Contributions by:
Kurt Jacobsen
Myths are cherished most intensely in academic disciplines that perpetually protest too much that they despise them. One does well to recall that even in modern physics seasoned warriors such as Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck were moved to recall with mouth-agape astonishment their encounters with the infinitely wily obstructions, diligent deviousness and ‘circling of…
Read Full Article...Books Reviewed in this Essay: Hannah Gurman, ed., Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Press, 2013) Ivan Eland, The Failure of Counterinsurgency: Why Hearts and Minds are Seldom Won (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013) Gian P. Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Press,…
Read Full Article...Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) A book with the defiantly downbeat title Why We Lost is not geared to enchant ‘higher circles’ or make much of a media splash. Count that in its favor. Moreover, in military memoirs…
Read Full Article...Is psychoanalysis kaput ? If not, ought it be put out of its misery? Sigmund Freud and his notorious ‘problem child’ have fallen on very hard times and for reasons having virtually nothing to do with their real merits, argues historian Eli Zaretsky in his latest book. Though a collection of five previously published articles,…
Read Full Article...Inside a foreign policy seminar, as a sour sort of luck would have it, I actually heard an Army officer, who was on leave to pick up an advanced degree, blurt just a bit too blithely that drone strikes in Pakistan were perfectly fine because the national government quietly approved. Why? Remote control warfare was…
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