Khaled Hosseini in Berkeley, in person and in print

A review of And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

In town recently for a probing interview conducted by Berkeleyside co-founder Frances Dinkelspiel, best-selling novelist Khaled Hosseini spoke about his craft much as any storyteller of our pre-literate past might have done.

“I just start writing and hope something happens,” he said. The interview took place June 23, 2013, before a capacity crowd in the chapel at the capacious First Congregational Church of Berkeley under the auspices of Berkeley Arts & Letters.

Hosseini starts with characters he cares about and sets out to tell their stories. “You should be really excited about writing when you get up in the morning,” he insisted. If he loses interest in the characters, he’ll throw out as many as ten chapters and start all over again.

“I spend years with these characters,” Hosseini explained. “There’s an internal dialogue that goes on” as they develop in surprising ways.

And the Mountains Echoed began as a “linear novel” about a young brother and sister, Abdullah and Pari, born in an Afghan village in the late 1940s. However, as Hosseini started to write, he began to wonder how some of the minor characters that had cropped up would fit into the narrative. For example, the children’s uncle Nabi “became central to the story” as the writing proceeded, and Nabi’s connection to a Greek doctor working for an NGO in Kabul subsequently took the story to a small Greek island as the doctor, too, emerged as a major character.

The result of Hosseini’s organic writing process is a novel that is at once intensely personal and broad in scope — a story that captures a half-century slice of Afghan  history as it relates the lives of Abdullah, Pari, and their family from the peaceful era of the mid-20th Century in Afghanistan to the present day in the South Bay below San Francisco. Compared to Hosseini’s previous novels, which verged on tear-jerker melodrama despite (or perhaps because of?) their universal appeal, And the Mountains Echoed is more ambitious, more nuanced, more insightful, and engages Hosseini himself far more.

This book firmly establishes Khaled Hosseini as one of the finest novelists working today. He belongs among that handful of post-colonial writers — including V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and Nadine Gordimer — who were born within cultures unfamiliar to “the West” and serve as our interpreters of the intercultural experience.

Khaled Hosseini, now 48, has lived in the United States since the age of 15, when his family secured political asylum and moved to San Jose. (A Communist coup had just toppled the Afghan King, and Hosseini and his family were fortunate to be living in Paris, where his father was a diplomat.) A physician, Hosseini practiced medicine in the South Bay for a decade until shortly after the runaway success of his first novel, The Kite Runner, persuaded him to turn to full-time writing. Collectively, his three novels — A Thousand Splendid Suns was the second — have sold more than 38 million copies.

Late in her interview, Dinkelspiel asked the author what plans he had for his next book. “I have a few ideas,” Hosseini said, “but I really won’t know what will happen until I sit down at the keyboard.”

A thriller that delivers both excitement and insight about the war in Afghanistan

A review of The Shadow Patrol, by Alex Berenson

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

 The cottage industry in spy thrillers encompasses a wide range of quality, from those that offer up cheap thrills with one-dimensional characters facing off in unreal circumstances to those, many fewer, that rise into the realm of literature, illuminating the human condition. The finest of the lot, such as Graham Greene and John Le Carre at their best, stand with other exemplars of modern fiction. Alex Berenson’s writing doesn’t quite measure up to them, but it comes close. His most recent novel about the adventures of soldier-spy John Wells, The Shadow Patrol, explores the tragic dimensions of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, from which no one leaves ennobled.

John Wells has left the CIA and his long-time love, his agency handler, Jennifer Exley, and is living in rural New Hampshire with Anne, a local cop. When his old CIA boss, Ellis Shafer, asks him to return to action in Afghanistan, where he spent so many years undercover inside Al Qaeda, Wells leaps at the chance. The agency’s Kabul station is in crisis. A Jordanian physician, having established a credible cover as an ally, has murdered the CIA’s top brass in the country by setting off a suicide vest. Now, in addition to the chaos that results when replacements for the top officials prove unequal to the task, reports have surfaced that the station has been penetrated by a Taliban mole. Wells’ assignment, to learn the identity of the mole, brings him and the CIA into conflict with the hierarchy of the Special Forces and eventually into a one-on-one test of wills with a Delta sniper who holds the key to the mole’s identity.

