Cover Shot! is a regular feature here at the Café. I love discovering new covers, and when I find them, I like to share. More than anything else, I am consumed with the mystery that each new discovery represents. There is an allure to a beautiful cover. Will the story contained under the pages live up to promise of the gorgeous cover art?
Yum! I love this cover for I Own the Dawn by M L Buchman! I hope none of those guns are loaded!
Kee Smith battled through a difficult childhood to work her way up the ranks of the U.S. Army. When she finally makes it into the elite Night Stalkers, she feels thrilled, honored, and vindicated…until she finds out she’s been assigned to the “girlie-chopper” piloted by the only other woman in the regiment.
Kee is determined to show Lt. Archie Stevenson, one of the male co-pilots, that she is just as tough as the guys. Throughout their special mission, Archie doesn’t know whether to make love to her or plant her face-first into the dirt. But he’ll do whatever it takes to break through that shield Kee wears around her heart.
In stores August 2012
During last night's latest organizing/cleaning mission, I rediscovered some old letters that my Mom let me keep while she was going through her own organizing/cleaning mission last year. They are from my great-great-uncle Bob, to his sister and his mother.
Bob was in the US Navy in World War One (we think the photo, below, is him in uniform). I was so touched by one of the letters that I am including it in this post. It reminds me of how when soldiers go to war, they worry very much about the people they are leaving behind at home. It's not just their loved ones worrying about them. War and worry is a two-way street for military families.
I will admit I've cleaned up Bob's spelling and typos, but I kept the sentence construction the same.
Here it is:
Mother,
I sent you a letter Thursday and suppose you have it by this time. Mother, did you say that you sent me a box of eats? Well I hope I get it Sunday or before we leave. The cake that Florence sent me and the cake that Mrs. Berdick sent in the box will be good while I am at sea and I will enjoy it. Hope this trip is as nice as the last one and the sea is calm and I will enjoy it very much.
Mother, I am feeling fine and getting fat. You know that. And it is fine out in the air and I want you to go out as often as you can and go to the show and get the girls to go out with you.
Mother, after you receive the money from Washington on the 5th of July, why don't you go down in the country for a week or a few days, for I will not be back til around the 15th of July and then you will be home. Go down to Kinderhook, NY for a visit, go somewhere and don't stay in the house all the time.
Mother, tell Pa-Pa that I am going to leave on another trip across the Atlantic and that I am feeling OK. Mother, write to me once a week, say on each Sunday and when I come back I will receive all your letters and you tell me each week how you are and all the rest. You be sure and tell me how you are for I want to know.
Mother, tell me all the news if any thing happens around Rensselaer, NY.
Mother, this will be all and will say "Good Afternoon" and also a "Goodnight, Mother," and don't worry over me and I will sail the seas safe and the USS Columbia will bring me and my shipmates back to the US OK.
From your loving boy,
With the best of love and kisses,
With love,
Son Robert
By Adam Jortner
Early in November was the 200th anniversary of a disaster.
The weather in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, played along and delivered a dreary, wet morning—just as it had on November 7, 1811, when a hodgepodge collection of frontier whites exchanged fire with Native American forces. The Americans “won” the Battle of Tippecanoe when the Indian soldiers retreated, but U.S. forces under William Henry Harrison had to evacuate their position the next day. What’s worse, they were only in the area to enforce the Treaty of Fort Wayne—a land seizure of questionable legality that Harrison himself had crafted by haranguing reluctant Native American leaders and, when necessary, plying them with alcohol. In addition, Tippecanoe touched off a long campaign of guerilla warfare between Native Americans and whites on the frontier that literally bled into the War of 1812.
An unnecessary war based on questionable treaties with an ambiguous result: not the finest hour for America.
The organizers of the 200th were well aware of Tippecanoe’s dubious history, and were adamant that this year’s gathering was a commemoration, not a celebration. The service included prayers from both a Christian clergyman and a Wea chief. The featured speaker was Governor George Blanchard of the Absentee Shawnee, the same tribe who provided the Indian leadership (Tecumseh and his brother, the Shawnee Prophet) that frustrated Harrison two hundred years ago. Reenactors portrayed both white militiamen and Indian soldiers.
Not everyone wanted such a dour memorial, however. One reenactor whipped up an enthusiastic crowd by praising the patriotism of white forces who had fought at Tippecanoe for “liberty.” A sharp-eyed gentleman told me (politely) that people who didn’t like Harrison’s little war of 1811 might as well leave Indiana of 2011. One invited speaker solemnly requested listeners to remember the blood of “two nations” that had watered the battlefield—and then proceeded to give a triumphal account of his own (white) ancestors who patriotically settled the land after the Indians had been forcibly removed.
