Kerry's book was mostly about international crime organizations like the Sicilian, Russian, and Japanese mafias, Colombian drug cartels, etc. Reviewers of The New War by Kerry have found it short on specific advice.
Can't wait to hear you call Library Journal an RNC attack publication.
There's a very good review from Free Republic at the end of this post. It notes that Kerry actually allowed that a loose nuke might be set off in an American city, but his answer to that possibility is very disappointing.
From Library Journal
In a cursory overview of international crime, Senator Kerry (D-Mass.) implausibly calls for foreign criminal law to be imported into the United States to prosecute nationals of other countries who plan crimes here then conduct them abroad. His rationale is that weak or corrupt countries cannot effectively prosecute crimes committed within their jurisdictions. At the same time, he suggests that crimes committed against Americans abroad be prosecuted here in "special courts." He also calls for transnational asset forfeiture, in which victimized countries would share in the forfeiture of assets seized in cooperating jurisdictions. While well intentioned, the book is short on specifics and contains no revelations about international crime. For general audiences.?Harry Charles, Attorney at Law, St. Louis, Mo.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Fresh from a hard-fought win over Governor William Weld in the 1996 Massachusetts senatorial race, Kerry pulls together information he gathered as chairman and ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations (1987^-97). "Crime still seems only a local phenomenon to most of us," Kerry notes, but crime has globalized, with international groupings--"the Italian Mafia, the Russian mobs, the Japanese yakuza, the Chinese triads, and the Colombian cartels"--working with smaller, specialized groups in "Nigeria, Poland, Jamaica, and Panama," and banks and businesses that enable such criminal enterprises to handle the vast wealth they generate. Kerry describes this network's key players, spotlighting the drug trade, terrorism, "human contraband," and money laundering, and suggesting globalized law enforcement that would seize global criminals' assets and share them (and criminal intelligence) with nations willing to cooperate. Civil libertarians will resist, but Kerry makes a disturbing case for his position. Mary Carroll --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
From one of the nation's top experts on international crime, Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), comes a fascinating overview of the newest generation of criminals and crimes that threaten America. When average Americans think of a crime syndicate, they probably think of the old-style Italian Mafia of movies like Donnie Brasco. That, plus declining homicide figures nationwide, threatens to lull us into a false sense of security. According to Kerry, who until this year was the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, the menace of global crime is greater than ever before. In a richly anecdotal book drawn from his tenure as an insider in the war against crime, Kerry details the newest quintuplet of dangers, which he calls ``The Big Five'': the Italian Mafia, the Russian mobs, the Japanese Yakuza, the Chinese triads, and the Colombian drug cartels. He devotes chapters to each of these threats and explains their growing influence and the ominous signs of transcontinental cooperation among them. Of their significance, Kerry writes: ``In strategy, sophistication and reach the criminal organizations of the late twentieth century function like transnational corporations and make the gangs of the past look like mom-and-pop operations.'' Other chapters are devoted to modern crimes like terrorism, money laundering, and illegal immigration, which the senator says threaten our very way of life. Kerry outlines a plan for meeting the new dangers, which includes the globalization of law enforcement and a ``reengineering of international law'' to allow countries to work together to fight criminals who ignore borders. At its worst moments, the book smells like a political pitch for the 2000 presidential race; at its best, it is a bold call to arms that Americans should not miss. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Card catalog description
The New War is a powerful warning that global crime is robbing us not only of our money but also of our way of life. As a result of his Senate investigations and access to law enforcement agencies, Senator John Kerry has seen the dark world of dirty money, violence, and corruption up close. In this groundbreaking book, he describes global crime organizations from Asia to South America, Europe to Africa, and shows why they have become one of the greatest threats to our national security. Kerry takes us inside major crime organizations that now operate on the global stage: the Russian "Mafiya," which includes much of the old Soviet KGB; the Chinese triads, whose tentacles reach into many American cities; the Colombian drug cartels; the Japanese yakuza; and the Sicilian Mafia. Most important, in The New War Kerry maintains that the aim of the global crime lords is to gain control of the very institutions that are the core of civil society - the courts, legislatures, banks, and media in their own countries as well as in the nations where they operate. And he demonstrates how an antiquated legal system is struggling to fight twenty-first-century criminal enterprises. This is a hard-hitting and critical assessment of current government policies for dealing with international crime. Kerry reveals the failures of both diplomacy and nerve that have crippled leaders in Washington and other Western capitals, as well as in Moscow and Beijing. He explains how law enforcement and judicial institutions must be reformed structurally to defeat vicious criminals. His recommendations are specific: Shut down offshore banks that launder and shelter criminal profits; regulate electronic money transfers; expand the scope of extraterritorial jurisdiction for major crimes committed against a country's citizens overseas; use the CIA and other intelligence services to penetrate global crime organizations; share the seized assets of international criminals with governments that cooperate in fighting global crime.