Returning years after his last visit to Afghanistan, Wells finds the country, the war, and the agency, all profoundly changed by the billions of U.S. dollars spread about the countryside and the years of unrelenting killing. Cynicism and greed have spread throughout the country like a virus.

When Wells checks into the CIA station in the capital, a senior officer tells him, “First off, understand the strategic situation’s a mess. We’re playing Whac-a-Mole here. First we had our guys in the east, and the south went to hell. Now we’ve moved everybody south, and the east is going to hell. And by the way, the south isn’t great either. This quote-unquote-government we’re working with, it’s beyond corrupt. Everything’s for sale. You want to be a cop? That’s a bribe. Five to ten grand, depending on the district. . . to become a patrolman. You want to be a district-level police chief? Twenty, thirty thousand. At the national level, the cabinet jobs are a quarter million and up.”

While there’s nothing in this monologue that we haven’t learned from news reports and the numerous nonfiction books about the war, this matter-of-fact informality drives home the point more clearly than any “objective” report could do. In fact, Alex Berenson was a New York Times reporter before he turned to full-time writing. As a reporter, he covered the occupation of Iraq, among other big stories, and he brings a reporter’s instinct for news and the value of obscure details to make a story come to light. In The Shadow Patrol, the intimate conversation and inner dialogue of American troops highlights the mind-numbing reality of war much more clearly than any nonfiction account could possibly do.

One of the most revealing passages in the book comes in the course of Wells’ conversation with the same CIA official who spoke of the corruption caused by the influx of U.S. dollars. Wells has asked “So how many officers do you have?”

“We’re close to full strength now. Six hundred in country.”

“Six hundred?”

“But you have to remember, only a few are case officers. More than two hundred handle security. Then we have the coms and IT guys, logistics and administrative . . . and the guys at the airfields, handling the drones. Fewer than forty ever get outside the wire to talk to the locals. Of those, most are working with Afghan security and intelligence forces. If you’re looking at guys recruiting sources on the ground, it’s maybe a dozen. . . . The security situation is impossible. Only the very best officers can work outside the wire without getting popped, and even then only for short stretches.”

This is today’s CIA.

Berenson has devoted significant effort to researching the agency, the reality of the war in Afghanistan, the heroin trade, the art of the sniper, and other elements in this clever and compelling story. The Shadow Patrol — the sixth in Berenson’s John Wells series — is a superb contemporary thriller that delivers both an exciting tale and down-to-earth reporting on the Afghanistan war.

Iraq war heroes, Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, and Hollywood all meet in this funny new anti-war novel

A review of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Tending to squeamishness as I do, I don’t often read novels about war unless they’re written with a generous dose of humor. Oh, I’ll admit to having read Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and a few other classics I remember less vividly, but that was all long ago. More recently, I’ve read and reviewed only Kill Anything That Moves, by Nick Turse, and The Outpost, by Jake Tapper. The war novels I truly cherish and have even been known to re-read are . . . well, anti-war novels, not to put too fine an edge on it. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Richard Hooker’s MASH, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 are all dead serious, of course, but they’re also hilarious from time to time (and Catch-22 nearly nonstop so). I generally find it difficult to deal with the grim side of war without a little help.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk fits very neatly into this latter category. It’s a funny book, beautifully written, and I suspect it conveys about as well as any humorless treatment a sense of the war in Iraq from the perspective of the Americans who fought it face to face with insurgents. It was no surprise to me when I learned after finishing the book that it had won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction. It’s that good.

Billy Lynn is a certified, true-blue, red-blooded American hero, one of eight surviving soldiers in a ten-man squad that engaged a large band of Iraqi insurgents in a deadly firefight. One of the two lifers in the squad, a sergeant Billy idolized, was shot, then grabbed and dragged away by two insurgents. Witnessing this terrible scene, Billy instantly, unthinkingly, leapt into the line of fire, shot and killed the sergeant’s two captors while dodging a barrage of bullets, and then proceeded to kill many of the other enemy fighters with one hand while he tended to the gravely wounded man with his other, finally cradling him in his lap as he died.