It’s an understandable urge to want all American military exploits to be the story of a successful quest for liberty. And there is a lot to admire about the American past. But to assume that Americans always fought for good causes—to assume every war is just and every commander selfless—is bad history. It’s true that the American forces fought hard at Tippecanoe, and that there was bravery on both sides. It’s also true that the battle was probably a huge mistake. Harrison’s bungling at the battle, the subsequent success of Native American forces, and the near-destruction of the United States in the War of 1812 should make any patriot pause before celebrating the events at Tippecanoe—leaving aside the question of whether Americans should take pride in the duplicitous nineteenth-century land treaties with Native Americans. And whatever else the battle was, it was not about liberty: no American freedoms (such as they were in 1811) were at stake at Tippecanoe—only the refusal of a collection of Indians to recognize a treaty brokered under bad faith. In fact, the Indians who fought under the Shawnee Prophet had a better claim to be fighting for liberty—many of the warriors who battled Harrison’s men had left their own families to join the Prophet’s struggle to prevent white expansion at Indian expense.
Telling the story of Tippecanoe as a battle of American liberty against Native American tyranny is an imagined past. This imagined past yields an imaginary present—one where “patriotism” solves everything. Our ancestors, we are told, loved liberty, and had patriotism, and they won. Presumably, if we had patriotism and loved liberty, we too would easily
By Nicholas Rankin
On 27th June 1941, in Washington D.C., Lt-Commander Ian Fleming RNVR drafted a short ‘Memorandum to Colonel Donovan’ on how to structure and staff the headquarters of his new American intelligence agency, COI, to be set up by Christmas 1941. Fleming suggested taking over a section of the FBI building and liaising closely with the Attorney-General and J. Edgar Hoover; Donovan would need to make friends with both the State Department and the FBI and enlist their full help ‘by cajolery and other means’. As Co-ordinator of Information, Donovan would have to ‘dragoon’ the War and Navy Departments into co-operation and be ‘prepared to take action quickly if they don’t help.’ Fleming recommended that Henry Luce of TIME magazine be asked to run Foreign Intelligence, a good “sapper” or military engineer should run Sabotage (a practical problem where romantics should not be encouraged), and Edgar Hoover should nominate someone to run Counter-espionage. Ian Fleming, who had a background as a Reuters news agency correspondent, thought Donovan would need a ‘Managing Editor with staff from a news agency foreign desk to receive and disseminate intelligence from a central office at GHQ’. He suggested consulting the head of Associated Press and getting staff from only one news agency to avoid jealousies and friction. There would have to be heads of country sections, liaison officers with other government departments, someone in charge of communications (‘A good Fleet Signals Officer’), someone to run matériel and transport (‘Consult American Express’) and many Field Officers (‘Pool the files of the State Department, Navy and Army, and pick the best. Appoint talent scouts to find more if necessary.’) Whoever recruited personnel should be a ‘thoroughly critical and sceptical man’. To liaise with the British Secret Service in London, Ian Fleming with his naval background naturally suggested people he knew through the Naval Intelligence Division: Commander Christopher Arnold-Foster and Captain Eddie Hastings. He wanted the closest cooperation between Britain and America: ‘Request CSS [the head of MI6] to allow your men in the field to work closely with ours’, and he advised judicious punishment pour encourager les autres: ‘Make an example of someone at an early date for indiscretion and continue to act ruthlessly where lack of security is concerned.’
Three weeks later, Fleming sent his boss Admiral John Godfrey, now back in London, a MOST SECRET cable about Donovan’s progress to date as Coordinator of Information.
1) Initial grant of ten million dollars placed at his disposal.
2) Washington personnel will be housed in Library of Congress and New York office will be at No. 2, Wall Street.
3) Skeleton staff should be at work by August 15th.
4) Information from Colonel Donovan will go direct to the President.
5) Emphasis has shifted towards strategical, economic and psychological research work and planning.
6) Propaganda in enemy countries will have a considerable role under ROBERT SHERWOOD, dramatist, working with radio corporations and Federal Communications Committee.
7) Geographical sections containing one naval, one military, one flying officer with civilian experts will be created. They will report to a Joint Intelligence Committee which will include Director of Naval Intelligence, Director of Military Intelligence, State Department. Their sources of information will be Service Intelligence departments supplemented by any fields they may be able to develop. These sections will also nominally repeat nominally be charged with Secret Intelligence Service, Special Operations 1 [propaganda] and Special Operations 2 [active operations] work
By Nicholas Rankin
In May 1941, Ian Fleming and his boss, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, were touching base in New York City with William Stephenson, the British Secret Service’s representative in North America as head of British Security Co-Ordination, whose headquarters occupied the 34th and 35th floors of the Rockefeller Center. The place later went into Fleming’s fiction. In chapter 20 of the very first Bond book, Casino Royale, James Bond confesses to the assassination of a Japanese cipher expert cracking British codes on the 36th floor of that building – it was the first of the two wartime cold-blooded killings that led to Bond’s Double O number.
