Dmitry Orlov:

In the waning days of the American empire, we find ourselves mired in political crisis, with our foreign policy coming under sharp criticism and our economy in steep decline. These trends mirror the experience of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Reinventing Collapse examines the circumstances of the demise of the Soviet superpower and offers clear insights into how we might prepare for coming events.

Rather than focusing on doom and gloom, Reinventing Collapse suggests that there is room for optimism if we focus our efforts on personal and cultural transformation. With characteristic dry humor, Dmitry Orlov identifies three progressive stages of response to the looming crisis:

* Mitigation-alleviating the impact of the coming upheaval
* Adaptation-adjusting to the reality of changed conditions
* Opportunity-flourishing after the collapse

He argues that by examining maladaptive parts of our common cultural baggage, we can survive, thrive, and discover more meaningful and fulfilling lives, in spite of steadily deteriorating circumstances.

This challenging yet inspiring work is a must-read for anyone concerned about energy, geopolitics, international relations, and life in a post-Peak Oil world.

Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects

Andrew Bacevich reviews new books by Douglas Feith and Ricardo Sanchez.

Setting aside combat memoirs, of which there are a growing number, the literature of the Iraq War divides neatly into two categories. The first category, dominated by journalistic observers, indicts. The second category, accounts authored by insider participants, acquits. The two books reviewed here fall into the second category: They are exercises in self-exculpation. Pretending to explain, their actual purpose is to deflect responsibility.

Apart from the finger-pointing and score-settling, these two accounts do agree at least implicitly on a single issue: taken as a whole, the national security apparatus is irredeemably broken. The so-called “interagency process” created to harmonize the efforts of national security institutions so that the president receives sound and timely advice and to ensure that presidential decisions are promptly implemented, whether in Baghdad or within the Beltway, actually produces the opposite effect. From quite different vantage points, Feith and Sanchez affirm that the principal product generated by the interagency process is disharmony, dishonesty, and dysfunction. Whether a different process employing the same people or recruiting different people while retaining the existing process would yield different results is difficult to say. To imagine, however, that simply electing a new chief executive in November will fix the problem is surely to succumb to an illusion.

Fault Lines: Inside Rumsfeld's Pentagon

Benjamin Wittes’ Law and the Long War is required reading for anyone interested in the legal challenges posed by the war on terror.

A short book review.

Terror and the Law: The Limits of Judicial Reasoning in the Post-9/11 World

This new book by Benjamin Wittes is said to be required reading.

Six years after the September 11 attacks, America is losing a crucial front in the ongoing war on terror. It is losing not to Al Qaeda but to its own failure to construct a set of laws that will protect the American people—its military and executive branch, as well as its citizens—in the midst of a conflict unlike any it has faced in the past. Now, in the twilight of President Bush’s administration, Brookings Institution fellow Benjamin Wittes offers a vigorous analysis of the troubling legal legacy of the Bush administration as well as that of the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court. Law and the Long War tells as no book has before the story of how America came to its current impasse in the debate over liberty, human rights, and counterterrorism and draws a road map for how the country and the next president might move forward.

Moving beyond the stale debate between those fixated on the executive branch as the key architect of counterterrorism policy and those who see the judiciary as the essential guarantor of liberty against governmental abuses, Wittes argues that the essential problem is that the Bush administration did not seek—and Congress did not write—new laws to authorize and regulate the tough presidential actions this war would require. In a line of argument that is sure to spark controversy, Wittes reveals an administration whose most significant failure was not that it was too aggressive in the substance of its action, but rather that it tried to shoulder the burden of aggressiveness on its own without seeking the support of other branches of government. Using startling new empirical research on the detainee population at Guantánamo Bay, Wittes avers that many of the administration’s actions were far more defensible than its many critics believed and actually warranted congressional support. Yet by resisting both congressional and judicial involvement in its controversial decisions, the executive branch ironically prevented both of those branches from sharing in the political accountability for necessary actions that challenged traditional American notions of due process and humane treatment.

Boldly offering a new way forward, Wittes concludes that the path toward fairer, more accountable rules for a conflict without end lies in the development of new bodies of law covering detention, interrogation, trial, and surveillance. Sure to discomfort and ignite debate, Law and the Long War is the first nonideological argument about a controversial issue of vital importance to all Americans.

Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror

In response to The Spy Who Blogged Me, from the May issue of The Walrus:

Niedzviecki asks why nobody seems to care, and it’s partly that these systems have been implemented in an incremental, technocratic manner, outside ordinary democratic processes, and therefore off the radar of the public and even elected representatives. But as he indicates, there is also widespread apathy about, if not outright acceptance of, increased surveillance in Western countries, none of which have seriously debated the full implications. With the recent speed of change, we are still too busy playing with these toys. We haven’t figured out whether any of them actually makes us safer, nor at what point their potential benefits outweigh the harm they wreak on our democratic way of life.Citizens are the proverbial frog swimming in water the state is slowly bringing to a boil. We thought we learned something with the case of Maher Arar. Sadly, it will take a lot of John Smiths being detained, rendered, denied jobs or mobility across the border, or linked to crimes they did not commit before a critical mass of citizens wakes up to the fact that we are living in a society where the freedoms we once took for granted are subject to new regimes of permission, and where any of us — Muslim or not — could be swept off the street based on a flawed “risk assessment.”

The Walrus » Letters » July/August 2008

He worries that the Air Force has taken a big hit while other services have remained largely unscathed for more serious violations. "I think there is a balance issue here."

Shake-up may lead to deeper overhaul

A mere six months ago, it seemed a good bet that Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic presidential nomination. It didn’t turn out that way. The Op-Ed page asked 13 political experts to explain why they thought her campaign didn’t live up to expectations.

What Went Wrong?

Hendrik Hertzberg:

Interesting how different things can look from inside a bubble. Or a bunker.

The Lady Doesn’t Vanish

There are two ways to look at the Basra fighting. It is either the beginning of a newly confident Iraqi state, asserting itself against Muqtada's militia, or it is the beginning of something close to a Shiite civil war. Later this year, Iraq is scheduled to hold elections for provincial officials. Whoever wins, it is very likely that the losers will not accept the results. In places such as Basra, that could mean more Shiite-against-Shiite violence. And this time even the Iranians may not be able to stop it.

Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq by Patrick Cockburn, reviewed by The New Republic Online

The Book Review asked a handful of writers to recommend books for the presidential candidates. Their suggestions are below.

Survey: Truth to Power