Clearly, events like this, though uncommon, were not unheard-of in the Iraq war — but this show of heroism was unique: it was captured on video by a Fox News camera team embedded with a neighboring squad and quickly found its way onto every TV, computer, tablet, and smartphone in America. Suddenly, Billy and his squad — erroneously dubbed “Bravo Squad” by reporters — are national heroes. Two, including Billy, received Silver Stars (though Billy’s commanding officer had recommended him for the Medal of Honor). Donald Rumsfeld’s Army, never slow to notice the possibility of a PR coup, yanks the squad out of Iraq and puts them on a multi-city “Victory Tour” all across the United States. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk tells the tale of the last couple of days of the Bravos’ tour, as they rush through a series of grueling appearances on Thanksgiving Day — prior to returning to Iraq to complete the eleven months left on their tours of duty.

Much of the story revolves around Billy’s interaction with the folks at home, and here’s where Ben Fountain shows his stuff and lays bare his feelings: “All the fakeness just rolls right off them, maybe because the nonstop sales job of American life has instilled in them exceptionally high thresholds for sham, puff, spin, bullshit, and outright lies, in other words for advertising in all its forms. Billy himself never noticed how fake it all is until he’d done time in a combat zone.”

Billy is nineteen years old, a native of small-town Stovall, Texas, and the rest of the Bravos hail from other towns throughout the broad sweep of the American South, from North Carolina to Arizona. They’re white, black, and brown. They’re real.

Ben Fountain has written one previous novel and a slew of short stories and nonfiction pieces for a long list of prestigious publications. He has won an arm’s length of awards for his literary work.

Two wrenching views of the U.S. military at war, Part 2: Afghanistan

A review of The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, by Jake Tapper

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

This is the second of two reviews of recent books that deal with the U.S. military at war. In a previous post, I reviewed Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse, which presents a dramatically different perspective on the subject by documenting the widespread atrocities committed by American troops four decades earlier.  

Christians are urged to “hate the sin, love the sinner.” Difficult as that may be to believe in many circumstances, the distinction between action and actor seems to be the only way to reconcile honor and support for American troops at war with the horrific acts they so often commit overseas. One recent book, award-winning journalist Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, fastens our attention on the numberless atrocities carried out by the U.S. military in Vietnam directly as a result of policies handed down from the top (the White House and Joint Chiefs of Staff). Turse shows how the military’s racist emphasis on the “body count” led directly and inevitably to the routine and indiscriminate murder of civilians throughout Vietnam. Rank-and-file soldiers (“grunts,” non-coms, lieutenants, captains, majors, light colonels) had little choice but to either participate in the slaughter or stand silently by. Doubtless, some enjoyed the opportunities for cruelty, but the overwhelming majority assuredly did not. Because for all intents and purposes the atrocities weren’t their “fault,” we could still honor and support them no matter how much we despised their heedless leaders.

Writing from a totally different perspective — from the ground up rather than top down — Jake Tapper relates the story in The Outpost of the men (and very occasionally, the women) who cycled in and out of an isolated combat installation in northeastern Afghanistan from 2006 to 2009. As in Kill Anything That Moves, we find soldiers in the field up to the rank of lieutenant colonel captives of policies set at much higher levels. They frequently display outstanding courage and suffer the deprivations of life in a harsh and hostile environment largely in silence, victims of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld’s deliberate decision to under-resource American forces in Afghanistan from the moment they invaded the country. However, the fatal decisions that sealed the fate of so many of the troops on the ground at what came to be named Combat Outpost Keating were a colonel’s decision to site the installation at what one visiting officer called the worst base location he’d ever seen and Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s insistence that the post not be closed until after he was reelected.