On 28 May 1941, Ian Fleming celebrated his 32nd birthday in New York City with the good news that the Royal Navy had sunk Germany’s greatest battleship, the 42,000-ton Bismarck. Then he and Godfrey travelled by train to Washington DC on their mission to persuade the American authorities that they needed to create a unified American secret service. Intelligent combination in the USA would be an improvement on the system in the UK, which had evolved four different bodies with overlapping functions and competing masters: the blockaders of the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW), the propagandists in the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), the saboteurs in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the spies of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6).
Before WW2, the United States of America had similarly left foreign intelligence variously to the diplomats of the State Department, the Military Intelligence Division (or G-2) of the War Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence. No-one below the White House was collating intelligence and no-one was taking the big strategic view. Although Admiral Godfrey found all three US departments polite and friendly towards him, he was surprised to discover how much the US Army and US Navy loathed and detested each other and what a snakepit bureaucratic Washington could be, like Whitehall at its very worst.
The only man who could knock heads together was the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States. Admiral Godfrey was invited to dine at the White House on 10th June 1941, and given an hour with the President afterwards in the Oval Office. According to Godfrey, after watching ‘a rather creepy crawly film of snake worship’, FDR drawlingly recounted his reminiscences of British Admiral Reginald Hall’s brilliance as Director of Naval Intelligence in the Great War, while Godfrey himself reiterated three times the need for the Americans to have ‘one intelligence security boss, not three or four.’
That very same day, 10th June 1941, William J. Donovan, (the American ‘Bill’ of the previous blog), had submitted a memorandum to the President recommending the establishment of ‘a central enemy intelligence organization’ to analyze and appraise all information on enemy intentions and resources, both military and economic, and to determine the best methods of waging economic and psychological warfare.
A week later, on 18th June 1941, President Roosevelt accepted Donovan’s proposal and appointed Donovan himself as Coordinator of Information (COI). His job was to ‘collect and analyze all information and data which may bear upon national security: to correlate such information and data, and to make such information and data available to the President…’ Roosevelt scrawled a note on the memo’s coversheet, ‘Please set this up confidentially … Military – not O.E.M. [Office of Emergency Management].’ The CIA historian Thomas F. Troy glosses ‘confidentially’ to mean there would be access to the President’s secret funds and ‘Military’ to denote ‘by virtue of the President’s authority as commander in chief’. William Stephenson, the Canadian ‘Bill’ was jubilant. He cable
By Nicholas Rankin
On 15 May 1941, two Englishmen flew from London to Lisbon, at the start of a ten-day wartime journey to New York City. Though they wore civilian clothes they were, in fact, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming RNVR, the future author of the James Bond novels. What followed was to change American intelligence forever.
Until December 1941, the United States of America was neutral in the Second World War. In two years of open blitzkrieg, the Nazis had conquered much of Europe; Britain stood alone and broke, summoning aid from its overseas dominions and colonies. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill remembered well that industrial America’s entry into the Great War in 1917 had assured victory. He needed a repeat, but the US President F.D. Roosevelt proceeded cautiously.
The first American aid to the Allied cause was spun as protecting an isolationist nation. In return for 50 old American destroyers for the Royal Navy, the USA obtained from the British Empire 99-year leases on a chain of strategic Atlantic bases: in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Antigua, St Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana. Between January and March 1941, there were also secret military and naval staff talks codenamed ABC – the American-British Conversations. Following these, the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee in London sent the two men to Washington DC to help ‘set up a combined intelligence organisation on a 100 per cent co-operative basis’.
The relationship of Admiral John Godfrey to Ian Fleming was like that of ‘M’ and James Bond, but also father/son. Fifty-three-year-old Godfrey had three daughters but no son; thirty-three- year- old Fleming had three brothers but no father. (Major Valentine Fleming DSO had been killed in the Great War just before Ian’s ninth birthday.) Admiral Godfrey had a brilliant mind but a volcanic temper; Ian Fleming was imaginative and imperturbable. He was a good fixer and drafted swift, crisp memos.
The two men flew KLM to Lisbon and then took the Pan Am Boeing 314 seaplane via the Azores to the British colony of Bermuda, 600 miles east of North Carolina, where the first American garrisons were building a base to help protect what President Roosevelt called ‘the Western Hemisphere’. Hamilton, Bermuda was where the British had set up the Imperial Censorship and Contraband Control Office to read the world’s mail, taken off transatlantic ships and planes. Fifteen hundred British ‘examiners’, also known as ‘censorettes’ because most were women, worked in the waterfront Princess Hotel, processing 100 bags of mail a day – around 200,000 letters – and testing 15,000 for microdots and secret ink messages, before sending on the bags on the next plane or ship. At first the USA objected to this infringement of liberty, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon realised how useful the system was when it began to reveal foreign enemy agents on US soil.
