I Was Wrong: A Real-Time Chronicle of the Iraq War 2001-2008 - Andrew Sullivan

Everyone was always against the Iraq War—now.

From the universal condemnation heaped upon it from right and left, it’s easy to assume that it was Cheney and few other neocon hawks who dragged America back into the gulf against its own volition. In truth, the war was pretty popular at first, enjoying majority support by a comfortable margin. It was only as the blunders compounded—the WMDs that weren’t, the absence of al Qaeda, the bungled debaathification that left a disaffected middle class and provided a key opening to jihadist insurgents—that public opinion soured.

Now, over twenty years post-invasion, it’s hard to find anyone who’ll claim that the war was a good idea, or even admit that they ever supported it (I’d love to see a poll asking respondents of sufficient age whether they supported the Iraq War back in 2003 and compare it with polls from that era. I have a feeling the numbers won’t match).

It is thus with refreshing honesty, and even a bit of bravery, that I Was Wrong compiles Andrew Sullivan’s blog posts from that era, laying bare the flawed reasoning and faulty assumptions that made him one of the wars earliest and most vocal boosters, and chronicling his concern, dismay, and ultimate horror at how the war unfolded.

Sullivan never reneges on the core moral argument that impelled him to endorse the war—namely, that Saddam was a monster and deserved ousting—but he is ruthlessly critical of the outcome, and freely admits that, even if a shaky democracy were to eventually emerge from the chaos (which, eventually, it sort of did), it wouldn’t have been worth the chaos and bloodshed unleashed among Iraqis, nor the irreparable damage to America’s vision of itself tarnished forever by Abu Ghraib.

Sullivan is an excellent writer, and I found myself propelled by the prose even as it rehashed old ground in some spots (as blog posts are wont to do). I found Sullivan’s intellectual honesty refreshing, even as his snide dismissal of liberal concerns about the war in the early pages could be grating. Some of his calls were also hilariously bad with the benefit of hindsight—a passage that made me laugh out loud: “ I do think however that this crisis means an obvious shift in terms of Bush’s successor. Two words: Rudy Giuliani”—but his early assessment of Obama as a political force was spot-on.

I was aware of the war as it happened, but didn’t follow it closely, so while I knew the broad strokes, there were details and players that were new to me. I enjoyed learning about it in more depth, but it was also strangely fun to take a brief tour of a period of time that spans my teens and early twenties, reliving stories and events through Sullivan’s scrutinizing lens. The framing of the posts, beginning with the trauma of 9-11 and ending on the eve of the 2008 election with Sullivan’s endorsement of Obama, suggests an optimism that feels undermined by current events, but does offer a through-line that makes it feel more like a book than a simple collection of blog posts.

If you can forgive a man his mistakes—even those with deadly consequences—this book is worth reading.

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists - Napoleon Chagnon

Noble Savages is another book scooped from my wife’s collection of library checkouts. I read it on her recommendation, and didn’t know anything about the subject matter before picking it up. The book is a memoir by cultural anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, a man I’d never heard of but who was apparently the main flashpoint of a controversy that tore the discipline into two camps: those who view anthropology as a fundamentally scientific pursuit in alignment with biological principles, and those who view it as one of the humanities with a mandate principally to identify and right the wrongs of past colonial encounters with native populations. Chagnon is staunchly a member of the first group, a leaning that is alluded to often throughout the book and becomes the central issue in its final chapters.

But despite being a memoir, the book isn’t as much about Chagnon as about the principal subjects of his decades-long research career: an Amazonian tribe called the Yanomamö, who were at the outset of his fieldwork in the late 60s among the last of the human tribes that could reasonably be called “untouched by civilization.” They had encountered the modern world, of course, but such encounters were fleeting, and their way of life remained as it had been for thousands of years before.

