Finishing Business: Ten Steps To Defeat Global Terror

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant With Great Insights
Review: C-Span2 Book TV has an excellent author event available. The author is very articulate and the book is brilliant. Some of the main points of the book are listed below.

1. We do not understand the danger of terrorism. We are dealing with a political movement with political ambitions. The terrorists are using religion as a cover.

2. Our government needs major reforms. Discipline and accountability has to be a responsibility of government officials.

3. We need to change our focus from national defense to national security. We need to form a national security university.

4. We need better ways to respond globally to the terrorism threat. We need to rejuvenate NATO. NATO now has a global mission.

5. The danger is in the Middle East. The real terrorist threat is to the Middle East, not so much to the USA mainland.




Rating:
Summary: Finally An Overall Framework on Terror
Review: First, let me just list the people whose names appear on the back of the book making comments on the the book and/or its author.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Former National Security Advisor
Brent Scowcroft, Former National Security Advisor
John Lehman, Former Secretary of the Navy
Anthony Zinni, Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command
James Woolsey, Former Director of Central Intelligence
John Hamre, Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense.

The theme of the book is far different, far more wide ranging and comprehensive than most of the writing on the subject, far more than television coverage shows, and infinitely more than the gibberish that was the election rhetoric.

The book says that the War on Terror, like our Wars on drugs, poverty, crime and other social ills is so far a war on symptoms, not on a cause. And unless some dramatic changes in the thought processes of those in charge, is likely to be just as ineffective. Dr. Ullman defines the danger as Jihadist Extremism, a polititial ideology just as Bolshevism or Nazism, with a thin veneer of religion that is intent on establishing some form of a fundamentalist state backed by Saudi oil money, with an almost unlimited supply of radical young men from Africa to Indonesia, and potentially with nuclear weapons from the Pakistani arsenal.

To fight such forces will require a fundamental change in the way the United States and the rest of the world addresses the problem. To go on further would require that this review be nearly as long as the book itself. Let me just conclude that this book has the ring of George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Herman Kahn and Henry Kissinger in their early days of defining the danger of the post World War II Soviet Union. The country will ignore this book at its peril.

Rating:
Summary: "If I were King . . . "
Review: If you were thinking that the War on Terror is going to be over any time soon, Harlan Ullman will quickly disabuse you of that notion. He rightly points out this is actually a War on Jihadist Extremism. Winning that war will require remedying the discontents that feed the extremism, and repositioning the United States government to be better able to do so. Most of the book is a rather dismal catalog of all the reasons for our failures to date. The background is great for those unfamiliar with this area, but sometimes the prose makes the phone book look enticingly entertaining by comparison.

But what are the "10 Steps" promised in the subtitle? They are ambitious, indeed. The first is to stop thinking about a Global War on Terror (remember the wars on drugs and poverty?), and recognize that this is a war against Jihadist Extremism. That makes sense. Next, we must realize that the danger posed by the terrorists is not the buildings they might demolish, but the institutions they threaten to disrupt--like our economic system and our personal freedoms. That, also, is imminently logical. At this point, Dr. Ullman becomes more ambitious. We must also reorganize the White House, Congress, and Defense Department, commit billions and billions to bring the "Crescent of Crisis" into the 21st Century, and force government officials to sign pledges similar to those required by Sarbanes-Oxley so that they can be held responsible for their actions. If Dr. Ullman is correct in all of this, we are in for a truly long haul.


Rating:
Summary: Finishing Business: Ten Steps To Defeat Global Terror
Review: Outstanding book with great insights into political options. Extremely timely and highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Where was the editor?
Review: This book is brilliant in multiple ways. It gives insights to many otherwise puzzling events in the recent past. Unfortunately, perhaps in the rush to get it to press while still topical, the editing is dreadful and makes the book a Murmansk run for the reader.

Example from page 42: "After the terrorist attacks, had Al Gore been president, it is unlikely that he would have had little option except to go after al Qaeda in Afganistan." I read that to mean that he'd have had other options, but who knows?

The flying leaps from topic to topic, often even within a single paragraph lead one either to give up and skim downwind touching only the wavetop highlights or beat to windward through mounting syntactic surf in trying to follow the argument. Ever hear of transitions ? (Usually taught in freshman comp.) The obscure syntax sometimes reads as if English were an almost-mastered second language to Ullman.

As a current member of the Naval Institute and a fan of Ullman's work, I am embarassed by the egregious editing failures of this otherwise outstanding work. The Naval Institute has failed Ullman. His work deserves better.