The Lessons of Modern War, Vol. 4: The Gulf War
Fourth in a series that has covered the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1973 through 1989, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Afghan and Falklands wars, this is a crushingly complete and data-filled tome. Drawing on the best available sources, including government reports, journalistic coverage, memoirs, and interviews, the authors have amassed an enormous amount of material on the Persian Gulf War. More a reference volume with a technical focus than a book to be read from beginning to end, it none-the-less contains interesting analytical sections and deals well with issues of high policy and strategy. It is, in short, a comprehensive guide to the war, which should stand for some years to come as a most useful work on the subject.
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Donald Rumsfeld has gotten better press as a secretary of war than he did as a secretary of defense. But the latter job is tougher, so he deserves some sympathy. The dilemmas of U.S. defense policy today reflect more than individual foibles and the difficulty of transforming a giant, often dysfunctional bureaucracy. Even more important, they stem from America's profoundly ambivalent and only semiconscious acceptance of its unique, world-historical role. Whatever the pace at which the Pentagon adapts to that fact, it must do so, and the more swiftly the better.
Whether or not the United States today should be called an empire is a semantic game. The important point is that it resembles previous empires enough to make the search for lessons of history worthwhile. Overwhelming dominance has always invited hostility. U.S. leaders thus must learn the arts of imperial management and diplomacy, exercising power with a bland smile rather than boastful words.
One does not rise through the bureaucracy as spectacularly as Colin Powell has without shrewd insight into of the game of government. But to understand Powell's views on issues ranging from the use of force to civilian control of the military, one has to return to his foot-soldier origins.

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