Description |
xxviii, 626 p. : map ; 25 cm. |
Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (p. 595-604) and index. |
Contents |
Foreword / by Louis Begley -- Introduction / by author -- Beyond the mountains -- La parenthese -- The legacy -- The mountains -- The saddest story -- How not to stop a war -- Cleansing, camps, and genocide -- "Safe areas" and the politics of gesture -- Explosion in the marketplace -- The great betrayal -- To the killing fields -- Operation Storm and the cold peace -- Coda : endgame in Kosovo -- Marooned in the Cold War -- The forever war -- The battleground in the American mind -- Struggles of democracy and empire -- How not to win a war -- Delusions in Baghdad -- Abu Ghraib : the hidden story -- A doctrine left behind -- We are all torturers now -- The real election -- The secret way to war -- Taking stock of the forever war -- The war of the imagination -- Words in a time of war -- Voices from the black sites -- The Red Cross report and what it means -- Into the light? : torture, power, and the real American exception -- Afterword : the erotic pull of the strange -- Coda : words in a time of war. |
Summary |
"From bloody battleground to dark prison cell to air-conditioned office, it tells the grim and compelling tale of the true final years of the American Century, as the United States passed from the violent certainties of the late Cold War, to the ideological confusions of the post-Cold War world, to the pumped up and ongoing evangelism of the War on Terror and the Iraq War, and the ruins they have left behind. Stripping Bare the Body is a book of stories telling how politics--and its handmaidens: violence and war--is practiced in the brutal worlds of Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, the 'black sites' and Washington, D.C. It shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels. As a newly installed Haitian president told Mark Danner, then on assignment for The New Yorker in riot-torn Port-au-Prince, 'Violence strips bare a society's body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin.' Moving from mass murder on election day in Port-au-Prince, to massacre by mortar bomb on the streets of Sarajevo to suicide bombing in the suburban neighborhoods of Baghdad, to torture in the secret 'black site' prisons of Thailand and Afghanistan, to the political deal making, personal rivalries and bureaucratic infighting in Washington and New York and Langley...'"--Jacket. |
Note |
35902012213720 c.1 Gift of Earl Lee. |
Subject |
Military history, Modern -- 20th century.
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Military history, Modern -- 21st century.
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Violence -- Political aspects.
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Torture -- Political aspects.
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Haiti -- History -- 1986-
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Balkan Peninsula -- History -- 1989-
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Iraq War, 2003-2011.
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United States -- Foreign relations -- 1989-
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United States -- Military policy.
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Militarism -- United States.
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ISBN |
9781568584133 (alk. paper) |
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156858413X (alk. paper) |
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