The discerning reader’s essential read
© 2010 FiveBooks, an intelligent general reader
FiveBooks Interviews
The author of Matterhorn and decorated Vietnam veteran says that even in a morally ambiguous war the politics soon evaporate. The soldier on the ground thinks: ‘How do we get out of this alive and help our friends get out of this alive and not let them down?’ His five books tell what it was like on both sides.
Global security consultant and founder of SustainableSecurity.org says sending armed forces into another country based on purely moral, gut-reaction feelings of good and evil, is a very dangerous policy-making premise. He chooses books on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Al Qaeda and where we’ve gone wrong.
Duke University Professor and author of Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History explains how the neoconservative veneration of nationalism leads to a foreign policy of perpetual war overseas, through the sacrifice of the population to the ‘nation’. He says the result of overthrowing Saddam Hussein has been to remove Iran’s closest regional competitor and to empower Iran to rise to a nuclear power.
Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research–Oslo (CICERO) and co-founder of disasterdiplomacy.org selects five essential books about the way disasters affect peace and conflict. That disasters are one-off isolated incidents is not true, he says. Over decades, sometimes centuries, city planning, the way people live and, especially, are forced to live, create the vulnerability of making an event which might only last 60 seconds, into a disaster. Hurricane Katrina is an excellent example.
The ex-diplomat who served as Special Advisor to both UK Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and later to Carl Bildt, International High Representative for Bosnia, says wars of the future will not take place with hard power, or in terms of traditional military logistics, but will be about the soft power of peoples’ minds, and trying to get inside them. He chooses five books on the glamour, the reality and the future of the people trained in the art of letting someone else have your way.
The veteran diplomat, ambassador to the UN and the UK’s whistle-blowing Special Representative to Iraq, says the mission in Iraq was wrongly set and the resources were wrongly allocated. ‘The magnificent work that was done was largely wasted, and lives with it – both Iraqi and outsiders.’ He talks about the history and future of diplomacy.
Georgetown University’s Professor of International Affairs says rivalries come to an end and are replaced by friendship through diplomacy not coercion. ‘There was a big debate between Barack Obama and John McCain during the US presidential election about whether you should talk to adversaries like Iran. Looking at 20 precedents, I find that the answer is yes – unequivocally.’
Academic G R Berridge, founder of the Leicester Centre for the Study of Diplomacy in 1994, is the author of a large number of textbooks on diplomacy – the core of most English-language diplomacy courses. He tells FiveBooks that we need professional diplomats for the same reason that we need trained doctors: ‘Diplomacy, like medicine, is a specialised activity with a store of complex knowledge, well-tried procedures, and distinctive lexicon.’
Andy McNab joined the infantry in 1976 as a boy soldier. In 1984 he was badged as a member of 22 SAS Regiment. He served in B Squadron 22 SAS for ten years and worked on both covert and overt special operations worldwide, including anti-terrorist and anti-drug operations in the Middle and Far East, South and Central America and Northern Ireland. In the Gulf War, McNab commanded the famous Bravo Two Zero patrol. The patrol infiltrated Iraq in January 1991, but were soon compromised. Three of the eight were killed, four captured, one escaped. McNab was held for six weeks and tortured. Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM) during his military career, McNab was the British Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier when he left the SAS in February 1993. Andy McNab has written about his experiences in the SAS in two bestselling books, Bravo Two Zero (1993) and Immediate Action (1995). His latest novel War Torn, is just out.
Simon Conway was born in California in 1967, educated in Britain and studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh. He served in the British army with the Black Watch and the Queen’s Own Highlanders. After leaving the military he worked for the HALO trust, clearing land mines and unexploded ordnance in Cambodia, Kosovo, Abkhazia, Eritrea and Sri Lanka. As Director of Landmine Action he ran projects in Western Sahara, Liberia and Guinea Bissau as well as successfully campaigning for an international treaty to ban cluster bombs. He has been following the Taliban since the mid-90s and exploring the extent to which the Taliban and al Qaeda are creations of the Pakistani Intelligence Services backed by Saudi money. In his latest book, A Loyal Spy, there are uncanny parallels between the plot and real life.