Godfrey and Fleming arrived in New York City on 25 May 1941. They stayed at the St Regis Hotel on 55th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan and soon went to meet ‘Little Bill’, the Canadian businessman William Stephenson, and his American friend and ally ‘Wild Bill’, Colonel William J. Donovan.
The bullish Bill Donovan (a WW1 Medal of Honor winner and New York lawyer) had twice travelled to the war-zone on unofficial inquiry missions for the US president. All doors had been opened for him: Winston Churchill was eager for American help. Donovan had got on well with Admiral Godfrey in London in July 1940 and had met Fleming in Gibraltar in February 1941.
The other Bill, ‘the quiet Canadian’ Bill Stephenson, had been sent to the USA in June 1940 by the British Secret Service with the mission of improving relations with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. President Roosevelt recommended ‘t
By Charlotte Buxton
In July 1917, after three years of bloody war, anti-German feeling in Britain was reaching a feverish peak. Xenophobic mutterings about the suitability of having a German on the throne had been heard since 1914. The fact that the Royal family shared part of its name, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, with the Gotha bombers responsible for the devastating recent raids on London turned these whispers into open cries.
In response, King George V – resenting any aspersions on his patriotism – changed the name of the British Royal family to the impeccably English-sounding Windsor. This act signalled the power of names in a society heavy with newly coined, derogatory labels for the enemy: from Jerry to Fritz, through the Krauts, the Boche, and the Hun, you needed to know who you were fighting, and why, it was felt.
But jingoism was not the only source of linguistic creativity in the period. The circumstances of the First World War were so horrific, so extraordinary, and involving so many millions of people that a new language was almost essential. Many words which emerged at the time have clear associations with the conflict, such as camouflage, blimp, aerobatics, demob, and shell shock. Others have a more complex history, emerging from soldiers’ slang; itself a product of the increased cosmopolitanism ushered in by the war.
Take me back to dear old Blighty
Before the war, many of the young Tommies (a term deriving from ‘Thomas Atkins’, which was used on specimen army documents from 1815 as the name of a typical private soldier) who were shipped abroad to fight had probably never ventured far beyond the villages in which they were born. Suddenly immersed in exotic, unfamiliar cultures, both their longing for home and their assimilation of their new surroundings are summed up in one word: Blighty.
Meaning Britain or England, but especially ‘home’, Blighty originated in the Indian army, as an anglicization of the Hindustani bilāyatī, wilāyatī meaning ‘foreign, European’. First recorded in print in 1915, Blighty was an ideal place of comfort, love, and security, sharply contrasting with the hideous discomfort, harsh discipline, and constant danger of the front, and remains a popular term amongst Brits for their homeland to this day. Less familiar is the word’s extended use, which popped up on the television programme Downton Abbey recently, when the conniving footman Thomas Barrow deliberately injures his hand in order to escape the trenches. In the programme, this war wound is referred to as a ‘Blighty’ – a popular term at the time for any injury serious enough to get its victim sent back home, hopefully for good.
Less extreme than a Blighty was a cushy wound – one which was not serious enough to get you sent home permanently, but which would usually buy some time away from the trenches. Deriving from the Hindu for ‘pleasure’, ḵushī, the word’s more familiar sense of ‘undemanding, easy, or secure’ developed at the same time. This has stuck in the language to this day, with ‘cushy job’ a particularly popular phrase in the Oxford English Corpus. In North America cushy is now also used to refer to a particularly comfy sofa or other piece of furniture – far removed, one might think, from its starting point in the mud and gore of battle.
From the trenches to the street
British soldiers adopted the language of their enemies just
In celebration of National Picture Book Month and Veteran’s Day:
Give a Military Family a Free Book
11 Ways to Ruin a Photograph book
In celebration of National Picture Book Month and Veteran’s Day and to honor of our military families,
download and give a free children’s picture book to a military family.
THE STORY: “11 Ways to Ruin a Photograph”
When her father goes soldiering for a year, a girl decides that without Dad at home, it’s not a family photo album. Though her beloved Nanny is in charge of the album that year, the girl makes sure that photographs of her never turn out well. Photos are blurred, wind blows hair in her face. April rains bring umbrellas to hide behind. Halloween means a mask. This poignant, yet funny family story, expresses a child’s anger and grief for a Dad whose work takes him away for long periods of time. It’s a tribute to the sacrifices made by military families and to those who care for children when a family needs support.
THIS STORY IS A WINNER!
