If you are going to read one book ...

on the war on terror, the War in Iraq, Bush Administration foreign policy, etc., it should be Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. I just finished it and it is as complete an account as we are likely to get in one book for quite some time. Hersh is an impecable reporter. He made his reputation as the free-lance writer who exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Since September 11, 2001, he has been the single most important investigative reporter in the world with his continuing coverage in the New Yorker. This book brings it all together in a seamless narrative. He opens with Abu Ghraib (which he, more than any other single reporter, is responsible for exposing), but then takes us back to September 11th and moves forward. Great insights not only on Afghanistan and Iraq, but Pakistan (remember those nukes?), Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and so on.

Speaking of reporters, I am currently reading A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam by Robert Mann, a very lucid and detailed narrative of the decision making by U.S. government officials regarding Vietnam from World War II onward. While there is much to comment on regarding the book, I just want to mention here one thing that struck me: as early as 1959, when the first series of articles by Knight-Ridder reporters came out debunking the rosy scenario in Vietnam that officials were feeding our citizens, the reporters were branded as unpatriotic and treasonous, aiding and abetting our enemies in Moscow and Peking. While reporters like David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne and Peter Arnett started to provide very detailed (and accurate) reports of how things were really going in the war ca. 1961 (by accompanying and interviewing the U.S. troops who fought alongside the Vietnamese), U.S. embassy and military officials for the most part kept feeding the White House misleading statistics and upbeat assessments. Importantly, none of these reporters was at the time against U.S. involvement; they simply reported how incompetent, corrupt, and unpopular our South Vietnamese allies were and how untenable the military situation was. Kennedy, for one, knew these reporters were providing more accurate information, but what he (and later Johnson) chose to do with that information is a story for another day.