Make $5 Million a Year. Glad to see something about the late Tim Russert that makes a lick of sense. I didn't particularly dislike Russert, but I can't see that his passing is going to have any effect on the quality of broadcast journalism (forgive all the oxymorons in that sentence).

James Wolcott: Bridge over Troubled Blather. On an op-ed by former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey advising Obama to win favor with voters by agreeing with McCain on many issues; e.g., "Sen. McCain, I appreciate your leadership on campaign finance reform, and my opting out of public financing isn't meant to abandon the system. There is a lot more that needs to be done to clean up the influence of money in politics. I will need your help to accomplish that objective." Actually, he'll only need McCain's help if he loses, which is what this advice is bound to do. One thing to remember is that Kerrey has flat out flunked two basic tests for any Democrat: by propagandizing for privatizing Social Security, he has shown: (1) he doesn't appreciate an issue where the Democratic Party brand has unassailable strength vs. the Republicans; and (2) he doesn't understand how Social Security works, and therefore why it's impossible to replace it with a private savings program that doesn't devastate retirement security for everyone now in the system.

Speaking of bad advice, I don't have the link but here's George Packer in the July 7 & 14, 2008 New Yorker:

Obama, whatever the idealistic yearnings of his admirers, has turned out to be a cold-eyed, shrewd politician. The same pragmatism that prompted him last month to forgo public financing of his campaign will surely lead him, if he becomes President, to recalibrate his stance on Iraq. He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reënergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia's recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November. So far, he has offered nothing more concrete than this: "We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in."

One thing this shows is that people who were fooled into supporting the Iraq war in the first place can be fooled again and again, no matter how many times they think they've recognized their errors. Packer is merely assuming that it's the US troops that have held Al-Qaeda and Al-Sadr in check, that only they can continue to do so, and that doing so is worth all the cost of keeping them there. Big assumptions for a bill that is running into trillions of dollars plus all sorts of other costs. Obama, at least, doesn't have Packer's checkered history of fuzzy thinking. If he wavers from his commitment to remove US forces from Iraq within 16 months in favor of Packer's favored "conditional engagement" he'll lose control of his policy and sight of where he wants and needs to go. The surge propaganda is a lot of wishful thinking insulated by a general dearth of facts. The dip in violence is little more than a lull, allowing marginal gains to be showcased without really changing much of anything. The US presence and manipulation is still the root cause of the violence, and Iraq will never stabilize until US forces leave.

One thing that's likely to happen is that Obama will weasel around the Iraq issue between now and November and possibly further until he figures out just how to effect withdrawal. This is partly to avoid having to swim upstream against the surge propaganda, partly to not let McCain pin the defeatist label on him. For an example, see this note by Steve Benen. This stuff may make his supporters nervous (as does the FISA flip-flop), but there is no reason to think he won't, once he gets the chance, take the most expeditious exit strategy out of Iraq, if for no other reason than that it's totally fracking insane that the US is there in the first place.

Jesse Helms is dead. He's the only politician I've ever seen spend an entire victory speech taunting his opponents and gloating over their humiliation. It would be totally disrespectful to him to say anything at all kind on this occasion, not that it's possible to actually recall anything. He was a complete, utter piece of shit, and inordinately proud of the fact.

Susan Faludi: The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (2007, Libri)

I read a lot of feminist writings in the 1970s, and was often struck by how they opened up novel and (for me) surprising views on subjects that I didn't expect to learn much new or surprising on. I haven't read many feminist writings since then, probably because the insights seemed to grow stale and formulaic. One exception was Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. This is another. It's actually two books: one reviews a long list of "captivity narratives" -- memoirs, accounts, and mythicized novels of white American women kidnapped by Indians, whose presence and alienness was at least as terrifying for early Americans as anything the islamofascists might fantasize; the other is an account of what happened after 9/11, focusing on the reflexive return of sexual role-playing, a world of trembling "security moms" and studly politicians offering themselves as protective heroes. Not that it's exactly lived up to the myth.

Karen Armstrong: Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World (1988; 1991; second edition, paperback, 2001, Anchor Books)

Karen Armstrong has become my first-call resource for the history of religion. I first saw her interviewed by Bill Moyers, then picked up her The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which seemed like something one should learn a little about these days, even if you basically consider them all a bunch of nut cases. I was pleased enough that I sought out her earlier book, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wanting to pick up a little historical background on the Crusades, I figured this book would be a good place to start. It is and isn't. The sections on medieavel history are spotty, although they do help, but at least half the book is devoted to more current concerns, especially the Israel-Palestine conflict. Even this isn't all that up to date: the book was originally published in 1988, with a post-9/11 preface rushed out for a timely December 2001 reprint. Going back through the quotes, I wish I had marked more old history and less new, but everything below is interesting in its own right. Just doesn't give the proper feel for the book, which despite its jumbledness is pretty dependably on target -- at least for our present interests in this history. It's certainly not the only possible approach to historical context of the Crusades.

Sven Lindqvist: "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey Into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1992; paperback, 1996, The New Press)

I noticed this book on Tom Engelhardt's Tom's Review of Books, where it stood out for one thing as one of the few relatively non-new books. It's oddly structured as a travel narrative, where the author is trekking across the Sahara from Algeria down. The trip itself has relatively little to do with Conrad's The Heart of Darkness -- the source of the title -- and the murderous ideologies of the era surrounding it. The notion that the "lesser races" were dying out (as opposed to being killed off) is something that wouldn't occur to us today, given our own experience of the population explosion in Africa, Latin America, etc. That it was dilligently wrapped up with the aura of science was typical of the era, something we should be more conscious of than most people are today.

The story of King Leopold and the Congo has recently been told by Adam Hochschild in King Leopold's Ghost. I read that a few years back; haven't collected notes from it, and should have. The story of the Herero genocide is less well known, but familiar to me from its prominent role in Thomas Pynchon's novel V.

Charles C Mann: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2006; paperback, 2007, Vintage Books)

This book attempts to sum up the vast range of recent research into the America prior to the European discovery by Columbus in 1492. As such, it jumps around a lot and is rather scattered. The quotes I picked out are even more scattered -- disease and the ease of conquest is one particular theme. Not all of the research is equally new or newsworthy. Some remains very uncertain. We still know much more about the moment of impact than whatever came before, and what we know about the moment of impact has frequently been misunderstood not least because the impact itself profoundly disturbed our findings.

Continuing with the books this week. Looking through the last couple of weeks, I've noticed that these book things take a lot of scrolling to get through. The blog software has a limit on how long an article lead can be, and I topped that on Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly. The way around that is to split the piece in half, putting the extra into the "extended body" -- don't know if there's a limit there, too. But it occurs to me that from here on out it might be best to just put the top section into the blog entry and drop the quotes section into the extended body. Means you'll have to do an extra click to get there, but it'll be easier to get around when you're just scanning.

The books pieces are all kept in the Books section, although they're not guaranteed to be up to date when I make the initial post. I generally update the whole website once a week, usually on Monday, so that's when we all get back in sync.

Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008, Simon & Schuster)

Baker's book is written as a chronological compendium of short news bits, as informal as a tabloid newspaper. The story begins before 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany -- the nominal starting date of WWII. It begins before 1933, when Hitler seized power in Germany. The early parts could have been documented more fully, but they give us a taste of the nations and persons squaring away for the big war. The story goes on through the end of 1941, by which time Germany has invaded the Soviet Union, and Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor and overrun the American colonial territory in the Philippines. It's also a date by which Germany had started implementing its "final solution" and the US had launched its Manhattan Project, another concept of final solution. It's worth pointing out that Churchill always saw massive bombing as the way to beat his enemies, but believed that bombing would only increase the resolve of the English to fight on. It's worth noting that while Roosevelt waited for the US to be attacked before entering WWII, he planned assiduously for that day, and for several years pushed policies to provoke Japan into attacking the US. It's also worth noting that whereas today we see the Holocaust as a convincing reason for the US and the UK to have gone to war against Germany, at the time neither Churchill nor Roosevelt would show Jewish suffering the slightest recognition or credence: in public and in private they entered the war for other reasons. It's also worth noting that the only people who did try to help Jews escape from impending doom were the pacifists, who in the end were too few and too late.

The following quotes offer a taste of this remarkable book.

Recycled Goods is still in semi-retirement. I'm not going very far out of my way, but when I stumble across something that fits, I jot it down and post it end of each month. Back when I was working on it the columns ran 40-60 records per month. In April when I resumed this I had 10; this month it's up to 17, mostly redundant jazz.

Spent the month trying to keep up with the flood of Jazz Consumer Guide entrants, some of which proved ancient enough to fall through to here. Slipped in a couple of world music delights to encourage publicists to keep sending. Besides, I liked their covers, although it took a while to track down scans, and I had to hack on them a bit to make them fit. Record count is up from the last two months when this column went into semi-retirement. Next month could just as easily go down, especially since I've run out of old jazz.

The Peter Brötzmann Octet: The Complete Machine Gun Sessions (1968 [2007], Atavistic): Roughly speaking, this is where Europe's jazz avant-garde takes off, building a tradition rooted in brutal cacophony, disjointed rhythm, and cartoonish irreverance. The three saxophonists went on to major careers: Evan Parker, Willem Breuker, and Brötzmann. They turn these long pieces into free fire zones, blaring in unison siren wails, splitting off to scratch through the dirt and the rubble. Two bassists: Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall. Two drummers: Han Bennink and Sven-Ake Johansson. One pianist: Fred Van Hove. Each has his own mind, but the piano is especially worth tracking. Original LP ran 37:08. CD reissue added two alternate takes, and now this edition adds a third take of the title piece, done live with extra saxophonist Gerd Dudek. Still fits on one CD, but it's an awful lot to sit through. B+

Classic Piano Blues From Smithsonian Folkways (1944-76 [2008], Smithsonian/Folkways): The small print limits the selection to Moe Asch's folkie-ethnomusicological label, which recorded some 3000 LPs with its eyes and ears fixed on the past -- one result is that real classics like Leroy Carr are too old, and contemporaries like Otis Spann are too modern. Sampled instead are such uncommercial fogeys as Memphis Slim, Speckled Red, Roosevelt Sykes, Champion Jack Dupree, and Little Brother Montgomery, with James P. Johnson a surprise appearance. The booklet often omits recording dates -- 1944-76 covers about half of the songs, but others could be earlier or later -- but otherwise provides a lot of information, often referencing more classic versions of these same songs. B+

