Bernard Porter London: Yale University Press, 2006, £18.99. h/b Porter is one of our leading historians of the British empire. He is also a friend of mine. Generally I wouldn’t try and review a friend’s book but this arrived too close to my deadline to find someone else – and someone more competent – […]
[…] and remains, far more imperialistic than the West has generally been, and that it was this that inspired the Al-Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, rather than any resentment against American aggression towards Moslem countries. In other words, 9/11 would have happened even without those US bases in Saudi Arabia. Islam […]
[…] unambiguous proof that absolutely nothing will deter us, that the entire world arrayed against us cannot stop us.’ (p. 286) Let us not forget that the current Pentagon doctrine is called ‘full spectrum dominance’ and that the US currently has over 1000 military bases around the world. In his recent piece on the subject […]
[…] a natural order – or at least, should be made so. Hence, as we have also discussed, the efforts of Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney at the Pentagon to establish the pre-emptive principle as a part of the US strategic furniture. Despite mounting near-unilateral military efforts in Iraq and the Balkans, the doctrinal case […]
[…] was helping the USA in its war with the Soviets in Afghanistan, and (b) US arms corporations were making money selling weapons systems and planes to the Pentagon which were being passed on to the Pakistan military as part of the price of co-operation in ‘the war on terror’. In short: Pakistan acquired the […]
[…] Sir Michael is among a number of senior British commanders who are said to question Britain’s backing for a US invasion of Iraq, and are sceptical of Pentagon claims about Saddam Hussein’s links with the al-Qa’ida terror organisation and his stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction.’ (1) Even more off-message On 25 January 2004 […]
[…] day after the article was printed Pravda published a long article on the Generals’ revolt in which it said that the mutiny was encouraged by NATO, the Pentagon and the CIA. (18) The rumours on April 22nd were launched cautiously by “a minor official at the Elysee Palace itself”, according to Crosby Noyes in […]
[…] at least three others missed. I find it difficult to believe that any of the powerful elements in the US state apparatus – the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, for example – would have felt it necessary to ambush Kennedy if they just wanted to get rid of him, or change some of his policies. […]
[…] careers for that to be accepted. Talbot conveys better than any other account I have read the conflict between JFK and those bits of the state, the Pentagon and the CIA, chiefly, which had serious vested interests in the Cold War. The centrepiece of Talbot’s account of this conflict with the US military, is […]
[…] have foreseen in 1963 just how massive an operation Vietnam was to become within only three years. Even the early ‘hawks’ in the State Department and the Pentagon assumed that south-east Asia could be controlled relatively easily and cheaply. (15) However, a more sophisticated version of this argument can be made — and it […]
