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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Management of Savagery is a brilliant and thorny book, a bold indictment of American foreign policy let down by shifts between two versions of core thesis, and an emotional commitment to an unconventional wisdom Blumenthal desperately wants you to believe and doesn't have the evidence to prove.
The weak version of the the book's thesis is simply: 9/11 was the direct result of American blowback, the end result of Zbigniew Brzezinski's ploy to cripple the USSR in Afghanistan by supplying and training proxy militias of Salafi extremists, which would eventually grow into Al Qaeda. We all know the consequences: 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, a never ending imperial quagmire. Worse, "giving Muslim extremists guns and money and hoping for the best" has become the bipartisan foreign policy establishment's go to plan despite the fact that it never ever works, leaving shattered countries, a maze of atrocities on all sides, seas of refugees, and right-wing populist backlashes to the refugees.
The weak version of the thesis is well worth attending to, especially claims of contacts between Al Qaeda and Western intelligence agencies in the period leading up to 9/11. There's also hints of a very important book about the nature of American governance in the early part of the 21st century, a kind of nightmare hydra of self-proclaimed 'counter-terrorism experts' laundering credibility through a revolving series of government, academic, thinktank, and media posts to justify imperial expeditions no matter who sits in the White House. That Project for a New American Century ghouls (remember PNAC?) and humanitarian interventionists like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Powers could come to the same means and ends is worth considering in full.
The problem is the strong version of the thesis. If this bipartisan foreign policy has been one of the major contributors to human misery in the 21st century, it is evil, and therefore anybody who opposes it is... well good might be too far, but righteous perhaps? It's the same kind of blinkered thinking that leads to the CIA handing weapons to Salafi extremists, and it puts Blumenthal in the same corner as Assad, Putin, and Trump, and renders his analysis crude and conspiratorial.
And this is a goddamn shame. Because we need to be reminded of this legacy of absolute failure, and the way that the parasitic counter-terrorism security state is choking the life out of our democracy (he says, as clouds of teargas drift through Seattle and Portland). And there is a very solid realpolitik analysis to be made here, about which factions have power within states, be they intelligence agencies or extremist cells or the people, and the balance of power between the Gulf Monarchies, Iran, Israel, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, America, Turkey, NATO, Russia, China etc..., and how this is leading us all down a bloody road, but Blumenthal isn't quite objective enough to make the case. And I sympathize, Blumenthal is an ADL designated anti-Semite (for the record, the ADL needs to chillax on officially designating people anti-Semites), and he's been writing stories the Israel government would rather not have published his entire career. But the web of treachery is too big to be adequately explained in this short book.
The weak version of the the book's thesis is simply: 9/11 was the direct result of American blowback, the end result of Zbigniew Brzezinski's ploy to cripple the USSR in Afghanistan by supplying and training proxy militias of Salafi extremists, which would eventually grow into Al Qaeda. We all know the consequences: 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, a never ending imperial quagmire. Worse, "giving Muslim extremists guns and money and hoping for the best" has become the bipartisan foreign policy establishment's go to plan despite the fact that it never ever works, leaving shattered countries, a maze of atrocities on all sides, seas of refugees, and right-wing populist backlashes to the refugees.
The weak version of the thesis is well worth attending to, especially claims of contacts between Al Qaeda and Western intelligence agencies in the period leading up to 9/11. There's also hints of a very important book about the nature of American governance in the early part of the 21st century, a kind of nightmare hydra of self-proclaimed 'counter-terrorism experts' laundering credibility through a revolving series of government, academic, thinktank, and media posts to justify imperial expeditions no matter who sits in the White House. That Project for a New American Century ghouls (remember PNAC?) and humanitarian interventionists like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Powers could come to the same means and ends is worth considering in full.
The problem is the strong version of the thesis. If this bipartisan foreign policy has been one of the major contributors to human misery in the 21st century, it is evil, and therefore anybody who opposes it is... well good might be too far, but righteous perhaps? It's the same kind of blinkered thinking that leads to the CIA handing weapons to Salafi extremists, and it puts Blumenthal in the same corner as Assad, Putin, and Trump, and renders his analysis crude and conspiratorial.
And this is a goddamn shame. Because we need to be reminded of this legacy of absolute failure, and the way that the parasitic counter-terrorism security state is choking the life out of our democracy (he says, as clouds of teargas drift through Seattle and Portland). And there is a very solid realpolitik analysis to be made here, about which factions have power within states, be they intelligence agencies or extremist cells or the people, and the balance of power between the Gulf Monarchies, Iran, Israel, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, America, Turkey, NATO, Russia, China etc..., and how this is leading us all down a bloody road, but Blumenthal isn't quite objective enough to make the case. And I sympathize, Blumenthal is an ADL designated anti-Semite (for the record, the ADL needs to chillax on officially designating people anti-Semites), and he's been writing stories the Israel government would rather not have published his entire career. But the web of treachery is too big to be adequately explained in this short book.