ethanhedman's reviews
148 reviews

While the book advertises itself and the summation of the Afghanistan Papers, I have my gripes and will list them here. The book falls into much of what international affairs analysis usually does with misanthropic adventures overseas. It focuses on ‘woulda’ or ‘coulda’ and never ‘shoulda’. The papers are a reflection of the different direction different arms of the US government, US military, and Afghan leaders were pulling US and NATO forces. This leads to a “quagmire” in which all of the above say things are going well when they aren’t to anyone on the ground, and there is no political will to put an end to the vicious cycle. What the book fails to mention are the quarter of a million civilians dead just due to war - excluding sanctions - and the horrific state we left the county in. 

What irks me most about things like the “Vietnam papers” or the “Afghanistan papers” is that it frames the tragedy not as the genocides that we committed there, but that American taxpayers were lied to - that our tax dollars were wasted. This perhaps is not the direct fault of the author, but as a summary of the US government review of the US war on Afghanistan, it must take the same criticism. 

Grandin analyses the slave uprising on the Tryal, and its interception by the Perseverance and its captain, Amasa Delano (relative of FDR). Grandin gives an all-encompassing dissection of empire, slavery, and expansion in the New World, while analyzing the different market, historical, and human forces at work that led to everyone being where they were in 1805 off the coast of Chile. The author infuses Benito Cereno and Moby Dick by Herman Melville as a corollary to how the forces at play on the Tryal interact with the seemingly pre-destined historical course the United States seemed to be on. 
Ultimately I believe Grandin sees Delano as a representation of the entrapment of Americans in history. That even when infrequently well-intentioned, people are largely bound to the political, social, and historical forces of their time and place. 

"The Duxbury preachers who supported independence told him that one's fate was not predestined, that man had reason and free will, which gave him the power to make of himself what he would. But for the hapless Delano, faith in reason and free will became its own enchantment, blinding him to the ties that bound men together, that set the limits of who succeeded and who failed, and that decided who was free and who wasn't." (258)
"In the United States, a purer ideal of freedom has come to hold sway, at least among some, based on the principles of liberal democracy and laissez-faire economics but also on a more primal animus, an individual supremacy that not only denies the necessities that bind people together but resents any reminder of those necessities." (273)

Finally read my first Didion novel and I get it. Amazing inspection of the malaise of American life in the 60s. 

There are too many damning quotes in this 248 page book to include without posting the entire book. Brenes argues that cold war defense spending "transformed the nature of of social democracy in the United States, altering American politics and creating a unique coalition of individuals invested in the "military industrial complex" for personal and political gain. 
That "unique coalition", Brenes argues, includes defense workers in the rust belt that were slowly disappeared, 'small government' Republicans driven by rabid anti-communism, neo-liberal Democrats driven by short-term political gains in keeping their constituents' jobs (which were on the way out and only hurt those Dems in the long term - no meaningful effort given to conversion programs from defense to domestic programs), and the defense companies that were complicit in the fostering of the Cold War Coalition and financially stood to gain the most from government contracts, all at the expense of the New Deal and its coalition. "The Cold War created a marriage of convenience between those who materially benefitted from defense spending and groups of national political actors who backed the defense economy for ideological reasons". Thus, Brenes argues, this coalition is partly a story of "how wealth was expropriated from working-class to wealthy Americans, and how American democracy was transformed in the process". 
This is already too long, you should read the book, but I'll close with this from Brenes. "The ultimate legacy of the Cold War therefore lies in its ability to transfigure American politics in ways that created new coalitions of Americans to keep the United States fighting the Cold War after 1991 - to align militarism and austerity with the interests of American democracy".