Dominique Cravic et les Primitifs du Futur: Tribal Musette (2007-08 [2008], Sunnyside): It's tempting to view this French cabaret group through the prism of their famous cover illustrator and sometime mandoline player, R. Crumb. Like the Cheap Suit Serenaders, guitarist Cravic's band is firmly planted in the past, its embrace of primtivism rooted in the romantic view of anthropology, with a little sci-fi for the future. For me it works not for its longing for other times so much as how disarmingly and charmingly French it all sounds: the accordions, marimba, clarinets, "musicale saw," "finger snapping," rhythm guitar, voices ranging from cigarette-stained poetasting to sweet chorales. Where we tend to think of world music as anything-but-ours, in France the view seems to be everything-including-ours. A-

Gabi Lunca: Sounds From a Bygone Age, Vol. 5 (1956-78 [2008], Asphalt Tango): Even now, nobody would go so far as to claim that Ceausescu's Romania harbored a golden age of pop music, but the German label Asphalt Tango has compiled five volumes without a slip, music no one else seems to have had a clue about. (Buda Musique's Éthiopiques series has done something comparable, but is more hit and miss.) Gypsy lautari music, with accordion and violin and cimbalom, mostly consumed at weddings, only rarely recorded. Lunca was the more refined of two major female singers -- the earthier Romica Puceanu got her props back on Vol. 2. A-

Briefly Noted

Nat Adderley: Work Song (1960 [2008], Riverside/Keepnews Collection): Cannonball's little brother plays a lean, unpolished cornet, backed by a group that straddles Bobby Timmons' funk-groove piano and Wes Montgomery's slickened blues guitar; the irresistibly catchy title cut makes this a minor hard bop classic. A-

Albert Ayler/Don Cherry/John Tchicai/Roswell Rudd/Gary Peacock/Sunny Murray: New York Eye and Ear Control (1964 [2008], ESP-Disk): Ayler's record, but all names are on the cover and all are notable, the four horns churning tumultuously, with Ayler's tenor sax reaching for the sacred, and Rudd's trombone plumbing the profane. B+

Don Cherry: Life at Café Montmartre 1966: Volume Two (1966 [2008], ESP-Disk): Sloppy seconds in Copenhagen, with Gato Barbieri's tenor sax sparring with the leader's trumpet over the fractured field of Karl Berger vibes, playing such complex Cherry compositions as "Complete Communion" loose and short-handed. B

Ornette Coleman: Town Hall, 1962 (1962 [2008], ESP-Disk): Three cuts with the trio that in 1965 cut At the Golden Circle, Stockholm, both volumes highly recommended, this less essential but unmistakable; sandwiched in the middle is a 9:17 string quartet, Coleman's first recorded glimpse of his harmolodic chamber music, something else again. B+

Droppin' Science: Greatest Samples From the Blue Note Lab (1966-74 [2008], Blue Note): With Alfred Lion and Francis Wolf departing, the legendary label foundered, adrift in quasi-commercial soul jazz with languid beats that I suppose have been sampled from time to time -- no details here, just another attempt to turn sows' ears into silk purses. C+

Coleman Hawkins: The Hawk Flies High (1957 [2008], Riverside/Keepnews Collection): Makes it look easy, too, lifted by warm brass from Idrees Suleiman and J.J. Johnson, soaring over a rhythm section that layers Hank Jones bebop on Jo Jones swing, swooping and diving and snatching the listener's attention with surprisingly effortless grace; only complaint is sometimes Hawk makes it look too easy. A-

Frank Lowe: Black Beings (1973 [2008], ESP-Disk): The short middle piece is solo tenor sax, thoughtful and intriguing; the two long pieces sandwiched around the solo are screamers, with Joseph Jarman on second noisemaker, wailing and shrieking spastically around Lowe's meatier riffs. B-

Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath: Eclipse at Dawn (1971 [2008], Cuneiform): A band of South African exiles with their township jive melodies, doubled to big band strength with English avant-gardists, the sounds repressed by apartheid amplified into the cacophonous noise of freedom; a live set from Berlin, not the clearest or the most exhilarating of performances, but a remarkable band. B+

Wes Montgomery: Incredible Jazz Guitar (1960 [2008], Riverside/Keepnews Collection): Not really -- despite his overwhelming influence on two-thirds of the jazz guitarists who followed in his wake, at best he was a subtle craftsman with natural swing on basic blues; nowhere is that more clear than on this elegant quartet with Tommy Flanagan's piano as delectable as the guitar. A-

Art Pepper: Unreleased Art, Vol. III: The Croydon Concert, May 14, 1981 (1981 [2008], Widow's Taste, 2CD): A hot set with a group -- Milcho Leviev on piano, Bob Magnuson on bass, Carl Burnett on drums -- Pepper toured often but recorded rarely with; he calls them his favorite group, and they repay the compliment -- there seems to be no end to wondrous tapes from his last years. A-

Sonny Rollins: Freedom Suite (1958 [2008], Riverside/Keepnews Collection): The 19:37 title cut seems a little subdued, tentative as if freedom is still uncertain; same for the side of standards, expanded with redundant bonus cuts, but they're just tapping into his sentimental side. B+

McCoy Tyner: Fly With the Wind (1976 [2008], Milestone/Keepnews Collection): A symphony of sorts, tempestuous but wildly scattered including some of those dull atmospheric spots, performed by a massive string orchestra plus harp, wind instruments limited to oboe and flutes, a rhythm section with Ron Carter and Billy Cobham frantically struggling to keep up with the pianist. B

James Zitro: Zitro (1967 [2008], ESP-Disk): Percussionist, worked with Sonny Simmons, got a free shot on the label that bragged "the artist alone decide" and turned out an energetic but unexceptional free jazz blast, a sextet with Alan Praskin and Bert Wilson on noisy saxes and Warren Gale riffing high on trumpet. B

Permanent link.

I feel like I paid my dues this week. Didn't get to everything I wanted to, but took a big chunk out of the incoming pile. There's still a bunch left, but I have more than I need to fill out a Jazz CG column. The new William Parker record gives me one pick hit. I could take either the Ron Brown or the Roy Campbell for a second Vision Festival (AUM Fidelity) pick hit and actually come up with a nice title for once: "Festival Visions." Or I could go with the Vandermark 5 and celebrate the two most fruitful players of the now-closing decade. The duds front is less clear, but I haven't been going out of my way to chase them down.

The main thing that keeps me from closing out this column is that I've been trying to get the book reports squared away. I posted a dozen in the last week, and will probably post another dozen this coming week. Takes a lot of time. While I do manage to skip back and forth, that's easier to do with these crude notes than with trying to write real Jazz CG capsules. So I figure I'm two weeks away from finishing. Should start getting into the replays this coming week, then nail down what I can the following. Unless something tragic happens.

The Amazing World of Arthur Brown: The Voice of Love (2007 [2008], Zoho Roots): One of the few causes celêbres I flat out missed in the 1960s -- AMG's "similar artists" list includes Jimi Hendrix, HP Lovecraft, Syd Barrett, and Carl Palmer; I had sort of been under the impression he was the English Dr. John, but maybe I'm confusing him with Jethro Dull. Anyway, he's hardly Amazing any more -- sort of a blues rocker with a little folkie twang in the guitar. One hoedown song had enough mustard on it I thought I might not be able to dismiss him out of hand. But then the next song came on. B

The Malchicks: To Kill a Mockingbird (2007 [2008], Zoho Roots): English blues-rock group, duo actually, with vocalist Scarlett Wrench and George Perez on guitars, banjo, bass, with some extra studio help -- drums, anyway, plus Phil May (Pretty Things) and Arthur Brown add some backup vocals. Songs are as stout as "Boom Boom," "House of the Rising Sun," "I Got My Mojo Working," "Baby, Please Don't Go." The female voice provides a slight twist on a genre firmly rooted in Eric Bourdon's testes. Finishes with a Leonard Cohen song, proving that history ambled on past the 1960s. B+(**)

The Pretty Things: Balboa Island (2007, Zoho Roots): British invasion reject from the 1960s, had a reputation as too hard, too low down, too dirty for Hullabaloo and Shindig, which was probably true but less than a crowning achievement. Went prog around 1970 with a Who-ish rock opera, no more successfully than their first phase. Staged another unsuccessful comeback in the late 1970s, aided by pub rock, punk rock, and Led Zeppelin, none of which helped. They're still around, still sounding pretty much like they always did, which with 40 years of perspective now looks a lot like the Aynsley Dunbar Retalliation, the real roots band for these inveterate punters. On the other hand, this is about as strong and a good deal more solid than any album they've turned in. They've never been much good at timing. B+(*)

Bobby Broom: The Way I Play: Live in Chicago (2007 [2008], Origin): Chicago guitarist, b. 1961, sixth album since 1995 (the first of two on Criss Cross), plus more records with Deep Blue Organ Trio. Trio, with Dennis Carroll on bass, Kobie Watkins on drums. Front cover photo is tightly cropped around guitar, and that sums up the album. Plays within Wes Montgomery's framework, but more tightly wound. Set is a mix of standards and bop tunes, most of the former well known from the latter, but none played to type. He meant this as a showcase, and that's what he got. B+(*)

Bridge Quartet: Day (2007 [2008], Origin): First album by group: Alan Jones (drums), Tom Wakeling (bass), Darrell Grant (piano), Phil Dwyer (tenor sax). Jones (from Portland, OR), seems to be the leader, but the group is built to showcase Dwyer (from British Columbia) -- "Bridge" is a Sonny Rollins reference, and Dwyer's likely to be happy with all the Rollins comparisons he can gather. Grant is by far the better known player; he has a relatively small role here, expertly done. Mainstream, but brash, loud, wide open, a mother lode of tenor sax. B+(**)

Doug Miller: Regeneration (2005-06 [2008], Origin): Bassist, originally from Bloomington, IN; studied under John Clayton, a connection to Ray Brown; moved to Indianapolis, then to New York, then to Seattle in 1987. First album under his own name, although he co-founded a big band called Big Neighborhood which has a couple of records, and has 25-30 side-credits since 1990. Miller wrote all of these pieces, which seems to be the point here. I find it hard to judge new mainstream jazz compositions -- they're so tightly bound within convention they hardly ever sound new. The odd thing here is how they vary the lead instrument -- sometimes trumpet or flugelhorn, tenor or soprano sax, or even flute, all wielded by the same Jay Thomas. Dave Peterson also does double duty on guitar and keyboard, with Phil Parisot's drums limited to four cuts. I suppose that's one way to make the bass the focal center, but it's still not clear enough for me. Still, some interesting stuff here. B

