War Made Easy

Normon Solomon is a nationally syndicated columnist on media and politics, whose columns have appeared in national publications such as the Washington Post, LA Times, New York Times and Boston Globe. He has appeared on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour, CNN, MSNBC, even Fox News, and has often been a guest of various NPR shows. He is also the founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts.

Mr. Solomon has written a new and very timely book, entitled War Made Easy, How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. I discovered this book by way of an excerpt from it on truthout.org, under the title Beware the "War on Terrorism". To call this volume timely is putting it mildly. After the bombings in London this past week, terrorism, and its corollary "war on," are on everyone's lips and in every political blog, whether the bent is liberal or conservative.

Solomon has a website here, and his new book has its own website as well. At this website you can read chunks of the book. This quote from the piece (Beware the "War on Terrorism") on truthout.org, as well as commondreams.org is worth reading, if you read no other part of WME:

Voices of reason, even when they've come from within the country's military establishment, have been shunted aside. In late November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, told C-SPAN viewers: "Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism. And it does whip up fear. Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few."

However, Jim Hightower thinks we need to read this book, and that's good enough for me. He says of it:

If you want to help prevent another war (Iran? Syria?), read War Made Easy now. This is a stop-the-presses book filled with mind-blowing facts about Washington's warmongers who keep the pentagon budget rising. It would be funny if people weren't dying. WME exposes the grisly game and offers the information we need to stop it.

| +Save/Share | |