The story told in The Outpost relates the history of the Afghanistan war writ small. At its creation, Combat Outpost Keating was the northernmost U.S. installation in the country’s northeast, the first in the province of Nuristan, a historically and linguistically distinct enclave with a reputation for fierce hostility toward all outsiders. It was placed in an exceedingly vulnerable location in a valley, surrounded on three sides by steep mountains, against the advice of virtually every officer who viewed the site from the air. The colonel in command of U.S. forces in that region insisted on placing it there anyway, since it had easy access to a road that could be used to supply it, saving precious airborne resources. However, in short order it became clear that the road was both indefensible, because every convoy was ambushed by insurgents, and impassable by any vehicles with a wide wheelbase (such as Humvees). Only when one heroic officer was killed trying to prove to his superiors just how treacherous the road really was did the Army stop attempting to supply the outpost by truck. Nonetheless, the outpost itself remained where it was instead of being moved high up into the mountains (as the troops on the ground kept requesting), because no commanding officer wanted to cede territory on his watch. And the number of troops assigned there, which was inadequate to begin with, was gradually reduced because of the scarcity of military resources. Eventually, when a new unit came onto the base, a brilliant junior officer implemented the counterinsurgency policy associated with General Petraeus, managing to bring attacks on his troops to a halt for more than half a year. Then he was replaced by a soldier who was critical of the policy, reversed course, and saw his hostility to the local people returned in spades. Finally, orders came down to abandon the outpost, but spies among the Afghan soldiers living there reported the preparations to the Taliban. In short order, days before the planned evacuation date, several hundred mujahideen surrounded the 53 Americans, fought their way into the outpost, and succeeded in killing seven of them and wounding eleven. Only one of the Afghan soldiers chose to fight; all the others either fled or hid. The Taliban was only driven back by the heroism of the defenders — and the extravagant use of airpower, including Apache attack helicopters, A-10 warthogs, F-15 fighter jets, and even a B-1 bomber dropping 2,000-pound bombs. After a decent interval, the outpost was abandoned and bombed to smithereens by American planes.

Think about the broad strokes in that picture. Doesn’t it resemble the history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan as a whole?

Clearly, Jake Tapper wrote The Outpost to honor the brave soldiers who were assigned there. He cites the name and rank of virtually every soldier whose actions are part of the four-year story — and there appear to be hundreds of them. For the major actors on the ground, chiefly sergeants, lieutenants, and captains, with a smattering of low-ranking non-coms, Tapper features extensive biographical information, sometimes including interviews with spouses. These soldiers rise fully formed from the pages of the book — real people, with self-doubts and passions and convictions all their own.

Tapper’s effort to convey a fully three-dimensional portrait of the soldiers at Combat Outpost Keating is both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Reading this book seems to convey about as accurate a picture of what life is like on the front line of the Afghanistan war as words might convey. The weakness lies in the use of so many individual names. In the course of the four years the outpost existed, four different units cycled in and out, each bringing its own cast of dozens of characters. It becomes tedious to follow all the individual stories because there is so much coming and going. To some degree, it’s easier to follow a few of the Afghan leaders in the nearby villages, because they generally stay where they are.

Tapper is a former White House correspondent for ABC News and is now an anchor and chief Washington correspondent for CNN.

Mossad, the PLO, and a young Palestinian refugee in a spy story set in London and Berlin

A review of Shake Off, by Mischa Hiller

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Ever wonder how publishers decide how to market books? For example, how to decide whether to feature a book as a “thriller” instead of, say, a “deeply moving novel of love and loss”? Mischa Hiller’s novel, Shake Off, raised questions like that in my mind.

Michel Khoury, a bright young man with a rare gift for languages, is recruited from a foster home at the age of 15 to be educated and trained in the USSR by the PLO. It is now the late 1980s, with the Soviet empire crumbling and Yasser Arafat holding on to power in the Palestinian diaspora. For some years now, Michel has been serving as a courier, an accomplished polyglot shuttling from Berlin to London to Geneva to Athens and Istanbul under the control of an older man named Abu Leila (“Father of Leila”), a surrogate father figure. Living in what the English call a “bed-sit,” a single room sans kitchen down the hall from a bathroom, Michel masquerades as a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, taking language courses he doesn’t need. When he meets Rachel, a beautiful young doctoral student in anthropology living next door, he finds himself increasingly drawn to her just as disaster strikes a courier he has enlisted in London. Soon, Michel finds himself the subject of interest by intelligence agencies of indeterminate origin — possibly more than one of them, and probably including Mossad — and is forced to dodge the increasingly familiar figures who are following him.