In conjunction with “
The Help” movie (www.thehelpmovie.com),
TakePart.com (www.takepart.com/thehelp) recently sponsored three writing contests: a recipe contest, an inspirational story contest and a children’s story contest.
TakePart is the digital division of Participant Media which aims to bolster a movie’s audience with a message of social change. THE HELP movie campaign emphasized the role of stories in people’s lives.
Notice: This site and the story are not endorsed by or affiliated with TakePart, LLC or the motion picture “The Help” and or its distributors.
READ THE BOOK!
Darcy Pattison’s story, “11 Ways to Ruin a Photograph” is the winning children’s story. It is a free download at www.takepart.com/thehelp, or download it here (pdf download).
You can also order it for your:
MORE
Read more at www.11WaystoRuinaPhotograph.
PLEASE pass this along to anyone who might know a military family or to anyone in the military that you know.
By: Lauren,
on 11/3/2011
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The United States, preemption, and international law
By Professor Louis René Beres
Admiral Leon “Bud” Edney
General Thomas G. McInerney
For now, the “Arab Spring” and its aftermath still occupy center-stage in the Middle East and North Africa. Nonetheless, from a regional and perhaps even global security perspective, the genuinely core threat to peace and stability remains Iran. Whatever else might determinably shape ongoing transformations of power and authority in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia, it is apt to pale in urgency beside the steadily expanding prospect of a nuclear Iran.
Enter international law. Designed, inter alia, to ensure the survival of states in a persistently anarchic world – a world originally fashioned after the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 – this law includes the “inherent” right of national self-defense. Such right may be exercised not only after an attack has already been suffered, but, sometimes, also, in advance of an expected attack.
What can now be done, lawfully, about relentless Iranian nuclear weapons development? Do individual states, especially those in greatest prospective danger from any expressions of Iranian nuclear aggression, have a legal right to strike first defensively? In short, could such a preemption ever be permissible under international law?
For the United States, preemption remains a part of codified American military doctrine. But is this national doctrine necessarily consistent with the legal and complex international expectations of anticipatory self-defense?
To begin, international law derives from multiple authoritative sources, including international custom. Although written law of the UN Charter (treaty law) reserves the right of self-defense only to those states that have already suffered an attack (Article 51), equally valid customary law still permits a first use of force if the particular danger posed is “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation.” Stemming from an 1837 event in jurisprudential history known as the Caroline, which concerned the unsuccessful rebellion in Upper Canada against British rule, this doctrine builds purposefully upon a seventeenth-century formulation of Hugo Grotius.
Self-defense, says the classical Dutch scholar in, The Law of War and Peace (1625), may be permitted “not only after an attack has already been suffered, but also in advance, where the deed may be anticipated.” In his later text of 1758, The Right of Self-Protection and the Effects of Sovereignty and Independence of Nations, Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel affirmed: “A nation has the right to resist the injury another seeks to inflict upon it, and to use force and every other just means of resistance against the aggressor.”
Article 51 of the UN Charter, limiting self-defense to circumstances following an attack, does not override the customary right of anticipatory self-defense. Interestingly, especially for Americans, the works of Grotius and Vattel were favorite readings of Thomas Jefferson, who relied heavily upon them for crafting the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
We should also recall Article VI of the US Constitution, and assorted US Supreme Court decisions. These proclaim, straightforwardly, that international law is necessarily part of the law of the United States.
The Caroline notes an implicit distinction between preventive war (which is never legal), and preemptive war. The latter is not permitted merely to protect oneself against an emerging threat, but only when the danger posed is “instant” and
By: Lauren,
on 10/27/2011
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Outdated goals of war in the 21st century
By Louis René Beres
Even now, when the “fog of war” in Iraq and Afghanistan is likely at its thickest point, our leaders and military commanders still speak in starkly traditional terms. Such ordinary emphases on “victory” and “defeat” belie the profound and critically-nuanced transformations of war presently [...]
By: Kirsty,
on 10/17/2011
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As head of the SS, chief of police, 'Reichskommissar for the Consolidation of Germanness', and Reich Interior Minister, Heinrich Himmler enjoyed a position of almost unparalleled power and responsibility in Nazi Germany. Perhaps more than any other single Nazi leader aside from Hitler, his name has become a byword for the terror, persecution, and destruction that characterized the Third Reich.
By: Lauren,
on 9/26/2011
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There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By sunset, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk and their grip on the Pacific had been loosened forever.
Nonfiction writer James H. Keeffe, III authored a guest piece for Inside Google Books titled “A 67-year reunion of wartime survivors, inspired by Google Books.” Keefe’s book, Two Gold Coins and a Prayer: The Epic Journey of a World War II Bomber Pilot and POW, recounts his father’s (James H. Keeffe, II) military service experiences.