Hiromi's Sonicbloom: Beyond Standard (2008, Telarc): Japanese pianist, full name Hiromi Uehara, b. 1979, came to Berklee 1999, has five US albums since 2003, all on Telarc, where she's angling for a big audience with some fancy fusion footwork. It's been hit and miss so far, but she gets some mileage out of these standards, most impressively an uproarious take on "Caravan." The band includes Dave Fiuczynski on guitar, Tony Grey on bass, Martin Valihora on drums. Some things lost me along the way, but at best the guitar can be spectacular. Ends with the fastest "I Got Rhythm" I've ever heard. [B+(**)]

Tony Grey: Chasing Shadows (2008, Abstract Logix): English bassist, also plays keyboards, b. 1975 Newcastle, graduated from Berklee in 2001, something of a protégé of John McLaughlin, plays with Hiromi's Sonicbloom. Fusion album, long groove pieces variously decorated -- Dan Brantigan trumpet, Elliot Mason bass trumpet/trombone, Bob Reynolds soprano/tenor sax, Gregoire Maret harmonica, Lionel Loueke guitar -- none setting a dominant tone, although Maret is the most distinctive. Hiromi plays pianon on one cut, but most of the keyboard work goes to Oli Rockberger. B+(*)

Saxophone Summit: Seraphic Light: Dedicated to Michael Brecker (2007 [2008], Telarc): The last such summit was so dominated by Michael Brecker that I filed it under his name, although the reason could just as well have been that I hated the record, had never cared for Brecker's records, and therefore figured they belonged together. The other pillars were Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman: the former an unimpeachable giant of the era, the latter a fine tenor saxophonist who spends most of his time these days annoying people with his soprano sax. But Brecker's gone now, so I filed this one under Liebman, figuring he'd be the squeak wheel. In any case, the dedication to Brecker here is pro forma. His shoes were easily filled by Ravi Coltrane, especially given that the songbook focuses on his old man. Booklet has no credits beyond the horns, but a group photo hints that the piano is Phil Markowitz, bass Cecil McBee, and drums Billy Hart. Randy Brecker adds his trumpet to the finale. Not much to say about this exercise. It never gets embarrassing like its predecessor, even when the flutes arrive (Coltrane is a saving grace here, with one soprano cut, the rest on tenor). While mostly competent, there are occasional strong moments, including a strong finish on three John Coltrane space elegies, which even Liebman takes on tenor. B

Andy Middleton: The European Quartet Live (2005 [2007], Q-rious Music): OK, this is weird: next up after Saxophone Summit, I pick a CD almost at random -- well, I discarded two singers first -- and get a saxophonist whose website starts off with praise from Joe Lovano, Michael Brecker, and David Liebman (also John Abercrombie). Biography is patchy. Plays tenor sax, maybe a little soprano. Based in New York City, maybe also in Austria (although the record label is in Germany). Has an American Quartet as well as this European Quartet, but the latter includes drummer Alan Jones, who hails from Portland. Has two previous albums on Intuition (2000-02), one earlier one from 1995; played in a group called the Fensters back in 1991. Figure him for postbop: he's not very far out of the mainstream, but he has an arresting sound and some fancy moves. Pianist Tino Derado helps out. Will give it another shot. [B+(***)]

Art Pepper: Unreleased Art, Vol. III: The Croydon Concert, May 14, 1981 (1981 [2008], Widow's Taste, 2CD): A hot set with a group -- Milcho Leviev on piano, Bob Magnuson on bass, Carl Burnett on drums -- Pepper toured often but recorded rarely with. He calls them his favorite group, and they repay the compliment -- there seems to be no end to wondrous tapes from his last years. A-

Sheila Cooper: Tales of Love and Longing (2006 [2007], Panorama): Singer/alto saxophonist, originally from Canada, now based in New York, working in a cozy little duo with Austrian pianist Fritz Pauer. Third album. My "pre-release copy" only identifies Panorama as the label, but it looks like this has been picked up and reissued (or will be -- don't have date) by Candid. Songs, including one original, tend to be slow and torchy, her voice capable and assured but not all that remarkable. I do, however, love the sound of her saxophone in these tight settings. B+(*)

Michael Dessen Trio: Between Shadow and Space (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): Nice new packaging for this batch of Clean Feed releases: a thin cardboard fold-out sleeve with a clear plastic liner for the disc. Dessen plays trombone and computer. Studied at Eastman School of Music, University of Massachusetts, UC San Diego; teaches at UC, Irvine. Has several academic papers, including two on Yusef Lateef. Second album, not counting four with group Cosmologic. Trio includes Christopher Tordini on bass, Tyshawn Sorey on percussion. Free trombone over a dense and intriguing brew of bass, percussion, and whatever. B+(**)

Fight the Big Bull: Dying Will Be Easy (2006 [2008], Clean Feed): Richmond, VA big band (well, nonet), led by guitarist Matt White, who writes the songs but tends to get drowned out by the six horns, especially the dual trombones. Rough and tumble, not quite free, but loud and noisy. On a lark, I checked out a couple of YouTube videos, which are badly shot and even more roughly played, although the recognizable line to "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is amusing. Album with Ken Vandermark is reportedly in the works. B+(*)

Luis Lopes: Humanization 4Tet (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): Don't know much about Lopes -- a couple of google matches appear to be false positives. This one plays guitar, is probably Portuguese, wrote all the pieces on his first album. The other players are slightly more well known: Aaron Gonzalez (double bass) and Stefan Gonzalez (drums) are sons of trumpeter Dennis Gonzalez. Rodrigo Amado is a Portuguese tenor saxophonist who's put together a number of solid albums, both under his own name and with Lisbon Improvisation Players (which has been known to include Gonzalez père). Amado's full-voiced honking dominates here, but a section where the guitar leads takes on much the same melodic shape, so I figure the guitarist is always pushing this music along even when he's not conspicuous. Another clue is that this is probably Amado's strongest outing yet, mostly because he rarely gets a chance to let up. B+(***)

Kirk Knuffke Quartet: Bigwig (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): Trumpet player, originally from Denver, now in New York. First album, with Brian Drye doubling the brass on trombone, Reuben Radding on bass, Jeff Davis on drums. Fairly free. I like the brass dynamics. B+(*)

Carlos "Zingaro"/Dominique Regef/Wilbert DeJoode String Trio: Spectrum (2004 [2008], Clean Feed): A bit from the liner notes (Rui Eduardo Paes): "Violins were forbidden in the 'Machine Gun' years, when 'classical instruments' were seen as symbols of a closed, authoritarian, and hierarchic music system. Even today, there's suspicion. European musicians in the new 'free' music came out of both the classical and jazz traditions but, influenced by the turbulent political climate, rejected their origins." Maybe that's an avant-garde thing, although my impression has long been that the line between avant-jazz and avant-classical has never been clearly drawn in Europe -- e.g., the relationship between Cornelius Cardew and AMM. While there are plenty of bad examples of small and large string groups backing jazz musicians, violin soloists in jazz are more likely to draw on folk fiddle or on the raw noisiness of the instrument -- the Velvet Underground's viola was as ear-opening as anything specifically within a jazz context. I suppose the reason this comes up with Zingaro is that he does have the Euroclassical background and tends to get slotted in avant-classical as much as jazz. Still, this is in no sense a polite piece of chamber music. DeJoode plays bass, but Regef fills the middle ranges with hurdy gurdy, providing buzzes and drones that suggest electronics. Three long pieces, complexly varied textures, with an uncomfortable bite to the sound that never really gets monotonous. Most sources skip the quotes around Zingaro, which may be a nickname or stage name -- Carlos Alves seems to be the given name, although sometimes this just appears as Carlos Zingaro Alves (with or without quotes). He has at least 16 albums since 1989; haven't heard any others, but I've run across him in side roles. This gained enough traction the second play I'm holding it back for a third. [B+(***)]

Elliott Sharp/Scott Fields: Sharfefelder (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): From Fields' notes: "This is what happens when you kid around." Two avant guitarists, both with long discographies, including some together. Chemistry can do amazing things. It can also leave you with nothing but an incoherent mess. More of the latter here. B-

Sten Sandell/Mattias Ståhl: Grann Musik (Neighbour Music) (2007 [2008], Clean Feed): Sandell plays piano, sometimes prepared. He tends to be abstract, sometimes turning out long, dramatic lines that strike me as grandstanding. Ståhl plays vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel -- instruments that produce tones that fit neatly within the crevices of the piano. They almost fit as one, which is an accomplishemt but not necessarily a plus. B

Todd Sickafoose: Tiny Resistors (2007 [2008], Cryptogramophone): Bassist, probably more electric than acoustic but plays both; originally from San Francisco, now based in New York. Third album. Has a substantial number of side credits since 1998, including Jenny Scheinman, Tin Hat, Ani DiFranco. I figure this as a fusion album, one of those big, sweeping prog things, loud, powerful, always listenable, sometimes interesting. Alan Ferber's trombone stands out among the horns. DiFranco plays some electric ukelele. B+(*)

The Jeff Gauthier Goatette: House of Return (2008, Cryptogramophone): Violinist, b. 1954, based in Los Angeles, had a couple of records on 9 Winds before he founded Cryptogramophone in 2000. This is his third record since. Quintet, with Nels Cline on guitar, David Witham on piano, Joel Hamilton on bass, Alex Cline on drums. Sort of avant-fusion, basically prog rock tweaked into funny shapes -- similar to the Todd Sickafoose record (trading the horns for violin), or various records by the Cline brothers. B+(*)

Freddie Hubbard & the New Jazz Composers Octet: On the Real Side (2007 [2008], 4Q/Times Square): Hubbard's early 1960s, both as a leader and especially as a sideman, made up one of the great individual stretches in jazz history -- hard bop, postbop, avant-garde, he could and did do it all. But after about 1965 he started to thin out, with a couple of superb fusion albums in 1970 (Red Clay, Straight Life), even less after 1980, a rare comeback in 1991 (Bolivia), then he literally blew his lip out in 1992 and that was that. This is his first album since then, produced and carefully shepherded by David Weiss. Not clear how much Hubbard plays. He's credited with flugelhorn, with Weiss on trumpet and a lot of firepower in the group -- three saxes plus guest Craig Handy on three cuts, Steve Davis on trombone, guest Russell Malone on one cut, piano, bass, and drums. Compositions are all by Hubbard. Haven't checked to see if any are new, but they all have arranger credits -- mostly Weiss, Davis on one, bassist Dwayne Burno on two. Weiss is a crack arranger, and if you're into that sort of thing, these pieces are crisp and snappy. I find that it leaves me wondering about the leader. B