Chagnon describes his first encounter in detail, but much of the book takes a non-chronological approach, focusing instead on different aspects of Yanomamö culture as an organizational principle. After a lifetime of writing academic works, Chagnon seems incapable or unwilling to deviate from his observational stance, which makes it a bit unusual as a memoir, though also makes it more interesting overall to someone unfamiliar with the Yanomamö. His respect for them as a people is clear, and while he does not hesitate to point out their foibles, he does so in a way that acknowledges their full humanity. This stance seems to implicitly argue that kid gloves approach of his opponents, who see the West as the aggressor and native tribes as fundamentally innocent, is an infantilizing and ultimately prejudiced viewpoint, denying the Yanomamö the full gamut of human traits, good and bad.

Its final chapters shift to his life after his research was curtailed by interference from local missionaries, who he claims saw him as a threat to their dominance, and pressure from rival academics, culminating in a hatchet job book that appears at this point to have been largely discredited. His bitterness is apparent but understandable. I have studied only his side in detail, but his arguments are convincing, and the bit of reading outside I did seems to confirm the perspective that the was wrongly accused of unethical conduct. His true sin seems to have been his unwavering conviction that Yanomamö follow biological imperative, and that basic biological drives—procreation, namely—drive their conflict more than scarce access to resources, which is the Marxist perspective.

All in all, an interesting book. I don’t think I’ll necessarily get out his other, more academic work, but i greatly enjoyed learning about the Yanomamö.

One Summer: America, 1927 - Bill Bryson

J’écris ceux mots après d’avoir relu trois livres de Bill Bryson : The Lost Continent, In a Sunburned Country, et One Summer: America, 1927. C’est le dernier livre qui compris le sujet de cette revue. Pour la premières deux, ça suffit à dire qu’ils sont travelogues—de l’États Unis et Australie, respectivement—et qu’ils sont très amusant. Mais pour la dernière, il y a un peu plus que ça.

Comme dit le titre, One Summer: America, 1927 discute l’effusion d’évènements qui ont arrivé pendant l’été en question. Les deux évènements les plus grandes, ils sont la vole de Charles Lindbergh sue l’Atlantique, de New York à Paris, et la saison remarquable de Babe Ruth, qui a frappé 60 home runs, une record qui durait pour plus que 30 années. Autres évènements notables comprissent l’inondation de la Mississippi; la lutte entre Jack Dempsey et Gene Tunney; le trial sensationnel de Ruth Snyder, qui avait son mari tué par son amoureux, et beaucoup d’autre chose.

L’écriture de Bryson c’est aussi drôle et élégant comme toujours, avec beaucoup des tournes des phrases amusant. C’était tellement plaisant, de relire ses livres pour la deuxième ou troisième fois. C’est certain qu’il y aura une quatrième.

Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present - Max Boot

I picked this book up unsure whether I was going to commit to it. I like Max Boot, as I’ve said before, but I’m not a huge fan of military history, which can be a little on the dry side. Luckily, Boot doesn’t bog down his prose with tactical descriptions of battles (I can never follow these anyway), but instead offers a higher level view of overall campaigns.

Invisible Armies is a book about guerrillas. The subtitle pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Though it follows a loose chronology, beginning with ancient Mesopotamia and Rome and ending with modern-day Iraq and Afghanistan, the book’s structure is primarily by theme, rather than time period. Boot covers liberal uprisings of the 18th century, anarchists of the late 19th, communists of the early 20th, through to the Islamic rebels of today. He makes a useful distinction between guerrillas and terrorists, with the former encompassing loose military units that fight largely military targets, while terrorists are smaller and primarily target civilians.

I was disappointed that he didn’t talk about Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who was the man, but despite this omission he covers a lot of ground. There were several people who I’d heard of very vaguely and appreciated learning more about—T.E. Lawrence, Yasser Arafat— as well as I people I hadn’t heard of at all (Massoud). The spreadsheet at the end was a nice little bit of wonkiness. I wonder if he lets people download it as an excel file.