As a novel written by a Palestinian whose protagonist is a survivor of the 1982 Israeli-Phalangist massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, Shake Off does a decent job conveying the profound sense of loss and the lingering terror that live on in Michel Khoury. However, the book was marketed as a “spy thriller.” Thrilling it wasn’t. The story hangs on a question of identity that waas resolved to my satisfaction about one-third of the way through the novel, so the twists and turns in its plot held no magic for me. I kept reading despite the slow unfolding of the plot because I found it intriguing to see the world through the eyes of a Palestinian refugee (albeit one with an extensive knowledge of Jewish history and Israeli attitudes). It’s worth reading for that reason alone.

The ugly U.S. war with Iran, past, present, and future

A review of The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran, by David Crist

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

If you were among those who sighed with relief when Barack Obama was reelected because you’d been concerned that a Republican administration would invade Iran, David Crist has news for you. In fact, The Twilight War is full of surprises, even for one who stays relatively well informed about world affairs. The underlying message — the meta-message, if you’ll permit that conceit — is that what we normally consume on a daily basis as “news” is an awkward mixture of critical opinion, wishful thinking, rumor, partisan posturing, self-serving news leaks, and a smattering of hard information.

When it comes to Iran, the purveyors of news have done an especially poor job of keeping us informed. As David Crist makes clear in this illuminating report on the three decades of conflict, tension, miscalculation, and profound misunderstanding that have characterized our two countries’ relationship, we have indeed engaged in what can only be described as war for several extended periods. And when I say war, I mean soldiers, sailors, and air force pilots shooting at one another, laying mines, launching missiles at ships and ground facilities, and generally forcing one or both of the two governments to decide between escalation and retreat. There was even one heart-stopping incident during the Reagan Administration when a rogue, high-ranking U.S. Admiral conspired with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to invade Iran with massive force — and, apparently, was ordered to pull back from the brink largely because the Administration was consumed with covering up the President’s active role in the Iran-Contra affair.

The 2004 Presidential election campaign brought into the spotlight the U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been photographed shaking hands with Saddam. Then we learned, some of us for the first time, that the U.S. had supplied weapons and munitions to Iraq. However, what went largely unreported was the extent to which the U.S. military built up its forces in the Persian Gulf to prevent Iran from flanking Iraq or widening the war to the Gulf Arab states, provided combat intelligence that helped Iraq turn back Iranian advances, and even intervened with force on Iraq’s side from time to time.

It was this history — combined with an understanding of the neoconservative design on the region — that led the Iranian leadership to conclude in 2003 that the U.S. invasion of Iraq presaged an imminent attack on Iran itself. The Ayatollah Khamenei and his minions were so frightened of this prospect that they used every backchannel available to them to attempt to get the U.S. to the negotiating table, where they were prepared to arrive at a grand solution to the differences between the two countries. Are you surprised to learn that the Bush Administration flatly rejected the overtures?

In other words, this has been a nail-biting relationship. Even worse, the outlook today doesn’t look any brighter than it ever has.

Author David Crist is a military historian for the U.S. Government, a reserve Marine Corps colonel, and the son of one of the early four-star commanders of CENTCOM, which was created in the 1980s to coordinate U.S. military affairs involving Iran and the Middle East. Given this pedigree, it’s not unfair to wonder whether Crist himself is guilty of some of the same sins I attributed earlier to the news media. Clearly, he’s extremely well informed and had access to military and government archives that  might well be closed to other writers. However, a little poking around on the Web reveals that Crist got at least a few of his facts wrong, and in some places his interpretation of events has clearly been colored by his official associations.

The Twilight War is an especially dense work. The hardcover edition runs to 656 pages, but it reads as though it’s a thousand, largely because Crist (military historian to the core) seems to include a capsule biography of every other officer and combatant engaged in every firefight he reports. Like the epic dramas of Cecil B. DeMille, The Twilight War has a cast of thousands. All in all though, this is a revealing and important book, well worth reading, even if that means slogging through the mud.