Roswell Rudd Quartet: Keep Your Heart Right (2007 [2008], Sunnyside): This reproduces the lineup and two songs from one of my all-time favorite albums, Rudd's Flexible Flyer (1974). That album included Hod O'Brien on piano, Arild Andersen on bass, and Sheila Jordan singing -- Rudd seems to have an aversion to drummers, even when he's playing African music. This time it's Lafayette Harris on piano, Bradley Jones on bass, and Sunny Kim singing -- not a fair comparison, especially pitching any singer up against the incomparable Jordan. More songs this time -- close to all the songs Rudd ever wrote lyrics to. Terrific trombone -- making me wish that was more the focus. Even here, the two repeats stand out. Maybe the others will kick in. [B+(**)]

Scott DuBois: Banshees (2007 [2008], Sunnyside): Guitarist, b. 1978, based in New York. Recorded two previous albums with Dave Liebman on Soul Note. This group consists of Kresten Osgood on drums, Thomas Morgan on bass, and Gebhard Ullman on tenor/soprano sax and bass clarinet. One thing I've noticed lately is that some saxophonists seem to get much sharper with a guitar guding them along. I've heard half-dozen or so albums by Ullman, respect his ambitions as a free player, but until now I've never really seen him hold it all together before. The Luis Lopes is another like this, but DuBois is much more out front -- his solos tend to be short but they strongly reinforce the pieces. Played this half-dozen times and it keeps gaining on me. A-

Guillermo Klein/Los Gauchos: Filtros (2007 [2008], Sunnyside): Pianist, b. 1970 in Argentina, attended Berklee 1990-94, moved on to New York. Los Gauchos is his big band, a mix of Latin players and other New York talents, including some players with substantial discographies of their own: Miguel Zenon, Chris Cheek, Bill McHenry, Ben Monder. Over a half-dozen albums, he's developed into an expansive and inventive arranger -- I'm tempted to compare him to Maria Schneider, but not being a big fan of either that may be too tongue-in-cheek. Still, the Monkish "Vaca" here is pretty irresistible, a good track to check out. Wish he wouldn't sing. B+(**)

Kris Davis: Rye Eclipse (2007 [2008], Fresh Sound New Talent): Canadian pianist, based in New York since 2002, has three albums now with this superb quartet, each showing advance. Group includes Jeff Davis (drums; from Colorado, presumably not related), Eivind Opsvik (bass), and Tony Malaby (tenor sax). The early albums immediately appealed for Malaby's distinctive edge. The pianist is developing a similarly rugged approach -- not just offsetting block chords, but in a piece like "Wayne Oskar" she leads off with intriguing abstractions then backs off as Malaby slips in to finish off her thoughts. A-

Jon Irabagon's Outright! (2007 [2008], Innova): Alto saxophonist, has done some good work lately, appearing on a pick hit (Mostly Other People Do the Killing) and another featured disc (Jostein Gulbrandsen) from the latest Jazz Consumer Guide. This one goes for overkill, starting with cover pics of masses of arm-waving fans -- I could see him moving the people but drawing them is another matter. A lot of talent here: three-fourths of Kris Davis' quartet -- Davis on piano/organ, Eivind Opsvik on acoustic bass, Jeff Davis on drums -- plus Russ Johnson on trumpet and Irabagon. Two cuts expand the group up toward big band mass. I don't much care for the horn duet at the beginning, but there are interesting bits throughout, including a MOPDTK-style assault on "Groovin' High." B+(*)

William Parker: Double Sunrise Over Neptune (2007 [2008], AUM Fidelilty): Recorded live at Vision Festival XII, three long pieces built around repeated bass riffs that the conductor farmed out to Shayna Dulberger, and a short bridge. With sixteen musicians, favoring strings (two violins, viola, cello, bass, guitar or banjo, oud, the leader's doson'ngoni) which elaborate the themes over horns (trumpet, three saxes, whatever "double reeds" Bill Cole plays), with vocalist Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay trading off against the latter. Oh, also two drummers, Gerald Cleaver and Hamid Drake. Whereas Parker's large groups in the past, like his Little Huey Orchestra, tended to go unhinged, this all flows together marvelously. Even a bit of wildness near the end of the second piece, which seems inevitable once you unleash saxophonists Rob Brown and Sabir Mateen, holds tight. The singer runs close to the edge of the high-pitched squeak that east (or southeast) Asian opera is prone to, but never slips over. A remarkable piece of work. A

David Murray/Mal Waldron: Silence (2001 [2008], Justin Time): Duo, recorded in October 2001, a little more than a year before Waldron passed on Dec. 2, 2002. Three Waldron songs, the title cut from Murray, three more (Sammy Cahn, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington). Not sure how to rate Waldron's performance here; Murray runs rings around him, but that's just Murray -- expansive, bracing, sometimes gorgeous (especially on bass clarinet). Both artists have excelled in duos before: Waldron with Marion Brown; Murray on several occasions, my favorite being the ballad set Tea for Two with George Arvanitas on Fresh Sound -- more of an Oscar Peterson-type player. This is much more dry. [B+(***)]

Gerald Cleaver: Gerald Cleaver's Detroit (2006 [2008], Fresh Sound New Talent): Drummer, from Detroit, based in Brooklyn (where this, despite its title, was recorded). Second album, plus 50-60 side credits. I mostly associate him with the avant-garde, since I've often run into him on records by Matthew Shipp, Roscoe Mitchell, Charles Gayle, Joe Morris, Mat Maneri, and Rob Brown. But he also shows up on more conventional postbop fare, including records by his group here: Jeremy Pelt (trumpet), JD Allen (tenor sax), Andrew Bishop (soprano/tenor sax, bass clarinet), Ben Waltzer (piano), Chris Lightcap (bass). (Actually, I don't see Pelt in his credits list.) Some flashy hornwork here, strong moments, although it's a little de trop for my taste. (Too bad he couldn't get his mentor, Detroit's patron saint Marcus Belgrave, instead of Pelt.) B+(*)

Pete Robbins: Do the Hate Laugh Shimmy (2007 [2008], Fresh Sound New Talent): Alto saxophonist. Website describes what he does as "brooklyn prog-modern (post)jazz." B. 1978, moved to New York 2002. MySpace page lists Tim Berne and Lee Konitz at top of list of influences. Two previous albums, the one I'm familiar with on Playscape (Waits & Measures) comes closer to bearing that out. This one doesn't. The keyboards and guitar are soft and moody, and the horns (including Jesse Neuman on trumpet and Sam Sadigursky on tenor sax, clarinet, and bass clarinet) rarely rise above that. Must be that "prog-modern (post)jazz" thing he's looking for. B

Ramón Díaz: Unblocking (2007 [2008], Fresh Sound New Talent): Drummer, originally from the Canary Islands, based in Barcelona, runs a hard bop quintet that last time out (Diàleg) I compared favorably to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Same group, a little more varied, with one "trad." piece, a slow bit, and some Fender Rhodes separating this from the 1960s. Blakey would have loved to have worked with the front line here -- saxophonist Jeppe Rasmussen, trumpeter Idafe Pérez -- and also with pianist José Alberto Medina (who has good records on his own). But he would think that the drummer should be a bit louder. B+(***)

The Alon Farber Hagiga Sextet: Optimistic View (2006 [2008], Fresh Sound New Talent): Israeli band, led by soprano saxophonist Farber; hagiga means celebration. Has a previous FSNT album by the Hagiga Quintet: nice record, as is this one. Loose rhythm with middle eastern (and possibly Latin) touches, a second horn in Hagai Amir's alto sax; piano and guitar aiding the flow. B+(**)

Norma Winstone: Distances (2007 [2008], ECM): English vocalist, b. 1941, cut a well-regarded record in 1971 (Edge of Time), but more often worked with others: Michael Garrick; Mike Westbrook; John Taylor and Kenny Wheeler in the group Azimuth. AMG counts nine records under her name. This one, like her 2002 Chamber Music (Universal) puts her in front of Glauco Venier (piano) and Klaus Gesing (soprano sax, bass clarinet). Hard to characterize her as a singer: she has a calm, stately voice, seemingly unaffected by the vogue of jazz singers emulating horn players. Gesing is consistently a plus here, especially when he lifts up one of the many slow pieces. Cole Porter's "Every Time We Say Goodbye" is a choice cut, but maybe that's just because it's easiest to relate to. B+(**)

Gary Morgan & PanAmericana!: Felicidade (Happiness) (2007 [2008], CAP): Twenty-piece big band, plays Brazilian music, with pieces by Jobim, Pascoal, Jovino Santos Neto, and others, including five by Morgan. Morgan was born in Chile, moved to Canada very young, played saxophone, later switched to bass. Studied at Berklee in 1980, but he seems already to have immersed himself in Brazilian music. Moved on to New York, where PanAmericana is based, although he also leads another orchestra based in Toronto. He's not in the personnel list here. For that matter, few (if any) of the musicians here are Brazilian. I don't have much feel for bands like this: when they're cruising they make for pleasant but uninteresting background music, when they slow down they get clumsy. Second album for the group. B-

The Joe Ascione Quartet: Movin' Up (2007 [2008], Arbors): Drummer, b. 1961, third album as leader (first was a tribute to Buddy Rich), plus 60 or more side credits, including membership in Frank Vignola projects Travelin' Light and the Frank and Joe Show (he's Joe). Quartet includes Frank Tate on bass, John Cocuzzi on piano and vibes, and Allan Vaché on clarinet, an interesting and somewhat whimsical lineup, especially when the vibes are in play. Mostly tunes from Gershwin and Porter, with some oddities thrown in -- "The Aba Daba Honeymoon," "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah's Got Rhythm." "Norwegian Wood" usually makes me gag, but he almost gets away with it. B+(*)

Larry Ham: Just Me, Just You (2007 [2008], Arbors): Subtitle: Arbors Piano Series, Volume 17. Pianist, b. 1954, played with Lionel Hampton (1986-87) and Illinois Jacquet (1990-95); more recently appeared on several Scott Robinson records. Second album, after debuting in 2007. This one's solo. Mostlys tandards, a couple of originals, a calypso, one from Bud Powell. No complaints -- just doesn't quite break the ice. B

Chris Flory: For You (2007 [2008], Arbors): Guitarist, b. 1953, played with Benny Goodman 1978-83, with Scott Hamilton from 1978 to at least 1989. Has half-dozen albums since 1993, one of many players who started on Concord and wound up on Arbors. Quintet with Dan Block (tenor sax), Jon-Erik Kellso (trumpet), Mike LeDonne (organ), and Chuck Riggs (drums). Like many swing-oriented guitarists, he tends to drop into rhythm when someone else is playing, which is kind of a waste behind the predictable LeDonne. The album fares best when Flory gets a clean lead. The horns aren't very pushy either, but are usually a plus. B+(**)

No final grades/notes this week on records put back for further listening the first time around.

