# 13: Chain of Command

Seymour M. Hersh

Seymour, sos un crack. Another war-time correspondent, he was the guy who broke open the whole My-Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Like Jon Lee Anderson, he also writes for the New Yorker and has written extensively about the war on terror, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib scandal, Gitmo, and even about the Bush administration's plan to deal with Iran.

I admire people like Seymour who have the balls and ability to write about what is really going on. I am also very glad that he is not censored and then he has the right to write about these issues. This is important work that he is doing. Apart from my agreement with many of his conclusions, and dismay at some of the mistakes and actions taken by people in the government, I felt that the book is very solid and with a great deal of substance.

This is a strange "book", in that it is really many different articles, some of them connected and many of them not. As is usually the case, I did not read the intro or even the back-cover, so I was confused for a while, until I realized that this was not meant to be a book in the traditional sense. I was seeking an overlying theme which is not meant to be there.

Be careful when you read this, the torture will make you sick to your stomach. It makes me angry to see how the US is losing moral clarity by torturing people for questionable intelligence. When combined with the perspectives of the Guerrillas (see previous post) you realize how complicated these questions are, and that the insurgency in Iraq is simply not going to go away.

I did spend a month or two into heavy political thought while I read these books and watched the 34 day Israel-Hezbollah war. I don't want to revive those days - all I needed was one night of trouble sleeping due to this to make me realize that enough is enough - so I won't delve into heavy politics. However, I have a recommendation: read the article by James Fallows called "Declaring Victory" in the Atlantic Monthly.

Would you like me to summarize "Chain of Command" ...

The Bush Administration is full of fuck-ups.

# 12: Guerrillas

Jon Lee Anderson

I like Jon Lee Anderson, I devoured his biography of Che Guevara at Business School. He also writes in the New Yorker, and I am struck by his type of reporting. This is a man who is goes to the hotspots in the world: when the Israelis are bombing Lebanon and people are fighting to get out of there, Anderson is flying into Beirut and reporting from there. When Afghanistan was a mess, there he was

Unfortunately I finished the book over a month ago, I know, I have been a bad boy with respect to my posts, so I am not sure how much I remember about this specific book.

The subtitle is: Journeys in The Insurgent World. Anderson has a serious ability to enter the world of different groups of guerillas around the world - he writes about guerillas in El Savador, the Mujahedin fighting in Afghanistan, the Karen of Burma (fighting an independence war for over 50 years), the Polisaro of Western Sahara (this is a strange case, they basically have their own country and rarely fight at all), and finally a group of Palestinians struggling against Israel in the Gaza Strip.

He enters these world's and writes about their experiences, their world-view, their philosophies. I fought it very vivid and quite eye-opening. These are people who have taken up a cause and are willing to both die and kill for it. It was interesting to see the fights forgotten by the world (Burma) and others that are always in the news (Gaza). It was interesting to see how the mujahedin have developed a culture that glorifies death and makes it a very acceptable outcome. The FMLN in Salvador understood the political aspect of the battle, how they needed to also win the hearts and minds of the people in the countryside. I also began to understand how if someone loses their parents and sisters to the enemy, they are sucked into the battle and find no other meaning in life other than to fight. In its purest form, violence simply begets more violence.

This a good read. It will leave you thinking.