Feminism? In Arabia? Read it here first

A review of Florence of Arabia, by Christopher Buckley

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Christopher Buckley proved to me that he’s one of the funniest writers alive today with Thank You For Smoking, They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, and Little Green Men (the latter two of which I’ve reviewed in this blog and hyperlinked their titles to my reviews). Florence of Arabia is, like them, a satirical novel rooted in contemporary issues, but once Buckley had introduced his protagonist and set up the story that revolves around her, I found myself laughing less and less. The difference here is that the issue the novel addresses — the brutal subjugation of women in ultra-conservative Muslim societies — is simply not funny. However preposterous the characters or improbable the circumstances, the subject just isn’t laughable at all.

In other ways, however, Florence of Arabia showed off Buckley’s exceptional talent: deliciously convoluted (if not Byzantine) plotting, overblown characters that somehow still seem true to life, and thorough grounding in the facts on the ground to make the story seem dangerously close to reality. All this made the book worth reading, even though I pretty much stopped chuckling about one-third of the way through the story.

So, here’s what happens: State Department bureaucrat Florence (born Firenze) Farfaletti is driven to feminist activism when an old friend from her tour in Wasabia (read: Saudi Arabia) is beheaded at the orders of her husband, the Wasabian Ambassador to the U.S., when she contacts Florence during an attempt to escape her stifling life in the Embassy. Improbably bankrolled by a shadowy government official named “Uncle Sam” to engineer a feminist revolution in Wasabia, Florence teams up with a CIA master-spy, a totally unprincipled PR man, and her gay State Department friend, George, a brilliant linguist and political analyst. Together, the four hapless warriors translate themselves to the Emirate of Matar (pronounced “Mutter”) where they set Florence’s cockamamie scheme into motion with the support of the Emir’s wife, a former television anchor in the UK.

Mayhem ensues. What else?

A fresh and thought-provoking view of world politics and current events

A review of The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Geopolitics — the subject of this fascinating book — has literally been on my mind  almost throughout my life.

I had recently turned three when the Allies invaded Normandy, beginning the long, last phase of World War II in Europe. I have no active memory of the invasion, but I’ve been told that I learned to read by studying the news about the event and its aftermath. My father read the newspaper at dinner, and I sat opposite him, leaning over the table so I could see the headlines — upside down — and ask him to tell me what the words meant. I loved the maps, too, those sketches of Europe and the Pacific with broad arrows pointing this way and that to indicate the movements of troops and ships at sea. Geography was long my favorite subject in school, and it’s probably not a stretch to think that my life-long fascination with the world outside the USA began with that experience.

Through a geopolitical lens, Planet Earth, and the machinations and foibles of earthly leaders, look a lot different than they do in most history books. Stand a few feet away from a globe and squint: if the globe is properly positioned, what you’ll see is one huge, three-tentacled landmass (Asia-Africa-Europe); a second, much smaller one that consists of two parts joined by a narrow connector (North and South America); and several even smaller bits of land scattered about on the periphery (Australia, Greenland, Japan, Indonesia). That’s the world as the Joint Chiefs of Staff must view it. Has to view it.

Understanding the globe from that perspective, current events become a lot easier to understand. Take, for example, the object of American preoccupation today: the Middle East.

The true geopolitical center of the Earth lies in the Middle East, a region consisting essentially of three sections: the Iranian Plateau, running from present-day Iraq to Afghanistan and dominated by a resurgent Iran, the latest incarnation of the Persian Empire; the Anatolian landbridge (Turkey) that connects Asia and Europe, successor to the Eastern Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires; and the oil- and natural-gas-rich Arabian Peninsula, unsteadily governed by the extended Saud family and a congeries of coastal emirates. Nestled between them and extending westward along the North African Maghreb is a long line of generally flat, low-lying states that are experiencing various degrees of instability, only a handful of which have a solid historical and demographic basis for nationhood (Tunisia, Egypt, Israel). Given the geography of this region, its perennial instability is no surprise. Constant turmoil is practically guaranteed, with the dominating Iranian and Turkish highlands above, and virtually flat, featureless plains below, divided among mostly weak states with arbitrary borders inherited from British and French colonial masters. As Kaplan notes, “the supreme fact of twenty-first -century world politics is that the most geographically central area of the dry-land earth is also the most unstable.”

