Surge by P. Mansoor (2013)--

I’ve finished reading the book, Surge. Some comments:

1.       P has a direct staff of perhaps a dozen+ with distinct duties, and those duties take up all their time. Little overlap. There are as well protective staff, etc.

2.       Yes, it is a matter of Anbar Awakening and P’s COIN strategy, and of course luck and …  That it was not permanent, with Maliki going back to his ethnosectarian roots is a problem. The US is a remarkable country in its believe that none of those should define loyalty. We’ve worked hard of late to make that case for Muslim US citizens.

3.       People worked very hard, subordinates were inventive, Odierno was a good complement to P, and lots of work needed to be done in DC so that the strategy was not undermined. It’s important to realize that just because you have the President on your back, does not mean subordinates with power will follow through. Admiral Fallon was especially difficult for the first half at least.

4.       This is not a history. It is a memoir and chronology. Mansoor is now a professor of military history, but this would not quite qualify as such. There is no attempt to be unbiased.

5.       Anyone who works for P, or for folks like him, should read this book. P is hard driving, hard working, and unrelenting, it would seem. He must have a flaw, but none revealed here. (The Paula Broadwell stuff does not count in my book—other than why do it on your office computer and file. Telephone from payphones, please. I have nothing to say about faithfulness, given what people do.)

What’s also interesting is that they went for three years without a successful strategy, until P offered one up. When you think about innovation and adoption, keep that in mind.

Yes, this was people intensive. But it depended on having all the best technology, MRAPs, communication gear, and various experts. I read an article recently that transformation was successful, in the initial taking over of Iraq. It then said the COIN failed since the subsequent years, post P, things fell apart again. I suspect this is not a good judgment. No one claims to be able to get rid of tribal and ethnosectarian conflict with COIN. You are just trying for  some order and security. It took many wars and many dead for the Catholics and Protestants to make a peace in Europe, and in Ireland that is still shaky.

Stephen Biddle: Military Power (2004)

The "modern system" of battle and strategy is meant to prevent offenses from destroying too many of your troops and materiel, to make it difficult for them to advance, to make it hard for them to locate their concealed and covered and dispersed opponents. And if you are an offender, you want to penetrate the defense to cut off the defense's supportive troops and logistical support so starving them in place. And in any case suppress fire, or make it much less effective if there is enough dispersion of defenders or focus of offense.

So roughly argues Stephen  Biddle in Military Power (2004), through case studies, statistical analysis, and gaming simulation. It's detailed interesting argument, and there has been substantial criticism and support (for example, in about 2006 in the Journal of Strategic Studies). But in reading it, the argument is impressive, the care is impressive, and the scholarship is methodologically catholic.

Americanah and Pericles

I finished off two excellent books this week, one fiction and one nonfiction.  Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  is a sprawling, big novel that moves across continents and time to tell a story about two people who lose each other and themselves in the quest for opportunities in England and the US, only to find themselves again back home in Nigeria--one by choice, and another by force.  I am still not sure how I feel about the ending, but Adichie is a marvelous storyteller and a brilliant prose stylist.  I was seething with frustration with her main character who stubbornly refused to grow in any way--Ifemelu is a watcher and a judger of other people, and she uses her brain to critique rather than to build--until she is by herself in the United States. She is a character who changes fast, by leaps, even as she possesses a writer's detachment.


Mike Peed gives a terrific overview in his NYT review. 

I also finished Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy.  My edition appearse to be the 1990 edition, as I picked it up at a used bookstore.  In this book, Donald Kagan, of whom I am an unabashed fangirl, writes about Pericles in his various roles: Strategist, Statesment, Hero, Democrat, Imperialist, Peacemaker, etc. It is a study of leadership. Kagan is a historian, and he doesn't have that much to work from for Pericles: Plutach and Thucydides  are his main sources.  This books feels a little self-indulgent, and that's ok: Kagan is a fan of Pericles (there are worse leaders to admire), and Kagan allows himself to praise what he finds admirable. He can't escape the obvious problems of Pericles as a military strategist, and Kagan's assessment is sad and fair.   There are some bumps in the book, which are quite dated: Kagan doesn't have a terribly deep read of Marx or Plato, and he drubs both of them for their anti-democratic visions.  Still, his writing on democracy and the Periclean vision is breath-taking.

I'm traveling this week so there will be lots of time for reading.

The Dupin Novellas by Edgar Allen Poe

I have a weakness for books about books, and I just picked up Books to Die For, a collection of writing by contemporary fiction writers about the most important or best mystery novel of roughly each year from 1841  to 2008. The early years skip because the mystery novel had not yet become a genre; there is nearly a ten-year gap between the first entry, Edgar Allen Poe's Murder in the Rue Morgue and the second entry, Charles Dickens' Bleak House.

Because, of course, I don't have enough reading to do, I am going to try to read them all in order, except for the ones I've already read, and perhaps revisiting some of those.

That means I started out with Poe, who is IMO unreadable except for poetry. I have large bits of The Raven memorized because as a poem it is awesome-gnarly and I love it.  His prose leaves me cold, and much as I wanted to like the Auguste Dupin stories, I didn't. They were tedious and turgid, and I am glad to be done with them and scratch that particular book off the list. I doubt I will have such trouble with Dickens, whom I've always liked.

The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis

The Four Loves is a deeply flawed book with many problems, particularly in the first chapters. Whenever I read him, I generally come to the conclusion that Lewis isn’t all that good at writing about people and their relations. And at the time of writing the Four Loves, he’s a grumpy old misogynist who seems never to have a met a woman he liked unless she was silent and scurrying around bringing him sandwiches, but only when he wants sandwiches, and only the kind of sandwiches he likes. If a man is less lovable than he might be, it’s probably a woman’s fault.

His many unkind portrayals of women in this book made it an irritating read. But I try to read with those allowances; if you were to avoid reading misogynists, you wouldn’t have much to read. Since it’s a short book and I was reading it for a book chapter I am writing, I made myself just slog through the first chapters to the last, which I later read in the Publisher’s Weekly review is considered some of his Lewis’ best nonfiction writing. It’s breathtaking:

There’s no escape along the lines of St. Augustine suggests. Nor along any other lines. There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with little hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, of at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch

I start out with Iris Murdoch how I always start out: I don't want to like it.  It's about a bunch of annoying English intellectuals who don't have much to do besides jump in and out bed with each other.  But for some reason, it all remains interesting and you have to figure out what is going on with these people anyway.  In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Julius is the Uber; he's handsome, celebrated, and rich, a scientist amidst a bunch of people who are not, with their unfinished books and whatnot. (It might be the best idea to, while I am struggling with my own manuscript, to read about people with perpetually unfinished books.)

Anyway, a lovely read.

Meh...too depressed to read, but I did see a good film: Smash His Camera (about celebrity culture and the paparazzi

Phhhhhhhhhbttttt.  I have been depressed, and when I am depressed, I don't get much done. However, I did watch an excellent document on paparazzi Ron Gallela.  You can see the trailer here.