For this cycle's collected Jazz Prospecting notes, look here.

Stephen Holmes: The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror (2007, Cambridge University Press)

Chalmers Johnson wrote a review of Holmes' book for TomDispatch. Holmes provides a guide to 12 books that provide a prism into how the US reacted to the 9/11 attacks. The following is a list of books Holmes covers. The descriptions are edited down from Johnson's review (moving sentences around, cutting surplus, fixing punctuation; the quotes in these paragraphs are from Holmes' book):

• Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003, Knopf): Why did American military preeminence breed delusions of omnipotence? While not persuaded by Kagan's portrayal of the United States as "Mars" and Europe as "Venus," Holmes takes Kagan's book as illustrative of neoconservative thought on the use of force in international politics. "Far from guaranteeing an unbiased and clear-eyed view of the terrorist threat, as Kagan contends, American military superiority has irredeemably skewed the country's view of the enemy on the horizon, drawing the United States, with appalling consequences, into a gratuitous, cruel, and unwinnable conflict in the Middle East" (p. 72).

• Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (2006, Pantheon): How was the war lost? Holmes regards this book as the best treatment of the military aspects of the disaster, down to and including U.S. envoy L. Paul Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi military.

• James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004, Viking): How did a tiny group of individuals, with eccentric theories and reflexes, recklessly compound the country's post-9/11 security nightmares? One of Mann's more original insights is that the neocons in the Bush administration were so bewitched by Cold War thinking that they were simply incapable of grasping the new realities of the post-Cold War world. "In Iraq, alas, the lack of a major military rival excited some aging hard-liners into toppling a regime that they did not have the slightest clue how to replace.  . . . We have only begun to witness the long-term consequences of their ghastly misuse of unaccountable power" (p. 106).

• Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (2003, Verso): What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld play in the Bush administration? He argues that perhaps Mann's most important contribution, even if somewhat mechanically put, is to stress the element of bureaucratic politics in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's manipulation of the neophyte Bush: "The outcome of inter- and intra-agency battles in Washington, D.C., allotted disproportionate influence to the fatally blurred understanding of the terrorist threat shared by a few highly placed and shrewd bureaucratic infighters. Rumsfeld and Cheney controlled the military; and when they were given the opportunity to rank the country's priorities in the war on terror, they assigned paramount importance to those specific threats that could be countered effectively only by the government agency over which they happened to preside" (p. 107)."

• Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996, Simon and Schuster): Why did the U.S. decide to search for a new enemy after the Cold War? Holmes regards Huntington's work as a "false template" and calls it misleading. Well before 9/11, many critics of Huntington's concept of "civilization" had pointed out that there is insufficient homogeneity in Christianity, Islam, or the other great religions for any of them to replace the position vacated by the Soviet Union. As Holmes remarks, Huntington "finds homogeneity because he is looking for homogeneity" (p. 136). [Johnson wonders why include this relatively old book. I suspect it because the neocon obsession with the Middle East dates back further, with Huntington and Bernard Lewis providing intellectual cover for the notion that Arabs are insurmountably alien.]

• Samantha Power, "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002, Basic): What role did left-wing ideology play in legitimating the war on terror? As Holmes acknowledges, "The humanitarian interventionists rose to a superficial prominence in the 1990s largely because of a vacuum in U.S. foreign policy thinking after the end of the Cold War. . . . Their influence was small, however, and after 9/11, that influence vanished altogether." He nonetheless takes up the anti-genocide activists because he suspects that, by making a rhetorically powerful case for casting aside existing decision-making rules and protocols, they may have emboldened the Bush administration to follow suit and fight the "evil" of terrorism outside the Constitution and the law. The idea that Power was an influence on Cheney and Rumsfeld may seem a stretch -- they were, after all, doing what they had always wanted to do -- but Holmes' argument that "a savvy prowar party may successfully employ humanitarian talk both to gull the wider public and to silence potential critics on the liberal side" (p. 157) is worth considering.

• Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists (2005, Soft Skull Press): How did pro-war liberals help stifle national debate on the wisdom of the Iraq war? Wildly overstating his influence, Holmes writes, Berman, a regular columnist for The New Republic, "first tried to convince us that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a tribal war over scarce land and water, is part of a wider spiritual war between liberalism and apocalyptic irrationalism, not worth distinguishing too sharply from the conflict between America and al Qaeda. He then attempted to show that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden represented two 'branches' of an essentially homogeneous extremism" (p. 181). Berman, Holmes points out, conflated anti-terrorism with anti-fascism in order to provide a foundation for the neologism "Islamo-fascism." His chief reason for including Berman is that Holmes wants to address the views of religious fundamentalists in their support of the war on terrorism.

• Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006, Yale University Press): How did democratization at the point of an assault rifle become America's mission in the world? Holmes is interested in Fukuyama, the neoconservatives' perennial sophomore, because he offers an insider's insights into the chimerical neocon "democratization" project for the Middle East. The problem, of course, is that not even the neocons are united on promoting democracy; and, even if they were, they do not know how to go about it. Fukuyama himself pleads for "a dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and a re-emphasis on other types of policy instruments." The Pentagon, in addition to its other deficiencies, is poorly positioned and incorrectly staffed to foster democratic transitions.

• Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (2004, WW Norton): Holmes has nothing but praise for Stone's history of expanded executive discretion in wartime. A key question raised by Stone is why the American public has not been more concerned with what happened in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison and in the wholesale destruction of the Sunni city of Fallujah. As Holmes sees it, the Bush administration, at least in this one area, was adept at subverting public protest. Among the more important lessons George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.

• John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (2001, Princeton University Press): How did the embracing of American unilateralism elevate the Office of the Secretary of Defense over the Department of State? This book is Holmes' oddest choice -- a dated history from an establishmentarian point of view of the international institutions created by the United States after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO, all of which Ikenberry, a prominent academic specialists in international relations, applauds. Holmes agrees that, during the Cold War, the United States ruled largely through indirection, using seemingly impartial international institutions, and eliciting the cooperation of other nations. He laments the failure to follow this proven formula in the post-9/11 era, which led to the eclipse of the State Department by the Defense Department, an institution hopelessly ill-suited for diplomatic and nation-building missions.

• John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (2005, University of Chicago Press): Why do we battle lawlessness with lawlessness (for example, by torturing prisoners) and concentrate extra-Constitutional authority in the hands of the president? In this final section, Holmes puts on his hat as the law professor he is and takes on George Bush's and Alberto Gonzales' in-house legal counsel, the University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who authored the "torture memos" for them, denied the legality of the Geneva Conventions, and elaborated a grandiose view of the President's war-making power. Holmes wonders, "Why would an aspiring legal scholar labor for years to develop and defend a historical thesis that is manifestly untrue? What is the point and what is the payoff? That is the principal mystery of Yoo's singular book. Characteristic of The Powers of War and Peace is the anemic relations between the evidence adduced and the inferences drawn" (p. 291). His conclusion on Yoo and his fellow neocons: "[I]f the misbegotten Iraq war proves anything, it is the foolhardiness of allowing an autistic clique that reads its own newspapers and watches its own cable news channel to decide, without outsider input, where to expend American blood and treasure -- that is, to decide which looming threats to stress and which to downplay and ignore" (p. 301).

Fred Kaplan: Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (2008, Wiley)

(pp. 1-2):

Nearly all of America's blunders in war and peace these past few years stem from a single grand misconception: that the world changed after September 11, when in fact it didn't.

Certainly things about the world changed, not least Americans' sudden awareness that they were vulnerable. But the way the world works -- the nature of power, warfare, and politics among nations -- remained essentially the same.

A real change, a seismic shift in global politics, had taken place a decade earlier, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Yet America's political leaders at the start of the twenty-first century misunderstood this shift -- and in a way that their misreading of 9/11 would exacerbate.

George W. Bush and his top aides in the White House and the Pentagon came to office believing that the United States had emerged from its Cold War victory as the world's "sole superpower" and that they could therefore do pretty much as they pleased: issue orders and expect obeisance, topple rogue regimes at will, honor alliances and treaties when they were useful, and disregard them when they weren't.

But in fact, the end of the Cold War made America weaker, less capable of exerting its will on others. And its leaders' failure to recognize this, their inclination to devise policies based on the premise of omnipotence, made America weaker still.

The Mirage of Instant Victory (pp. 7-8):

Near the start of his [2000] presidential campaign, Bush had given a speech at The Citadel -- the historic military college in Charleston, South Carolina -- spelling out his top priorities for a new defense policy. He would deploy antiballastic missiles "at the earliest possible date," even if doing so meant withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, the long-standing centerpiece of Russian-American arms control accords. And he would transform the United States military. A "revolution in the technology of war" was in the works, he declared. Battles of the future would be won not by an army's "mass or size," but by its "mobility and swiftness," and vital new roles would be played by information networks and by highly accurate missiles and bombs.

If taken seriously, this was a truly dramatic pronouncement. It would mean a new concept of nuclear deterrence, an overhaul of the Army, a new look for war and peace.

As president, Bush said, he would order his secretary of defense to conduct "an immediate, comprehensive review of our military -- the structure of its forces, the state of its strategy, the priorities of its procurement." The secretary would have "a broad mandate -- to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come." Now that he was president, he told Rumsfeld to carry out that comprehensive review.

(p. 40):

[Rumsfeld's] disdain toward the Army was reinforced by his frequent dealings with Tommy Franks, the general he had come to know best. Franks, by no means a strategist, was widely regarded as a dim bulb, even by fellow officers. Rumsfeld, by nature impatient with people who weren't smart, despised Franks and wanted to get rid of him after the Afghanistan war. But over the Christmas holidays, Bush invited Franks out to his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Franks was a tall, salty, plain-speaking, profane Texan -- he had gone to the same high school as Bush's wife, Laura -- and he and the president got along like gangbusters. Bush called Rumsfeld and said, "Tommy Franks is a hell of a guy!" Rumsfeld realized that Franks would have to stay.

(p. 49):

The invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003. In the battlefield phase, it went, to a remarkable degree, as planned. The second part of the war -- after Saddam fled and his regime crumbled -- went disastrously, in part because it had not been planned at all.

Rumsfeld was so enamored of transformation -- as a theory of war, as a tool for control, and as an explanation for what still seemed the triumph in Afghanistan -- that he forgot, if he ever fully understood, that winning wars means more than hitting targets or winning battles. Rumsfeld didn't plan for Phase IV -- securing and stabilizing the country after the capital had fallen -- because he didn't think it would be necessary. [ . . . ]

Rumsfeld was not alone in his failure to think about the post-battle phase. As Wass de Czege noted in his memo on the war games, senior military leaders weren't thinking about it, either. There were no U.S. Army field manuals still in print on the subject of how to end a war.

