Subterms
BooksTop general feared Trump would launch nuclear war, Woodward book reportsGeneral Milley worried about Trump’s ‘trigger point’ after the election and monitored him to prevent catastrophic military strike Martin Pengelly in New York@ More
BooksMelania Trump like Marie Antoinette, says former aide in hotly awaited bookStephanie Grisham says former first lady refused to condemn Capitol attackers and believed husband’s lie about election fraud Martin Pengelly in New York@ More
Politics booksTwenty years on from 9/11, is US democracy working? From 9/11 to the storming of the Capitol, a new book by Biden biographer Evan Osnos covers a tumultuous period of US history. He talks to David Smith about Trump, Afghanistan and the beginning of a new eraDavid Smith in Washington@ More
BooksEx-Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham to release White House bookGrisham, also a former top aide to Melania Trump, to publish memoir containing ‘surprising new scandals’ in October Martin Pengelly@ More
The ObserverChinaJonathan Mirsky obituaryJournalist and historian of China who went from admiring the regime to being one of its sternest critics Jonathan SteeleThu 9 Sep 2021 12.15 EDTLast modified on Thu 9 Sep 2021 12.17 EDTJonathan Mirsky, who has died aged 88, was a prominent American historian of China who switched to journalism and won the international reporter of the year title in the 1989 British Press Awards for his coverage in the Observer of the Tiananmen uprising.Getting the story had been a bloody experience. Armed Chinese police gave him a severe beating when they discovered he was a journalist. He was lucky to be rescued by a colleague from the Financial Times who led him away, his left arm fractured and three teeth knocked out.Mirsky’s career encapsulated the shifts in the way the western left viewed China, from the first decades of communist rule to Beijing’s move to capitalism while still under single-party control.He began as an early and prominent academic critic of the US’s role in the Vietnam war, starring in numerous protest marches and campus teach-ins. Opposing the US strategy of isolating China in the years before Nixon and Kissinger’s 1972 visit to Mao Zedong in Beijing, Mirsky supported the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group of radical US academics who criticised the senior faculty elite of US Asian studies for their silence on the immorality of the war.He had his first direct encounter with Maoism on an extraordinary boat trip led by Earle Reynolds, a Quaker peace activist. In 1969 Reynolds took Mirsky and four other Americans on his ketch, Phoenix, heading for Shanghai. It was meant as a goodwill gesture in the hope of starting a dialogue between Americans and Chinese officials. When they were stopped by a Chinese naval vessel 20 miles from the coast and ordered to leave, Mirsky – according to his account to friends – thought: “OK. In that case I’ll swim to China.” He jumped into the sea. The Chinese vessel hurriedly pulled away, and the Phoenix sailed back to Japan.Mirsky was never a “110 percenter” like some western admirers of Maoism but he was prepared to be impressed on his first foray to China in April 1972. With a dozen other young China scholars he spent six weeks travelling around the country with official guides. As he recalled in a book of essays by alumni of King’s College, Cambridge, he had gone “convinced that the Maoist revolution and even the Cultural, which was still going on, were good for China”. After only a few days he became convinced something bad was happening that their hosts were covering up. Many colleagues on the trip resented his growing scepticism. Some years later Mirsky met one of the guides again and complained about his deception. The guide replied: “We wanted to put rings in your noses and you helped us put them there.”Over the next four and a half decades Mirsky was to develop into one of China’s sternest and most knowledgable critics, a trajectory that he described as “From a Mao fan to a counter-revolutionary” in his contribution to the book My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on Their First Encounters with China (2012). He regularly lambasted western leaders for downplaying human rights violations for the sake of trade.In typically colourful language in a 2014 article for the New York Review of Books, he deplored the lack of political and social progress. “I may have been inadvertently right in May 1989 [just after Tiananmen] when I said China would ‘never be the same again’. It is sleeker, richer, internationally more reckless, more corrupt – and its leaders are ever more terrified … I am reminded of the old street sweeper in 1990 at a corner in Beijing. She was shovelling donkey dung into a pail. I asked her if she thought things had changed for the better. She replied, ‘This city is like donkey dung. Clean and smooth on the outside, but inside it’s still shit.’”Mirsky was born in New York to Reba Paeff, a children’s author and harpsichord player, and Alfred Mirsky, a pioneer in molecular biology. Educated first at Ethical Culture Fieldston school in the city, he went on to obtain a BA in history at Columbia University. He spent a year at King’s, Cambridge, in 1954, during which he met an American woman who had been a missionary in China and who urged him to study Mandarin. Three years of language