Current Events : American

The U.S. government is in crisis. With America’s attention fixated on who will step into the Oval Office in 2009, no one has noticed where the real power has shifted—to a vast network of unelected officials whose authority has grown wildly out of control. more...

Price: $16.00

Heavily armed guards at the entrances to malls and restaurants. Citizens deemed “suspicious” taken away without formal charges or legal counsel. Would a “safe” America even look like America anymore? One of the few journalists to penetrate the new counter terror initiative, Matthew Brzezinski offers an insider’s look at the new technology, laws, tactics, and persistent vulnerabilities of the post-9/11 era. more...

Price: $14.00

This work considers the principal international law and international order issues involved in the War Against Terrorism and in the War on Iraq in 2003. Specific attention is given to the application of international humanitarian and international human rights law in the wars. more...

Price: $40.00

Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks’s #1 New York Times bestseller, transformed the political dialogue on the war in Iraq—The Gamble is the next news breaking installment. Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began. Since early 2007 a new military order has directed American strategy. Some top U.S. officials now in Iraq actually opposed the 2003 invasion, and almost all are severely critical of how the war was fought from then through 2006. At the core of the story is General David Petraeus, a military intellectual who has gathered around him an unprecedented number of officers with both combat experience and Ph.D.s. Underscoring his new and unorthodox approach, three of his key advisers are quirky foreigners—an Australian infantryman-turned- anthropologist, an antimilitary British woman who is an expert in the Middle East, and a Mennonite-educated Palestinian pacifist. The Gamble offers news breaking information, revealing behind-the-scenes disagreements between top commanders. We learn that almost every single officer in the chain of command fought the surge. Many of Petraeus’s closest advisers went to Iraq extremely pessimistic, doubting that the surge would have any effect, and his own boss was so skeptical that he dispatched an admiral to Baghdad in the summer of 2007 to come up with a strategy to replace Petraeus’s. That same boss later flew to Iraq to try to talk Petraeus out of his planned congressional testimony. The Gamble examines the congressional hearings through the eyes of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and their views of the questions posed by the 2008 presidential candidates. For Petraeus, prevailing in Iraq means extending the more...

Price: $27.95

When the war on terrorism became the top U.S. priority, how did this affect the Army's other longstanding commitments?How should the Army adjust to the altered landscape? The author here summarizes the thoughts of a group of RAND Arroyo Center researchers who found five main demands that the Army must be able to meet: increased deployments, a broader range of capabilities, greater use of the transformation process to meet these goals, high demand for scarce skills, and a more flexible overseas basing structure. more...

Price: $9.95