At one point, Keefe’s father was compelled to hide with a Jewish family in the attic of a kindly Dutch doctor; the family consisted of a mom, dad and nine year-old little girl. After Keefe’s distributor listed the title on Google Books, Helen Cohen-Berman found it from searching on Google and then got in touch with Keefe; she revealed herself to be that daughter who shared the attic space with Keeffe’s father six decades ago.
Here’s more from the piece: “Six months after Helen’s email to me, after much planning, Helen flew to Seattle and was reunited with my father on September 13, 2011. Sixty-seven years had passed since last they saw each other. It was a very moving experience—all possible because of Google Books. I was greatly honored to have been able to bring my father and Helen together again. Helen said the reunion was a ‘closing of a circle’ and a healing time for her as she was finally able to talk about some of the events she had endured. For my father, the reunion was a joyful occasion.”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
By John Tirman
The American public is essentially indifferent to the victims of wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The native populations that U.S. troops intervened on behalf of, or who were under the thumb of dictators we were trying to depose, suffered greatly in those wars, with millions dead and additional millions made homeless, impoverished, widowed, injured, or deprived of a normal life. This staggering human toll was and is not America’s responsibility alone, of course. But what is remarkable is how little the American public sympathizes with these victims, how little concern is registered.
By: Lauren,
on 8/4/2011
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By John Tirman
As the U.S. war in Iraq winds down, we are entering a familiar phase, the season of forgetting—forgetting the harsh realities of the war. Mostly we forget the victims of the war, the Iraqi civilians whose lives and society have been devastated by eight years of armed conflict. The act of forgetting is a social and political act, abetted by the American news media. Throughout the war, but especially now, the minimal news we get from Iraq consistently devalues the death toll of Iraqi civilians.
By: Maryann Yin,
on 7/25/2011
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This fall Clive Cussler, Sandra Brown, Kathy Reichs, Mark Bowden and Andrew Peterson will embark on Operation Thriller, a USO/Armed Forces Entertainment tour.
Operation Thriller sends authors to military bases around the world to entertain our troops–follow this link to read about last year’s tour. At the moment, the exact locations and tour dates cannot be revealed for security reasons. 2011 marks the 70-year anniversary of the USO organization.
Here’s more from the release: “OPERATION THRILLER, will fly to the Middle East, where they will sign autographs, pose for photos with the troops and talk about their books, movies, television series and writing. This trip marks the tour’s second installment, the first one kicked off in November 2010 and was comprised of Steve Berry, David Morrell, Doug Preston, James Rollins and Andy Harp.”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
By Louis René Beres
Theory is a net. Only those who cast will catch.
In an important work of contemporary philosophy and social science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn articulates the vital idea of “paradigm.” By this idea, which has obvious parallels in the arts, Kuhn refers to certain examples of scientific practice that provide theoretical models for further inquiry: Ptolemaic or Copernican astronomy; Aristotelian dynamics; Newtonian mechanics, and so on. At any given moment in history, we learn, the prevailing paradigm within a given discipline defines the basic contours of all subsequent investigation.
The transformations of these paradigms, transformations that are occasioned by the essential opposition of new “facts” and empirical findings to the prevailing dominant orthodoxy, are “scientific revolutions.” The transition from one paradigm to another represents the core dynamic in which science is able to progress.
As an intrinsically important (but generally under-recognized) area of political science, strategic studies are no exception. In the fashion of all other fields of inquiry, this very old area of scholarship can progress only to the extent that new paradigms routinely arise to “excavate” a consistently transforming consciousness of war and peace. Ironically, however, the emergence of such indispensable new paradigms has been remarkably scant in recent years, creating a genuine ossification of strategic studies. This condition is already precipitating assorted negative intellectual and policy consequences.
What is to be done? I propose to argue here that the benefits of Kuhn’s useful concept of paradigm could be enhanced by pertinent reference to the world of art. In this world, creative “advance” is achieved via ongoing and persistent challenges to dominant orthodoxies, what Kuhn would call the dynamic of “paradigm shifts.” Significantly, in the world of art, these entirely revolutionary transformations of prevailing epistemologies [i] are spawned by an always emergent avant-garde, by a critical “vanguard” for the new.
This is exactly what we need in strategic studies today. Now, we lack altogether the idea and the presence of an avant-garde. As a result, the field continues to be dominated by aging and increasingly irrelevant paradigms; hence, by static models of military thinking that are often incapable of shaping any purposeful military policies. More specifically, the absence of avant-garde thinking has had determinable consequences for our problematic strategic policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
One of the major “beat” [ii] poets of the 1950s titled a poem, “This Is Not a Poem.” [iii] In so doing, he sought, through irony and paradox, to confront and eventually to alter the prevailing norms of poetry. It is in the constant and continuing tension between orthodoxy and avant-garde that art advances.