study in the US followed before Mirsky, with his first wife, Betsy, also a Mandarin student, went to Taiwan to run a language school for four years.Back in the US he was awarded a PhD in Chinese history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966. He and Betsy divorced in 1963 and he married Rhona Pearson, a British neurobiologist, with whom he moved to Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, in 1966. There he became co-director of the East Asia Language and Area Studies Center. However, he was refused tenure, in part because of his anti-Vietnam protest activity, and in 1975 he and Rhona moved to London.Mirsky was attracted to journalism and became the Observer’s China correspondent, based in London but frequently travelling to the country. His critical views of communist rule were strengthened when he made the first of six visits to Tibet for the paper. He decided the fault was not just communism but racist imperialism by Han Chinese towards ethnic minorities. Later he visited the exiled Dalai Lama in north India, who became a close friend. They shared the same sense of humour, and Mirsky was delighted to receive a long message from the Dalai Lama a few weeks before he died.During a trip to China in 1991 Mirsky was asked by the foreign ministry to leave the country and told he would never again receive a visa. In 1993 he moved to Hong Kong to become East Asia correspondent of the (London) Times until he resigned in 1998 in protest at its owner, Rupert Murdoch’s, accommodating line on China. Back in London, Mirsky wrote dozens of book reviews, mainly for the New York Review of Books. They were always erudite and colourful, and are admired today by scholars of China for their astute observation.For at least a quarter of a century Mirsky loved to hold court with friends over lunch at the same table at Fortnum and Mason’s in Piccadilly, usually enhanced by at least one Jewish and one off-colour joke. In the words of a close friend, Michael Yahuda, a former professor at the London School of Economics, “Jonathan was a master of anecdotes and he was never shy of embellishing them in favour of a good story. Above all, he enjoyed friendships and a good meal. Life with him was never dull.”He and Rhona divorced in 1986. While in Hong Kong, a decade later Mirsky married Deborah Glass, an Australian specialist in financial regulation who became deputy chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission when they moved to London. In 2014 they separated and Deborah returned to Australia.He is survived by his sister Reba. TopicsChinaHistory booksNewspapers & magazinesUS politicsThe ObserverobituariesReuse this content More
BooksInterview‘America is not a perfect country’: David Rubenstein on Trump, Biden and a nation’s troubled historyMartin Pengelly In his new book of interviews with influential figures, the billionaire considers the health of US democracy and how it might withstand further attacks@ More
BooksThe Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post used freedom of information to produce the definitive US version of the warJulian BorgerSun 5 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 5 Sep 2021 02.02 EDTIn the summer of 2009, the latest in a long line of US military commanders in Afghanistan commissioned the latest in a long line of strategic reviews, in the perennial hope it would make enough of a difference to allow the Americans to go home.‘The intensity has not changed’: Jason Kander on the fall of Afghanistan – and trying to get friends outRead moreThere was some excitement in Washington about the author, Gen Stanley McChrystal, a special forces soldier who cultivated the image of a warrior-monk while hunting down insurgents in Iraq.Hired by Barack Obama, McChrystal produced a 66-page rethink of the Afghan campaign, calling for a “properly resourced” counter-insurgency with a lot more money and troops.It quickly became clear there were two significant problems. Al-Qaida, the original justification for the Afghan invasion, was not even mentioned in McChrystal’s first draft. And the US could not agree with its Nato allies on whether to call it a war or a peacekeeping or training mission, an issue with important legal implications.In the second draft, al-Qaida was included and the conflict was hazily defined as “not a war in the conventional sense”. But no amount of editing could disguise the fact that after eight years of bloody struggle, the US and its allies were unclear on what they were doing and who they were fighting.The story is one of many gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities uncovered by Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post. His book is based on documents obtained through freedom of information requests, most from “lessons learned” interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a watchdog mandated by Congress to keep tabs on the hundreds of billions flowing into Afghanistan.In the Sigar files, and other interviews carried out by military institutes and research centres, Whitlock found that soldiers of all ranks and their civilian counterparts were “more open about their experiences than they likely would have been with a journalist working on a news story”.Blunt appraisals were left unvarnished because they were never intended for publication. The contrast with the upbeat version of events presented to the public at the same time, often by the very same people, is breathtaking.The Afghanistan Papers is a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years. The title and the contents echo the Pentagon Papers, the leaked inside story of the Vietnam war in which the long road to defeat was paved with brittle happy talk.