May I suggest "Citizen Soldiers" by Stephen E. Ambrose.
Yes, you may. And I'll simply scoff at your naivete. Military men are of three kinds. The Honorable, The Naive and The Corrupt.
What we have today in Iraq is the the Corrupt leading the Naive. There are no honorable men among the forces that illegally invaded Iraq and now immorally foment terror in the middle of the night by using tanks to knock down people's front walls and kidnap the residents. And for what? So Halliburton, Bechtel and the Kuwaiti royal family can rip off the American taxpayer and the Iraqi oilfields. It's a really disgusting example of world-class looting that we are witnessing.
Instead of reading something as naive as Stephen Ambrose, I suggest you use your mind to try to get at the truth of what is occurring in Iraq. It is part of a pattern.
You could really do yourself a huge favor by reading "A People's History of the United States" by Prof. Howard Zinn. Well over three million people have, and they've had their eyes opened to the tawdry underbelly of the expansion of America from a tiny seaboard colony into a global imperial enterprise.
Next, you should dive into the oeuvres of Gore Vidal and especially Noam Chomsky, who knows more about world politics than 99.999999% of the population and writes about it quite eloquently.
Then, you could take just two minutes and read and understand the words of the man that the J.P. Morgan Bank tried to hire to execute a coup d'etat against Franklin Roosevelt. Here's Smedley Butler in his own words:
"WAR IS JUST A RACKET"
fas.org
lexrex.com
And if you really want to get past some of your naivete, you should definitely read this:
neravt.com
*****
Steven Ambrose, at the end, was a sad man. A broken man. A mere apologist for empire and the government's propaganda. It paid well, I'm sure his heirs are happy with their inheritance, if not Ambrose's legacy as a sell-out and panderer. |