Of all the states in the Greater Middle East, the strongest of all, and most likely to dominate at some point in the decades ahead, is Iran, with a proud history (“Iran was the ancient world’s first superpower.”), a population of 75 million, a literacy rate of 80%, an industrial base, and an extensive network of universities. Iran is situated in an enviable position, straddling the region’s two principal oil-production areas (the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf), not to mention its own abundant hydrocarbon reserves. Is it any wonder, then, why Iran captures headlines with such frequency?

In this fashion, geopolitics yields important insight about how the world works. To cite another example, Kaplan asks “Why is China ultimately more important than Brazil? Because of geographical location: even supposing the same level of economic growth as China and a population of equal size, Brazil does not command the main sea lines of communication connecting oceans and continents as China does; nor does it mainly lie in the temperate zone like China, with a more disease-free and invigorating climate. China fronts the Western Pacific and has depth on land reaching to oil- and natural-gas-rich Central Asia. Brazil offers less of a comparative advantage. It lies isolated in South America, geographically removed from other landmasses.”

The Revenge of Geography is crammed with thought-provoking analysis — about the influence of geography on European history, about the role of megacities in our future, about changing demographic patterns, about the impact of latitude on the fate of nations. Oh, and do you remember Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical treatment of Kazakhstan? Kaplan informs us that “Kazakhstan is truly becoming an independent power in its own right” (and proves it). Who knew?

A word of warning, though: unless you’re familiar with both world history and ancient history, you may find The Revenge of Geography to be tough sledding through the innumerable mentions of long-lost empires and forgotten kings. Kaplan grounds his analysis not just in geography but also in history, and his knowledge of both clearly runs deep.

Kaplan begins wrapping up his book with a troubling discussion about recent U.S. foreign and military policy: “while the United States was deeply focused on Afghanistan and other parts of the Greater Middle East, a massive state failure was developing right on America’s southern border, with far more profound implications for the near and distant future of America, its society, and American power than anything occurring half a world away. What have we achieved in the Middle East with all of our interventions since the 1980s? . . . Why not fix Mexico instead?”

“America faces three primary geopolitical dilemmas,” Kaplan concludes. “[A] chaotic Eurasian heartland in the Middle East, a rising and assertive Chinese superpower, and a state in deep trouble in Mexico. And the challenges we face with China and Mexico are most efficiently dealt with by wariness of further military involvement in the Middle East. This is the only way that American power can sustain itself for the decades to come.”

Romance, intrigue, and betrayal in post-World War II Istanbul

A review of Istanbul Passage, by Joseph Kanon

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Some books build slowly, and just as you begin to wonder whether you have the energy to finish them, you discover you’re a captive and no longer able to put them aside. Then they build and build, until you find yourself on the last page, out of breath from the frenzied rush to the end. Istanbul Passage is one of those books.

Kanon, born in 1946, writes spy stories about the period immediately following World War II and before the Korean War (1945-50). Istanbul Passage relates the tale of Leon Bauer, an American businessman whose poor eyesight had kept him out of the war. In compensation — seeking his own war, really — Leon has persuaded a friend of his in the U.S. consulate to hire him for special espionage assignments, helping smuggle Jews out of Romania and on to Palestine. Now, in 1945, Leon receives a different sort of assignment, which involves helping to smuggle a high-value Romanian intelligence target through Istanbul and on to safety in the U.S. But everything quickly goes wrong. Leon finds himself shooting a man to death in a firefight, and the Romanian turns out to be a war criminal at least partly responsible for one of the most notorious massacres of Jews outside the German camps.

Istanbul Passage is a complex and finely written tale. You can’t read the book without getting to know Leon Bauer — and Istanbul — as deeply as though you had experienced the story yourself. Joseph Kanon is one fine writer!