Chapter "The Fog of Moral Clarity" -- deals with North Korea (pp. 54-55):

The first President bush launched a policy of "comprehensive engagement" with North Korea -- an all-fronts diplomatic campaign to keep Kim Il Sung from completing the facility or, short of that, from reprocessing the fuel rods. The campaign had little effect until September 27, 1991, when Bush announced that he was unilaterally dismantling all U.S. tactical nuclear weapons worldwide. He made this announcement in the context of rapidly warming relations between the United States and the Soviet Union amid the winding-down of the Cold War. But the move would also eliminate the hundreds of tactical nukes -- most of them on short-range missiles -- that America had deployed in South Korea decades ago to deter a North Korean invasion.

This tangible gesture unleashed a torrent of diplomatic activity. At the end of the year, after American officials confirmed that they had removed all nuclear weapons from the region, the leaders of North and South Korea -- who had never signed a peace treaty to end the war of 1950-1953 -- negotiated a mutual nonaggression pact. And North Korea, which had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty back in 1985, signed the NPT's "safeguards" agreement, allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency to station inspectors and cameras inside its reactors and to place the nuclear fuel rods under lock and key.

By the time Clinton was elected president, relations were breaking down. North Korea refused to let the IAEA's inspectors inside a building that stored nuclear waste. The South Korean government arrested a ring of North Korean spies. The annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises, known as "Team Spirit," which Bush had suspended at the start of 1992, were scheduled to resume.

In March 1993, just over a month after Clinton took office, a Pyongyang spokesman denounced Team Spirit as a "nuclear war game preliminary to the invasion of North Korea." Kim Il Sung put the country on alert, ordering a dusk-to-dawn blackout and holding a massive rally -- over one hundred thousand attended -- in the capital.

This goes on for several more pages with details of ups and downs in suspicions, threats and negotiations; Kim Jong Il replaces Kim Il Sung; George W. Bush replaces Clinton; Kim Dae Jong is elected head of South Korea, favoring a more conciliatory policy toward the North (p. 61):

When Kim Dae Jong arrived in Washington, Bush publicly criticized him and his sunshine policy. Bush and his advisers, especially Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, decided not only to isolate North Korea, in the hopes -- in their minds, the near-certainty -- that the regime would crumble, but also to ignore South Korea, in hopes that its next election would restore a conservative to office.

Bush turned out to be the naïf. Kim Jong Il survived U.S. pressure. And Kim Dae Jung was soon replaced by Roh Moo Hyun, a populist who ran on a campaign that was not only pro-sunshine but anti-American.

(p. 70):

As the talks got under way, Jack Pritchard -- one of the few administration officials who had ever talked with North Korean diplomats -- resigned in protest. His job title was envoy for North Korean negotiations, yet he was prohibited from conducting negotiations. He asked himself, "What am I doing in government?" Pritchard had heard, from reliable quarters, that White House and Pentagon higher-ups referred to him as "the Clinton guy" and didn't want him involved in the six-party talks, lest he take them too seriously. Powell asked him not to quit, or at least not to do so publicly. Pritchard respectfully declined on both counts. He helped set up the six-party talks, left when they started, and went to work at the Brookings Institution. He explained his reasons for quitting to anyone who asked.

(p. 74):

The Bush administration's whole approach to North Korea hinged on a premise that turned out to be untrue -- that the United States had the power to set the terms of a new world order and, therefore, didn't need to compromise with competing concepts or interests.

The failure of American policy toward North Korea stemmed from a failure to grasp the implications of this new balance of power in Asia. It also stemmed from a failure to understand -- a willful refusal even to try to understand -- Kim Jong Il's motives in this standoff, the patterns of behavior he displayed, and the strategic options for dealing with them. Kim's eccentricities had little to do with it. Had he been the sanest leader on the planet, he would have had a rational motive to develop a nuclear arsenal. His diplomats had studied the two Gulf Wars carefully, and concluded that Saddam Hussein's big mistake lay in not having nuclear weapons to deter U.S. intervention. They made precisely this point in an official statement released back in April 2003, just after American tanks rolled into Baghdad: "The Iraq war teaches us a lesson that, in order to prevent a war, and defend a country's security and a nation's sovereignty, it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent."

Chapter "Chasing Silver Bullets" -- on missile defense (p. 79):

The debate over missile defenses dated not to Reagan's Star Wars or even to the 1972 ABM Treaty but much further back, to the mid-to-late 1950s, when weapons scientists inside the government, carrying high-level security clearances, first discovered the technical obstacles. Roughly every ten years sine, the debate has repeated itself, with the same arguments, often among the same people. And each repetition has followed the same pattern, with the president and his aides at first enthusiastic about some technological advance that makes shooting down missiles seem suddenly feasible -- then realizing that the same old technical obstacles remain.

If Bush and his aides had known this history -- if they had known that the main critique of missile defenses was not political or philosophical but rather technical -- they might have stepped more gingerly before tripling the missile-defense budget yet again, withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, and rushing a brand-new missile-defense system into production and deployment without having any idea whether it could really defend against an attack. But they didn't know the history; they thought that history was irrelevant anyway; and so they plunged ahead.

(p. 85):

It has been a recurring pattern throughout the history of arms procurement: when one rationale for buying a weapon proves untenable, its most impassioned advocates shift to a different rationale. The advocates know that the weapon is vital to the national defense; they figure that opposition stems from some ulterior motive (political hostility or pacifism or a rivalry with the branch of the armed services that's funding the weapon). For many, it would be too drastic a cognitive shift to reassess the wisdom of a project; better to devise a new argument that justifies it. [ . . . ]

This pattern of shifting rationales has been particularly acute in the history of the ABM, because the desire for a nuclear defense is understandably strong -- and because the case for specific ABM systems has fallen apart so repeatedly.

This is followed by various examples from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including this setback (pp. 88-89):

But a bigger shock came in the spring. On April 9, 1970, Kissinger's assistant on strategic issues, Laurence Lynn, met in DuBridge's White House office with two senior executives from Bell Telephone Laboratories, Safeguard's prime contractor. The executives had called the meeting to announce that they wanted out of the ABM business. They recited all the ways that Safeguard could be overwhelmed by the offense, and concluded -- as Lynn put it afterwards in a secret/eyes-only memo to Kissinger -- that Bell no longer wnted "to be associated with a program which cannot technically perform the missions the government claims it will perform."

Nixon and Kissinger were shocked. Nixon wrote in the margins of the memo, "My guess is that the real reasons are their scientists" -- who might have been influenced by all the Nobel laureates opposing the system -- "and P.R. fears." Whatever the motive, they knew this was a disaster. Once Congress found out that the prime contractor was giving up lucrative business on the grounds that Safeguard wouldn't work, the program was doomed.

Nixon finally negotiated the ABM treaty as a way to cover up the contractor's unwillingness to build the unworkable system. Reagan didn't understand that at all when he came up with his own Star Wars program.

(p. 106):

On September 11, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, was scheduled to give a speech on, as she put it, "the threats the problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday." The main topic was to be missile defense; her prepared text which was later leaked to the press, said nothing about terrorism. She never delivered the speech because that morning, terrorists flew two passenger jetliners into the World Trade Center and another one into the Pentagon.

The attack suggested that ballistic missiles might not be the most likely threat facing America; that even if missile defenses could be made to work, a foe could simply strike with other, far cheaper and easier weapons. But it only galvanized Bush and Rumsfeld to push full speed ahead.

(p. 112):

Spending on missile defense continued soaring, to $10 billion a year and beyond, an amount much larger than the budget for any other single weapons program. It remained a great boon for contractors. And Bush still believed in the idea. To cut back would be to admit that the idea was wrong, that the money spent so far -- over $100 billion since Ronald Reagan sparked its revival nearly twenty years earlier -- had been a waste. Maybe it would work one day. Some enemies might think it works now. Menawhile, there was still the hope that America's enemies might be vanquished, that the axis of evil would collapse, and that freedom would supplant tyranny across the planet.

As Bush began his second term, he adopted this hope as an article of faith and as the centerpiece of his foreign policy.

(pp. 126-129):

After September 11, the Bush White House was looking for new ideas to deal with this new threat, ideas that went beyond traditional Realism. The PNAC report seemed to fit the times,a nd the PNAC authors were well placed to argue its case.

On June 1, 2002, President Bush delivered the commencement address at West Point and laid out a new doctrine -- a "Bush doctrine" -- on national security. The doctrines of deterrence and containment, which served the nation well in the Cold War, were, he said, obsolete. "Deterrence -- the promise of massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend," the speech declared. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver their weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. . . . If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. . . . We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge." That is, we must take "preemptive action."

The argument in Rice's Foreign Affairs article -- that rogue regimes were living on "borrowed time" and that they can be dealt with through classic deterrence -- fell by the wayside.

At this point, though, Bush had not yet drawn the link between security and freedom, the link that would animate his second inaugural address. That connection clicked three weeks later, on June 20, when Dick Cheney flew to a resort in Beaver Creek, Colorado, to chair the World Forum, the annual conference of the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI was Washington's leading neocon think tank. It has served as a Republican cabinet-in-exile while Clinton was president, and it was riding high now that many of its denizens from those years were back in power.

At that conference, Cheney heard a galvanizing speech by Natan Sharansky. [ . . . ]

Many of those at the AEI World Forum knew that President Bush was about to decide on an administration policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perle, who at the time was chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Advisory Board, had persuaded Sharansky to deliver the forum's keynote address, in hopes that he might have an impact.

Nine months had passed since the September 11 attacks, but they still shaped the way Americans thought about everything related to foreign policy. Sharansky knew this -- he felt the same way -- and he placed the topic of his speech in that context.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he began, was "not a tribal war between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East," but rather a key battle in "the first world war of the twenty-first century, waged between the world of terrorism and the world of democracy." Just as the Cold War divided the world into democracy and Communism, so, after 9/11, have we returned "to the world of two poles" -- this time, "democracy and terrorism." The West's key task, he said, was "to expand the world our enemies try to destroy" -- that is, "to export democracy."