This is also true of academic disciplines. Yet, in the genre with which we are presently concerned, the sub-field of political science that we call strategic studies, we are witnessing nary a new challenge to the now-sanctified mainstream still defined by Clausewitz, Sun-Tzu, Brodie, Schelling, Liddell-Hart, etc.
What is to be done? Let me offer an example from the world of art. To recognize the origins of modern art, a contemporary expression of which was contained in the “beat” movement, we must look at the revolutionary romanticism of Blake and the revolutionary classicism of David. So, too, must we consider the historical idealism of Delacroix (to Cezanne always “le grand maître&l
By: Lauren,
on 6/17/2011
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By Gregory A. Daddis
David Ignatius of The Washington Post recently highlighted several “positive signs in Afghanistan,” citing progress on the diplomatic front, in relations between India and Pakistan, and on the battlefield itself. Of note, Ignatius stressed how U.S.-led coalition forces had cleared several Taliban strongholds in Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The enemy, according to the opinion piece, was “feeling the pressure.” That same day Britain’s former ambassador to Afghanistan condemned General David Petraeus’s tactics as counterproductive and “profoundly wrong.” Denouncing an overemphasis on military action, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles noted that the use of body counts and similar statistics was reminiscent of the Vietnam War and “not conducive to a stable political settlement.”
The allusion to Vietnam, made frequently in the last five years, suggests uncertainty over the true amount of progress being made in Afghanistan today. For nearly a decade Americans in South Vietnam similarly tried in vain to assess progression towards the daunting political-military objective of a stable and independent noncommunist government in Saigon. Military officers and their civilian leaders employed a range of metrics to track success in the myriad political, military, economic, security, and social programs. As early as 1964, analysts were wading through approximately five hundred U.S. and Vietnamese monthly reports in an attempt to appraise the status of the conflict. In the process, the American mission in Vietnam became overwhelmed with data, much of it contradictory and, thus, of dubious value. By war’s end, questions remained over whether the U.S. Army in particular had achieved its goals in Southeast Asia. That debate continues to this day.
The American experience in Vietnam has served—rightfully so—as only an imperfect roadmap for our more current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In short, all wars are unique. Our recent conflicts, however, do illustrate the continuing challenges of defining progress and success in unconventional wars and of developing a coherent strategy for such wars. It is here that an objective study of Vietnam can offer insights and perspectives into the unresolved problems of measuring what matters most in an environment like Afghanistan. Quantitative statistics often do not tell the whole story as governmental allegiances, population security, and political stability all are highly subjective assessments. As in Vietnam, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have varied from province to province and any broad, centralized appraisals of the war likely miss the finer points of local conditions driving the political and military struggle.
Even in a war without front lines, Americans expect wartime progress to be linear. Effort should equal progress. Progress should lead to victory. The widely contrasting views of David Ignatius and Sherard Cowper-Coles, however, imply a battle is being waged over the very idea of “progress” in Afghanistan today. (Asking if the United States “won” in Iraq would provoke equally opposing responses.) If historical examples can be instructive in any way, the problem of metrics in Vietnam arguably helps illuminate the reasons why gauging wartime progress in Afghanistan has produced such a wide range of opinions. Assessing wars oftentimes is just as difficult as winning them.
Colonel Gregory A. Daddis is the author of No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War. Daddis teaches history at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. He has served in a variety of
By: Kirsty,
on 5/12/2011
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By David Fisher
There has been much recent debate about whether the 2003 Iraq War was legal, with both Tony Blair and his Attorney General summoned before the Chilcot enquiry to give evidence on this. But a more fundamental question is whether the war was moral.
On this question the Chilcot enquiry has been silent, perhaps reflecting a more general scepticism in society about whether moral questions can have objective answers. But there is a way of thinking going back to Aquinas, Aristotle and beyond that insists that there are rationally based ways to answer moral questions.
A key contribution to this is furnished by the just war tradition. This sets a number of tests which have to be met if a war is to be just. It has to be undertaken: for a just cause, with right intention, with competent authority, as a last resort, and the harm judged likely to result should not outweigh the good achieved, taking into account the probability of success; while in its conduct the principles of proportion and non-combatant immunity have to met; and the war end in a just peace.
This may appear over-prescriptive: erecting so many hurdles that war would become impossible. But the just war tradition recognises that wars can be just and may sometimes be necessary. What the tradition insists on are two fundamental requirements, as simple as they are rationally compelling: is there a just cause and will the harm likely to be caused by military action outweigh the good to be achieved by that cause? In other words, is war likely to bring about more good than harm?
So how does the Iraq War fare against these criteria?
Different reasons were adduced at different times for the war. But the declared grounds common to both the US and UK Governments was to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, so enforcing UN Security Council Resolutions.