Kanon ran two major New York publishing houses before he began writing in 1995 when he was nearly 50. His five previous novels — Los Alamos (1997), The Prodigal Spy (1998), The Good German (2001), Alibi (2005), and Stardust (2009) — have won widespread acclaim, and deservedly so, as I’ve noted in my reviews. (To see those reviews, click on the titles of his last two previous books.)

Barack Obama’s foreign and military policy viewed from the inside

A review of Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

When I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I expected a great deal from his Presidency — much too much, it’s clear in hindsight. What I didn’t expect was that as President he would exercise U.S. military power almost as aggressively as George W. Bush. As the subtitle of this excellent book hints so broadly, the apparently anti-war candidate Obama quickly morphed in office into a resolute, hands-on Commander in Chief.

In his campaign, Obama had “promised to restore traditional American ‘engagement’ by talking and listening to America’s most troubling adversaries and reluctant partners. His supporters saw a welcome turn away from the ‘with us or against us’ black-and-whites of the Bush years. His critics saw naivete and softness. Both have been surprised. This is a book about those surprises.”

In practice, Obama learned that his brand of engagement yielded little more than vitriolic rhetoric from Iranian mullahs, North Korean generals, and the Pakistani military. What has proved far more effective are the actions he could take consistent with his more sophisticated view of American power: a massive increase in drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; the country’s first-ever (known) use of cyberwarfare in a targeted attack on Iran’s nuclear program, along with increasingly brutal sanctions on the country and its government; the ever-growing use of Special Forces in operations such as the murder of Osama bin Laden; and a pronounced “pivot” from Europe to Asia in combating the rise of China, as exemplified by the opening of a new military base in Australia. While ending U.S. participation in our “war of choice” in Iraq and beginning the pullout from Afghanistan, President Obama has sharply stepped up our use of the weapons of war in a growing number of undeclared and sometimes undercover hostilities.

Make no mistake about it: Barack Obama has made an idelible mark on the U.S. military and intelligence services, sharpening their missions and reshaping their priorities, and all while forcing them to live within more limited means. And anyone who might be tempted to think that Obama acted this way out of weakness needs to understand that great extent to which he made decisions at crucial times in the face of opposition from nearly all those around him — in giving the green light to the Navy SEAL mission to kill bin Laden, and in deciding to ask Hosni Mubarak to resign. As Sanger writes, “‘He personally basically overrode just about his entire government,’ said one official in the room, noting that Gates and Clinton were still actively opposed, ‘Look, this is what I’m going to do,’ Obama said, according to notes of the meeting. ‘I’m going to call [Mubarak] now.'”

All this, and more, comes to light in the five sections that form the backbone of this book. Sanger writes about each of the leading hotspots in turn: Afghanistan and Pakistan; Iran; Egypt; China and North Korea. This is truly world-class reporting, informed by sources at the very highest levels of the U.S. government.

Sanger concludes, “It is too early to know if the emerging Obama Doctrine — a lighter footprint around the world, and a reliance on coalitions to deal with global problems that do not directly threaten American security — will prove a lasting formula. His effort at ‘rebalancing’ away from the quagmires in the Middle East toward the continent of greatest promise in the future — Asia — was long overdue. But it is a change of emphasis more than a change of direction. Obama proved her was adaptable to new realities, what James Fallows rightly called ‘the main trait we can hope for in a president.'”

If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to be a 30-year veteran of The New York Times and serve as its Chief Washington Correspondent, read this extraordinary book with an eye on those sources, both named and anonymous, and their revelations, which pop up seemingly on every page. You’ll see, then, how very deeply embedded in the fabric of official Washington is this one newspaper — a newspaper that serves as the source of an extraordinary proportion of the stories that make their way onto evening news broadcasts and the front pages of other papers around the world. In laying bare the pattern of Barack Obama’s surprisingly aggressive use of military power, Confront and Conceal is just as effective in revealing David Sanger’s unusually high-level access at the White House, the CIA, and the Pentagon.