He urged America not to push for a Palestinian state -- not yet. Yasser Arabat, the PLO chairman, was a dictator and a terrorist; the mere granting of statehood would not turn him into a responsible leader, because he would still be a dictator and, therefore, would still lead a terrorist state. [ . . . ]

Sharansky acknowledged that many people thought Arabs and democracy were incompatible, but he recalled that many people had said the same thing about Russians and, before that, at the end of World War II, about the Japanese. Yet democracy had triumphed in Russia and Japan, and it could triumph in the Middle East, too. "Democracy is for everybody!" he exclaimed. (The text of the speech printed the sentence in italics.) "What a powerful weapon, democracy! What a drug for the people!" Not only does it allow people the freedom to say and d o as they pleased, but -- because it makes leaders accountable to the people, and because people want to live in peace -- it is also, Sharansky said, "the best guarantee of security."

A nation's interests and ideals, as one.

Cheney had spoken with Sharansky a few times over the years. They were scheduled to meet for a half hour after the speech. They ended up talking for an hour and a half. Cheney said he would pass Sharansky's comments on to the president.

Four days later, in the White House Rose Garden, Bush gave his much-anticipated speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its theme came straight out of Sharansky's AEI address. The formation of an independent state and Israel's withdrawal from its territories, he said, should be preceded by -- and explicitly linked to -- the Palestinians' move toward democracy.

"I call on the Palestinians to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," Bush said. "I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty." These new leaders, Bush predicted (following Sharansky to a T), will be able to work out security arrangements with Israel. And after that, "the United States will support the creation of a Palestinian state."

The problem, of course, was that the Palestinians never got the hang of democracy -- they kept electing unapproved ("compromised by terror") leaders, the proof of their inadequacy being Israel's inability to work out the requisite security arrangements. The neocons are often charged with being agents not just of Israel but of the Likud bloc; in fact, Bush picked an even stranger bed fellow, one far to the right of Likud (pp. 129-130):

Sharansky was on a plane heading back to Israel when Bush delivered the speech. Perle later called him on the phone to tell him about it. "He was speaking your words," Perle told him. Sharansky was thrilled. The news, he wrote later, was "almost too good to be true."

In Israel, Sharansky was widely viewed as an obstructionist to peace talks. Long before the AEI Forum, he had presented his plan to Ariel Sharon's government, which brusquely rejected it. There was no chance Arafat would stp down or allow pluralism. Maybe Sharansky was right; maybe that meant there could be no peace as long as Arafat was in charge. But to make Palestinian democracy a precondition for talks was equivalent to saying there would be no talks, and not even Sharon was willing to go that far.

(pp. 144-145):

The crucial thing was that his views fits. They provided an intellectual foundation, an air of legitimacy, for Bush's view of the world. In a pre-inaugural interview with the Washington Times, Bush said, "If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy." On CNN, he elaborated on the plug, "Sharansky's book," he said, "confirmed . . . what I believe . . . that deep in everybody's soul -- everybody's soul -- is this deep desire to be free. That's what I believe. No matter where you were raised, no matter your religion, people want to be free. And that a foreign policy, particularly from a nation that is free, ought to be based upon that thought."

(p. 153):

Rumsfeld wanted to get into Iraq, crush Saddam's army, overthrow his regime, then get out. The whole point of military transformation, as he saw it, was to demonstrate that America could project power and topple rogue regimes with a small, light force and that, therefore, it could do so repeatedly, anytime, anywhere, at low cost and little effort. To get involved in a serious postwar occupation -- stabilization, security, nation-building, and all the rest -- would nullify the concept; it would bog down lots of troops for a long time.

In short, Rumsfeld did not miscalculate how many troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq after the war, as some critics later charged; he understood the calculations all too well. Rather than ratchet up the troop levels to meet that mission, he simply side-stepped the mission. He wasn't interested in it, didn't think postwar stabilization was what a modern military -- especially a transformational military -- ought to be doing.

(pp. 155-156):

Here, though, Rumsfeld's plan hit two roadblocks. The first, unexpectedly, was President bush. At an NSC meeting in February, a few weeks before the invasion, Feith mentioned in passing Chalabi's impending government. Bush interrupted him. We're not choosing anybody as Iraq's leader, he said. That's for the Iraqi people to decide. A few days later, Wolfowitz, who had not been at the earlier meeting and apparently had not been briefed on it by Feith, brought up Chalabi again. Bush lashed out. This is about democracy, Bush said. He had nothing for or against Chalabi, but the United States was not going to put its "thumb on the scale."

Now Rumsfeld and his assistants were in a spot. The invasion was about to go forward with the small force that Rumsfeld had demanded. He was convined it would be enough to beat the Iraqi Army and topple Saddam; in that, he turned out to be right and the generals turned out to be wrong. But his solution for postwar order -- his excuse for not thinking about, much less authorizing a plan for, Phase IV -- had just been overridden by the president.

Some defense secretaries might have hurriedly prepared a new plan. Rumsfeld prepared an end run. Right after Saddam's regime fell and American troops took the capital, Wolfowitz supplied Chalabi and more than six hundred of his Free Iraqi Fighters with a transport plane to Nasiriya.

Then came the second roadblock -- the Iraqi people. After a brief flurry of excitement, Chalabi never sparked popular support. He allied himself with one political party after the next, ran some ministries in transition governments, and headed a de-Baathification board for a while. But he alienated the various party chiefs. By the time parliamentary elections took place, he ran on his own ticket -- and didn't attract enough votes to win a seat.

The only option left for Rumsfeld, at this point, was denial. The Department of Defense had executive authority over postwar Iraq. But by June 2003, just a couple months into the occupation, it was clear to several officials who watched him at NSC meetings on the subject that the secretary of defense had lost interest.

(p. 163):

But it indicated no such thing. Had Bush looked at his own country's history, he would have seen that the election sporting one of the highest turnouts ever, with 81 percent of the eligible population voting, was the election of 1860 -- the election right before the American Civil War. He would have seen, in other words, that high turnouts don't necessarily reflect great harmony, that they can also presage implacable conflict and impassioned violence.

In the 2005 Iraqi election, Sunnis voted almost entirely for Sunni parties, Shiites voted almost entirely for religious Shiite parties (the explicitly secular Shiite candidates won only a handful of seats), and the Kurds ratified a nonbinding referendum to secede from Iraq altogether. The Iraqis didn't vote for a free society; rather, each ethnic or religious group voted for a society in which it would dominate the rival groups. And the act of voting that way -- the politicization of social tensions -- hardened their mutual hostilities.

When Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006 (pp. 171-172):

When asked at her press conference why she hadn't embarked on shuttle diplomacy already, Rice replied, "I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling," but "it wouldn't have been clear what I was shuttling to do." She added, "I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante. I think that would be a mistake."

Then came the remark that dropped jaws and made headlines. "What we're seeing here," she said, "is, in a sense, the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East. And whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East."

(p. 178):

However, out in that world, the view was very different. Against the backdrop of Bush's rhetoric about freedom, his maneuverings for material interest appeared more venal than usual; and against those maneuverings, his lofty rhetoric rang especially hollow.

For two brief periods -- just after Saddam Hussein was toppled, when American power seemed supreme, and during the Orange and Cedar Revolutions, when it seemed that freedom might really be "on the march" -- some leaders in the Middle East wondered if their days of unfettered power were numbered, if they might have to adopt political reforms to survive.

But before long, they concluded that Bush's calls for reform were bogus, a cynical veneer for big-power domination. They saw the war in Iraq as purely a play for Middle Eastern oil or as a crusade against Islam or simply as a sign of incompetence. And as American troops became bogged down in Iraq, it became clear that Bush had little leverage to press the issue in any case. Because they tought Bush didn't believe his rhetoric about democracy, they didn't have to take it seriously either. They could clamp down on their oppressed people even more, without consequence.

In their attempt to pass off America's ideals and interests as one and the same, President Bush and his advisers damaged both.

(pp. 183-183):

When Karen Hughes was appointed to the job [Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy] in March 2005, Condoleezza Rice introduced her at a press conference, saying, "We must do more to confront the hateful propaganda, dispel dangerous myths, and get out the truth."

A few months earlier, Charles Wolf, a longtime analyst at the RAND Corporation, wrote a paper on the subject entitled "Public Diplomacy: How to Think About It and Improve It." Almost twenty years earlier, Wolf had served with Andy Marshall on the panel that foresaw the economic downfall of the Soviet Union. Now, Wolf wrote, referring to the declining image of the United States, "Misunderstanding of American values is not the principal source of anti-Americanism." Many foreigners understand America quite well; they simply don't like what they see. It isn't myths, Wolf noted, but rather "some U.S. policies" that "have been, are, and will continue to be major sources of anti-Americanism."

Contrasts Bush's strategies with the founding precepts of the cold war era, under Truman, Acheson, Marshall, Kennan (p. 191):

By contrast, Bush's strategies neither succeeded nor endured -- not even through the two terms of his presidency -- because they did not fit the realities of his era. They were based not on a grasp of technology, history, or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith, and a willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.

Those in charge of his policies cared little about the details of warfare, knew little about the realities of the Middle East, and had not thought through what made freedom work in their own country, much less what might make it work elsewhere.

Richard Rhodes: Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007, Knopf)

This is Rhodes' third book on nuclear weapons, following The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the latter including the early Soviet efforts to join the arms race. Two great books, exactly where to start to learn anything (and pretty much everything) about the strange beauty and terror of nuclear weapons. This book largely completes the story, covering the subsequent arms race, the fitful attempts to rein it in, and the general absurdity of trying to pretend that these bombs are anything but Weapons of Mass Suicide. In typing up these quotes, I'm particularly struck by the political folly of the neocons, and for that matter the long line of trigger-happy anti-communists from Kennan and Nitze up through PNAC.

Extraordinary book.

No page number, just a quote on the opening page, from old-time conservative Peter Viereck:

Reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away.

To the Chernobyl Sarcophagus (pp. 5-7):

At 2:30 on Saturday afternoon someone finally called the institute to report an accident at Chernobyl. In the early hours after midnight, Chernobyl Reactor Number Four had run away in four seconds from 7 percent of maximum rated power to about one hundred times maximum rated power, an event called a prompt critical excursion that had flashed the reactor's thousands of gallons of circulating water to high-pressure steam. The graphite core of the massive, concrete-encased reactor was an enclosed cylinder forty feet in diameter and twenty-three feet tall, set on end, with blocks of concrete and a water pool beneath it to absorb the fierce radiation its zirconium-clad uranium fuel elements produced, and a two-million-pound disk-shaped upper biological shield of concrete blocks set over it like a lid to protect workers from radiation exposure. In the same spirit of bravado that had prompted the scientists at Los Alamos during the Second World War to nickname the atomic bomb they were building the "gadget," the men who operated the RBMKs called the upper biological shield the pyatachok, Russian for one of the smallest Soviet coins, the five-kopek piece. When the water flashed to superheated steam and the reactor's steam pipes started exploding, an eyewitness reported later, the pyatachok "began to bubble and dance."