“With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict,” Whitlock writes. “Instead, they chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”As Whitlock vividly demonstrates, the lack of clarity, the deception, ignorance and hubris were baked in from the beginning. When he went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, George Bush promised a carefully defined mission. In fact, at the time the first bombs were being dropped, guidance from the Pentagon was hazy.It was unclear, for example, whether the Taliban were to be ousted or punished.“We received some general guidance like, ‘Hey, we want to go fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan,’” a special forces operations planner recalled. Regime change was only decided to be a war aim nine days after the shooting started.The US was also hazy about whom they were fighting, which Whitlock calls “a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover”.Most importantly, the invaders lumped the Taliban in with al-Qaida, despite the fact the former was a homegrown group with largely local preoccupations while the latter was primarily an Arab network with global ambitions.That perception, combined with unexpectedly easy victories in the first months, led Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to believe the Taliban could be ignored. Despite offers from some leaders that they were ready to negotiate a surrender, they were excluded from talks in December 2001 on the country’s future. It was a decision the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, called the “original sin” of the war.Rumsfeld declared there was no point negotiating.“The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them,” he said in March 2002. “And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone.”Not even Rumsfeld believed that. In one of his famous “snowflake” memos, at about the same time, he wrote: “I am getting concerned that it is drifting.”In a subsequent snowflake, two years after the war started, he admitted: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”’The Taliban had not disappeared, though much of the leadership had retreated to Pakistan. The fighters had gone home, if necessary to await the next fighting season. Their harsh brand of Islam had grown in remote, impoverished villages, honed by the brutalities of Soviet occupation and civil war. The Taliban did not represent anything like a majority of Afghans, but as their resilience and eventual victory have shown, they are an indelible part of Afghanistan.Bruised Biden tries to turn the page after US debacle in AfghanistanRead moreWhitlock’s book is rooted in a database most journalists and historians could only dream of, but it is far more than the sum of its sources. You never feel the weight of the underlying documents because they are so deftly handed. Whitlock uses them as raw material to weave anecdotes into a compelling narrative.He does not tell the full story of the Afghan war. He does not claim to do so. That has to be told primarily by Afghans, who lived through the realities submerged by official narratives, at the receiving end of each new strategy and initiative.This is a definitive version of the war seen through American eyes, told by Americans unaware their words would appear in public. It is a cautionary tale of how a war can go on for years, long after it stops making any kind of sense.TopicsBooksAfghanistanSouth and Central AsiaUS militaryUS foreign policyUS national securityGeorge BushreviewsReuse this content More
BooksOur Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after TrumpTom Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln – on how American democracy can only be brought down from within Lloyd GreenSun 22 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 22 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTLiberal democracy is under attack from within. Institutional trust erodes. Fewer than one in six Americans believe democracy is working well, nearly half think democracy isn’t functioning properly, and 38% say democracy is simply doing meh. Atomization, bowling alone and nihilism have converged at the ballot box.The Reckoning by Mary L Trump review – how to heal America’s traumaRead moreRepublicans are hellbent on shoving the events of 6 January, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol, down a deep memory hole. GOP governors in Florida, Mississippi and Texas remain sanguine as Covid-19 dispatches children to intensive care. Seven months into his presidency, Joe Biden looks to some like Jimmy Carter redux, competence and judgment seriously doubted, allies strained and divided. FDR, he’s definitely not.Into this morass parachutes Tom Nichols, with a meditation on the state of American democracy. Nichols grew up in a working-class home in Massachusetts and is now a professor at the US Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School. He is also a Never Trump conservative.In his eighth book, Nichols is pessimistic. “Decades of constant complaint,” he