amazon.com
When asked on Fox News last weekend about his anti-terrorism record, Kerry quickly invoked The New War: "[I]n that book, ... I wrote about how we needed to strengthen our ability to be able to fight international criminal crime, including terror. ... I said, four years before New York, it'll take one mega-terrorist event in one of our cities to change life as we know it in America. I think we deserve a president who does see ahead."
Kerry must be assuming no one will go back and actually read his manifesto, because his description of it is awfully selective. Yes, Kerry briefly considered the possibility of a terrorist catastrophe on American soil. But The New War was almost entirely focused on the threat of global crime -- not terrorism. If the future Kerry predicted really had arrived, we'd currently be locked in a vicious cyberwar with CD-pirating Japanese yakuza, Chinese kidney-traders, and Italian mobsters -- not hunting Islamic fundamentalists potentially armed with weapons of mass destruction.
It is, of course, true that almost no one predicted a September 11-like attack, and few correctly identified Islamic terrorists as the chief post-cold-war security threat to the United States. But the ways in which The New War missed the mark are nevertheless revealing. They show the extent to which Kerry was influenced by the criminal investigations of his early Senate career, his preference for viewing post-cold-war security more as a matter for law enforcement than the military, and his tendency to describe problems ad nauseam without offering a clear and bold course of action.
....
On Fox News, he boasted of having dedicated a chapter to "The Globalization of Terror" and of predicting that "one mega-terrorist event in any of the great cities of the world [will] change the world in a single day." Indeed, he did. Kerry also, to his credit, accurately identified the danger posed by "loose nukes" in the former Soviet Union and all but predicted that "the Big One" -- a terrorist nuke in a major city -- is inevitable.
But, after issuing such dire warnings, The New War never offers anything like a proportional response. Kerry offers plenty of lofty talk about sacrifice and hardship -- "The nations of the earth that stand for the rule of civilized law must be willing to make sacrifices if that law is to endure" -- but his prescriptions tend to be bromides for international cooperation, like his call for "an entirely new, multilateral code of behavior" consisting of "nothing less than a full and deliberate commitment by every legitimate government to making the rule of civilized law the dominant force on the planet." Other ideas are either vague or small-bore: investments in new law enforcement technologies, closer regulation of international finance, the addition of 1,000 FBI agents overseas, and a new "global law enforcement" agreement that would allow countries to better cooperate.
What's missing are substantive specifics. There is no call for more funding for global nonproliferation initiatives, such as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, begun in 1991 and aimed at securing the loose nukes that worried him, or for cracking down on proliferator governments. Kerry has little to say about the role of U.S. intelligence agencies. Nor does he once consider whether "the new war" might require some new role for the U.S. military.
Perhaps worst of all is the odd note on which he closes -- a call for repairing America's domestic health through after-school programs, health care for all, and early-childhood intervention. Those programs, Kerry writes, "will enable us to make peace in our own country and contribute to it elsewhere." After reading that Manhattan is likely to be nuked someday, a reader can be forgiven for expecting more.
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