Confront And Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars And Surprising Use Of American Power (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
I suppose this book poses the question: What does the Administration want you to know about the most sensitive issues, like the relationship with Pakistan and their terrifying nuclear arsenal?As near as I can make out, Sanger is relying almost exclusively on official sources. Now, he's got great stories to tell, but there's no hint that he's saying anything that he wasn't told by an official acting in accordance with their brief, a few quotes of Wikileaks documents notwithstanding.Well written, and with seemingly a lot of sources in the President's national security team, but in essence what you're getting is the Administration's story. If you've been reading the paper regularly, how much will be new?I suppose the evaluations of some of the personnel, that General Jack Johnson was marginalized, both by design and seemingly with his choice, Sanger nicely sketches a Pentagon functionary without many answers, but on the road a lot. But overall, you get the sense that his subjects are his sources, and he's not going to say anything bad about them . . . David Sanger's level of access to top-level sources in the Obama White House and elsewhere means that this book is chock-full of surprising revelations - about our cyber-attacks on Iran, about the philosophical rifts in Obama's foreign policy team, about the insane backlash from Pakistan after the bin Laden raid. The amount of legwork and the intimacy of the stories make for a breezy, consistently fascinating read.That having been said, I do wish that the writing was consistently more compelling and that I felt more clear on why the author wanted to tell this story in particular, about the closed-door decision-making in the Obama Administration. Books by newspaper journalists fall into this trap a lot; the reporting is top-notch but the personal connection never quite lands, and the author projects a veneer of keeping his/her powder dry rather than engaging in judgement-making.The level of access Sanger enjoys may also account for the conventionality of his assumptions about wartime decision-making. There's a sense that the Petraeus-endorsed counter-insurgency agenda is as genius as all of the fawning magazine profiles say it is, when a number of smart foreign policy folks are beginning to believe that the surges expended much blood and treasure to gain what could've been had much more cheaply with more focused troop deployments. And there's a real reluctance to dig into the very-real problems with the drone war in Pakistan (especially from the POV of Pakistanis, which is a real mess.) I'm not even sure it gets a full chapter in a book that's entirely about American power and secrecy, which seems strange.Nevertheless, there are nicely unlikely moments scattered throughout, like Hillary Clinton's rueful admission that the WikiLeaks publication of State Department cables exposed the depth of governmaner malfeasance in Tunisia, kicking off the Arab Spring. So - worth a real look.
What do You think about Confront And Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars And Surprising Use Of American Power (2012)?
Reading more like a novel, it covers the "war on terror" as it's being fought today.
—AshSch
Being considered for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.
—Manda4986
meh, but a terrific treatment of the Olympic Games operation against Iran
—aaaaaaaa
Great story telling, and a good illustration of the Obama doctrine.
—sunny