writes, “regularly aired in the midst of continual improvements in living standards, have finally taken their toll.”The enemy, Nichols asserts, is “us”. Citizens of democracies, he writes, “must now live with the undeniable knowledge that they are capable of embracing illiberal movements and attacking their own liberties”.As if to prove his point, Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, recently made light of Trump’s attempts to have the Department of Justice subvert the election result. Even with Trump out of office, Senator Lindsay Graham continues to play first golf buddy, Renfield to Trump’s Count Dracula. A majority of congressional Republicans voted against certifying the 2020 election.In 2016, Nichols urged conservatives to vote for Hillary Clinton because Trump was “too mentally unstable” – far from the “very stable genius” he would later claim to be.In Our Own Worst Enemy, Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln on how threats to American democracy always come from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” Nichols sees the internet and the “revolution in communications” as the means by which we reached this dark point.Public life has become ever more about dopamine hits, instant reaction and heightened animus. Our fellow citizens double as our enemies. Electronic proximity breeds contempt, not introspection. Social media and cable television provide a community for those who lack a three-dimensional version.Nichols looks to ancient Greece for a reminder that nothing lasts forever. Admiringly, he quotes Pericles, the Athenian general and orator – but observes that Pericles was not around when his city state collapsed. He died two years earlier, behind “the besieged walls of Athens – from a plague”.History can repeat itself.In September 2016, writing in the Claremont Journal of Books under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Michael Anton declared the contest between Trump and Clinton the “Flight 93 Election”: a reference to the plane that came down in Pennsylvania on 9/11 when passengers attacked their hijackers. Clinton, he argued, simply had to be stopped. First principles of conservatism could therefore be jettisoned.“Charge the cockpit or you die,” Anton thundered. “You may die anyway … There are no guarantees.”What, he asked, must be done “against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality and corruption?” To Anton, for the right, respect for “democratic and constitutional niceties” was ultimately a sucker’s game. Culture was stacked against them.After a stint as a Rudy Giuliani speechwriter, and other stops along the way, Anton joined Trump’s national security council.Later this year the Claremont Institute will honor Ron DeSantis. At a press conference earlier this month, the Florida governor asked: “Would I rather have 5,000 [Covid-19] cases among 20-year-olds or 500 cases among seniors? I would rather have the younger.”A few weeks later, the Sunshine State is getting the worst of both worlds.Simple decency, it seems, is for losers. Amid the last presidential campaign, comparisons between the US and the Weimar Republic were rife. The January insurrection was seen as our “Reichstag fire”. The attackers came from the right.Nichols absorbs and abhors it all. Not surprisingly, he takes particular aim at the populist right, which he says has been the “main threat” to liberal democracy over the past two decades. That is subject to debate, which Nichols acknowledges. Regardless, he writes that the populist right “is a movement rooted in nostalgia and social revenge”.As if to make Nichols’ point, Lauren Boebert, the hard-right, QAnon-adjacent Republican congresswoman from Colorado, recently trashed Biden for having left America’s friends in Afghanistan in the lurch – after voting last month against granting 8,000 immigration visas to Afghans who assisted the US military.‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisisRead moreOther GOP diehards who opposed the legislation include Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mo Brooks and Paul Gosar. Greene and Gosar were charter members of the de facto white nationalist America First caucus. After a bomb threat on the Capitol this week, Brooks tweeted: “I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society.”Considering what ails America, Nichols offers limited prescriptions. He supports bridging the gap between civilian and military life. The progeny of the coastal elites opt for Ivy League colleges over the service academies, reinstatement of the draft isn’t likely and notions of national service all too frequently amount to “little more” than a paid internship, he writes.Concurrently, rightwing “Spartanism” breeds the unsustainable notion that “‘citizens’ and ‘soldiers’ are not the same people”.Nichols urges America’s youth to spend a summer in uniform, exposed to military life and skills. Most won’t join the army, he thinks, but will come away with a better knowledge of the soldier’s life. Right now, he laments, “there is no longer any common experience related to national defense”.Indeed. America has become one nation separated by a common language.
Our Own Worst Enemy is published in the US by Oxford University Press
TopicsBooksUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsUS CongressBiden administrationTrump administrationreviewsReuse this content More