Then two explosions in the space of less than four seconds tore open the reactor and blew out the building. The reactor core was sealed within a metal tank filled with a mixture of helium and nitrogen to prevent the graphite moderator -- four million pounds of pure carbon -- from burning. The prompt critical excursion had heated the graphite red hot. The first steam explosion lifted the two-million-pound pyatachok. At the same time the steam burst down through the metal tank and penetrated the red-hot graphite. Steam combines ferociously with hot carbon to make carbon monoxide, liberating hydrogen; the second and more powerful explosion combined steam and exploding hydrogen gas, tilted up the pyatachok nearly vertical, shattered the upper half of the reactor core, and blew tons of its red-hot radioactive debris -- a rubble of highly irradiated uranium-oxide fuel as well as radioactive graphite and zirconium -- past the pyatachok, through the roof, and half a mile into the air.

It fell out by size. Big blocks of hot graphite landed on the roofs of Number Four's turbine hall and Reactor Number Three. To lower construction costs, the roofs had been covered with flammable asphalt; the hot graphite set them on fire. Blocks and smaller pieces of graphite landed on the grounds around the building and splashed hissing intot he four-mile-long cooling pond that lay between the plant and the Pripyat River. The cooling pond was fed by and drained into the river, which drained in turn into the big reservoir downstream that stored the water supply of the city of Kiev, the Soviet Union's third-largest city, with a population of some 2.5 million people.

Graphite pieces and soot-like particles scattered across a stand of pines southeast of the complex; several weeks later, when the radiation had killed the trees and their chlorophyll had faded, people started calling the dead stand "the Red Forest." About half the total radioactive fission products jettisoned from the reactor fell within a two-mile radius of the building. The gases released in the explosion diluted and dispersed into the upper atmosphere, but the wind carried the finest aerosols and hot, intensely radioactive particles (which lofted on their own heat like microscopic hot-air balloons) northwest toward Minsk, on to Ingalina and then across the Baltic Sea to Finland and Sweden. The explosions also blew out the shield elements below the reactor; with the water channels through the graphite blocks drained, the hot graphite chimneyed air up the channels through the remaining lower half of the reactor core and the graphite began to burn. It turned efficiently, the soot and ash carrying more and more radiation high into the air.

A containment structure such as the concrete-and-steel dome that protects all Western and Japanese power reactors would probably have confined the Chernobyl explosions and their radioactivity, but Soviet reactors of the RBMK type lacked such containment.

In the 1950s, when the RBMK design was developed and approved, Soviet industry had not yet mastered the technology necessary to manufacture steel pressure vessels capacious enough to surround such large reactor cores. For that reason, among others, scientists, engineers, and managers in the Soviet nuclear-power industry had pretended for years that a loss-of-coolant accident was unlikely to the point of impossibility in an RBMK. They knew better. The industry had been plagued with disasters and near-disasters since its earliest days. All of them had been covered up, treated as state secrets; information about them was denied not only to the Soviet public but even to the industry's managers and operators. Engineering is based on experience, including operating experience; treating design flaws and accidents as state secrets meant that every other similar nuclear-power station remained vulnerable and unprepared.

Unknown to the Soviet public and the world, at least thirteen serious power-reactor accidents had occurred in the Soviet Union before the one at Chernobyl. Between 1964 and 1979, for example, repeated fuel-assembly fires plagued Reactor Number One at the Beloyarsk nuclear-power plant east of the Urals near Novosibirsk. In 1975, the core of an RBMK reactor at the Leningrad plant partly melted down; cooling the core by flooding it with liquid nitrogen led to a discharge of radiation into the environment equivalent to about one-twentieth the amount that was released at Chernobyl in 1986. In 1982, a rupture of the central fuel assembly of Chernobyl Reactor Number One released radioactivity over the nearby bedroom community of Pripyat, now in 1986 once again exposed and at risk. In 1985, a steam relief valve burst during a shaky startup of Reactor Number One at the Balakovo nuclear-power plant, on the Volga River about 150 miles southwest of Samara, jetting 500-degree steam that scalded to death fourteen members of the start-up staff; despite the accident, the responsible official, Balakovo's plant director, Viktor Bryukhanov, was promoted to supervise construction at Chernobyl and direct its operation.

(p. 16):

The RBMK reactor was a dual-use design. It was developed in the 1950s as a production reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, then adapted for civilian power operation in the 1970s; like its graphite core, its pyatachok was punctured with multiple channels from which irradiated fuel rods could be removed via an overhead crane while the reactor was operating. If the military needed plutonium, on-line refueling would allow fuel rods to be removed early to maximize their bloom of military-grade plutonium. A safety containment structure around such a reactor, which would probably have prevented an accident like the one at Chernobyl, would have also greatly reduced its military value. Military needs thus competed with civilian needs in the choice of the RBMK design when the Soviet Union decided to greatly expand electricity production with nuclear power in the early 1970s; a competing light-water reactor design, the Soviet VVER, was safer but less suitable for the production of military-grade plutonium. The RBMK design was adapted for civilian use primarily for economic and logistic reasons -- the concrete and graphite reactors drew on different industrial resources than the steel VVERs did -- but their dual-use potential weighted the decision as well. From the perspective of the Politburo's old guard, then, publicly discussing an accident at a Soviet nuclear power plant, especially one that revealed such serious design flaws, would be no less subversive than revealing the location and fitness of an army in the middle of a war.

(pp. 24-25):

The struggle to deal with the fallout of radionuclides that had contaminated large areas of Soviet territory continued through the summer and fall and across the next winter. When the leaves fell from the chestnut trees that are the glory of Kiev, proud on its high bluff above the Dnieper River, they had to be raked up, all three hundred thousand tons of them, baled and buried outside the city as low-level nuclear waste. "Liquidators" by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps half a million in all -- 340,000 soldiers, many of them recently returned from service in Afghanistan, new draftees, minor government employees such as teachers and inspectors -- were pressed into service and took their brief turn scraping away topsoil, paving over roads, spraying plastic coatings onto schoolyards and fallow fields, burying gardens, houses, equipment, wells. "We buried the forest," one of them told Alexievich. "We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half pieces and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves. . . . It was just your average Russian chaos. That's how we live." In November 1986, after a heroic effort, workers finished entombing Reactor Number Four within a sarcophagus made of half a million cubic yards of reinforced concrete, and only then did it cease releasing radiation into the environment.

"More than 500 residential communities, nearly 60,000 buildings and structures, and several tens of millions of square meters of exposed surfaces of technological equipment and internal surfaces at the [nuclear-power plant] itself have been decontaminated," Colonel-General Vladimir Pikalov of the U.S.S.R. Chemical Forces summarized a year later. "Tens of thousands of cubic meters of contaminated soil has been removed and the same amount brought in and several thousand insulating screens have been laid down. Dust has been suppressed on vast territories and several thousand samples have been taken for radioactive isotope analysis."

Shevardnadze came to call 26 April 1986 "Chernobyl Day." It "tore the blindfold from our eyes," he wrote later. It tore the blindfold as well from the eyes of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens living in the western Soviet Union. "Chernobyl happened," a Byelorussian biologist told Alexievich, "and suddenly you got this new feeling, we weren't used to it, that everyone had his separate life. Until then no one needed this life. But now you had to think: what are you eating, what are you feeding your kids? What' dangerous, what isn't? Should you move to another place, or should you stay? Everyone had to make her own decisions. And we were used to living -- how? As an entire village, as a collective -- a factory, a kolkhoz [i.e., a collective farm]. We were Soviet people, collectivized. . . . Then we changed. Everything changed."

Eastern Europe changed. The European Community banned imports of Soviet, Polish, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian agricultural products worth $500 million annually as of 7 May 1986, inflicting great economic hardship on populations already restive in response to Gorbachev's relaxation of authoritarian control. Ironically, the purpose of recent Soviet nuclear-power development had been to increase electrical capacity available to Eastern Europe. "The decision to accelerate the nuclear-energy program had been taken in 1974," Zhores Medvedev explains, "when the international price of oil rose sharply and export demand increased. Oil became the main source of foreign exchange after 1974. Poor [Soviet] harvests meant that large imports of grain and food were necessary. As a result, the replacement of oil by nuclear energy became a priority." More than any other natural resource, oil propped up the stagnant Soviet economy, but the oil the Soviet Union supplied to Eastern Europe went at subsidized rates. Replacing most of that oil with nuclear electricity would free it up for foreign trade. The new Five-Year Plan that Gorbachev's government had introduced at the 27th Party Congress in February 1986 had called for doubling nuclear-generated electricity, primarily by building reactors in the Ukraine. Those plans were now in doubt.

Next two chapters on Gorbachev (pp. 54-55):

Gorbachev's concerns for the next ten years [after 1970] were largely agricultural: drought, crop failures, dust storms, irrigation projects, road building. His work brought him into regular contact with Moscow and frequent conflict with Kulakov, who by then was the Politburo member responsible for agriculture. Gorbachev saw the economy stagnate, saw regional initiatives rejected, saw "manipulators" become "the heroes of the day," and found himself increasingly disenchanted: "Should you come up with your own ideas -- be prepared for trouble. You could even land in jail. It was actually impossible to do something sensible while complying with all the regulations and instructions. A popular adage hit the mark: 'All initiative is punishable.'"

(p. 56):

Remnick adds: "Gorbachev appears to have few illusions about his double face. Years after coming to power, he told [the journalist] Vitaly Korotich . . . 'In those days, we all licked Brezhnev's ass -- all of us!'" Ass-lickers are a staple of middle bureaucracies, of course, and are certainly not unique to the former Soviet Union. The activist and strategic analyst Daniel Ellsberg identifies the same pattern of behavior in American bureaucrats. The U.S. government, he points out, "does not require true believers to run it. . . . The system consciously runs by men who -- in order to stay in the game, to be close to the center of power, to have the hope that someday the moment may come when their own true values will be served -- will go on for years serving values that are the opposite of what they privately believe." Hence the frequent phenomenon of recantation from retirement.

(pp. 60-61):

Not only second-rank officials such as Baibakov and Gorbachev feared usurping Brezhnev's prerogatives where the military was concerned; so also did Gromyko and Andropov. One consequence of military influence over the Soviet leadership, ultimately devastating, was the 1979 decision to invade Afghanistan. Arbatov believes that "the military-industrial complex had grown to such proportions [by then] that it escaped political c