We now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. But even that startling disclosure by the Iraq Survey Group would not necessarily invalidate the coalition’s disarmament objective as just cause if there had been strong grounds for believing that Saddam had such weapons.
The problem is that the evidence for such weapons was ‘sporadic and patchy’ in the words of the official Butler report. The Governments’ claim that they were acting on behalf of the UN was also weakened by the lack of substantial international support for military operations, evidenced by the reluctance of the Security Council explicitly to endorse such action through a second resolution. This, in turn, reflected concern that military action was not being undertaken as a last resort: that Saddam should have been given more time to convince the inspectors he had abandoned WMD. Doubt over whether each of these just war conditions was met did not amount to a knock-down argument against war. But the doubts taken together mutually reinforced each other and so strengthened concern that there was not a sufficient just cause.
It is, moreover, the single most serious charge against those who planned the Iraq War that they massively under-estimated the harm that would be likely to be caused by military action. Coalition leaders could not reasonably be expected to have forecast the precise casualty levels that would follow military action. But the coalition leaders can be criticised for failing to give sufficient consideration to what would be the effects of regime change and for not formulating robust plans promptly to re-establish civil governance in its wake and ensure a peaceful transition to democracy. They thus acted with a degree of recklessness. Just as they had undertaken worst case assessments of Saddam’s WMD capability, so they had undertaken best case assessments of what would happen after the regime had been changed.
The Iraq War was, like most wars, fought from a mixture of
By:
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on 5/11/2011
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12 Days of Sci-Fi, Day 10:
Earth, space, earth, space, Canada…what? Where are we again? Believe it or not my fellow Americans, Canada is its own country, not a US holding (LOL!)…
Cloned to Kill by Derwin Mak
Equality
Editor’s comment: “Cloned to Kill” goes beyond the ethics of cloning to explore the nature of free will, forgiveness and belonging to community. As such, it’s a story not so much about clones as about us.”
One of the best aspects of great sci-fi is that it forces the reader to think through their own values and beliefs by presenting these in a new, never-before-imagined situation. Thus Derwin Mak, our author, has forced his reader to deliberate the unthinkable. Should clones be baptized? Are they human like natural-born people? Should they receive the sacraments? Ultimately the reader is forced to question what it means to be human. And mildly, another thread running through the plot involves the hearing of voices…saints have experienced this by God’s grace, yet everyday people suffer it as a result of mental illness. What is sane? What is humane? This is an excellent story for family or book club discussion, as its mere dozen pages leaves much to be discussed. Don’t miss it in the anthology Infinite Space, Infinite God II http://ow.ly/4F48e .
(Derwin Mak lives in Toronto, Canada. His story “Transubstantiation” won the 2006 Prix Aurora Award for Best Short-Form Work in English. His novel The Moon Under Her Feet was a finalist for a 2008 Prix Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English. His second novel, The Shrine of the Siren Stone, was published in 2010. With Eric Choi, he co-edited The Dragon and the Stars (DAW Books), the first anthology of science fiction and fantasy written by persons of Chinese ancestry living outside China. His website is www.derwinmaksf.com .)
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12 days of sci-fi, day 8:
Back on earth again, we switch gears to a story with a modern day setting that seems it could be straight out of today’s news…except the humanitarian aid workers aren’t quite what they seem to be. Parents should be advised that one of the themes to the plot is the abuse of very human-like female droids as sex slaves.
Tin Servants by J. Sherer
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Editor’s comment: “He’d (the author) read a lot of stories about robots trying to act human, but humans acting as robots?”
This is a solid, fast-paced action drama set in Ghana nearly 50 years from now. The trauma and tragedy of a war-torn African nation, as well as risk to the protagonist, are realistically told almost as if we were watching an award-winning film. The beauty to reading stories instead of watching them in film is that the reader has the benefit of the character’s self-talk. We sense Paul’s, a/k/a TK-19’s, yearning to help the refugees with every cell in his body. Or at least the ones that are still human…
Don’t miss out. Pick up a copy of Infinite Space, Infinite God II at Amazon http://ow.ly/4F48e .
(J Sherer lives in Southern California and works as a marketing supervisor for a large credit union. When he’s not writing, he enjoys playing sports, catching up on his favorite stories, and working with others on business strategies and tactics. His blog, Constructing Stories (www.jsherer.com), is a place where writers of all levels can engage in meaningful dialogue about the writing and storytelling process. He also partners with Nathan Scheck to present a free online science fiction adventure experience called Time Slingers (www.timeslingers.com). J Sherer’s past publication credits include Infinite Space, Infinite God; Dragons, Knights, and Angels Magazine; and the West Wind.)
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you read that knocked your socks off?
Jeanette Murray is the author of The Officer Says “I Do.” She dropped by the virtual offices to introduce herself and chat about her new book.
