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From my colleague, Lexington Green at Chicago Boyz:

Best Books About Reagan

ChicagoBoyz will be hosting a roundtable discussion to celebrate the centenary of the birth of President Reagan, the week of February 6th 2011.

In the meantime I would like to get the views of our contributors and readers on what are the best books about Reagan, the Reagan presidency, the Reagan era. Please leave comments with your favorites.

I note that President Obama was recently reading Lou Cannon’s book The Role of a Lifetime, which is supposed to be very good.

I have read and enjoyed several books about Mr. Reagan, his presidency and his era. I will restrict myself to one favorite. If I had to pick one, I would give the palm to Peggy Noonan’s book What I Saw at the Revolution. Used copies are available for a penny. This book captures the impact Mr. Reagan had on our national morale, which is not always captured in other writings about him. I say this despite still being mad at Ms. Noonan about her unforgivably uncritical response to Mr. Obama’s candidacy.

I am currently reading John O’Sullivan’s book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World. I am about one third done with it and it is excellent.

As I said in the comments section at Chicago Boyz, I concur that Cannon’s The Role of A Lifetime and Noonan are the place to start.

There was a prolific outpouring of memoirs by former members of the Reagan administration in the years during and after his time as president. I think we can even divide the lit into books about (or by, at least nominally) Ronald Reagan and those about his administration.

Here are some of my recs….

On Ronald Reagan:

An American Life: The Autobiography

Reagan: In His Own Hand

The Reagan Diaries

I like starting a subject by looking closely at what they had to say for themselves. Reagan’s diaries and private correspondence put the lie to the “amiable dunce” smear made by Clark Clifford (a decidedly nasty-edged, lawyer-courtier of Democratic presidents who ended his own long public career exposed as a corrupt dotard, thus proving George C. Marshall’s ability to size up a man’s character was inerrant).

On the Reagan Administration:

Inside The National Security Council by Constantine Menges

Unfortunately, I believe this one is out of print. Dr. “Constant Menace” details the intrigue at the NSC and State by officials who were less than committed to Reagan’s foreign policy initiatives, in particular the Contras and SDI. Menges, the late brilliant, often insufferable, old-style neoconservative gets a thumbs up from me for his capacity to infuriate State Department officials and his geostrategically incompetent and socially inept boss, NSC Adviser Col. Bud McFarlane.

Casey by Joseph Persico

Liberal biographer Joe Persico paints a complicated but at times hagiographic picture of his close friend, CIA spymaster and Reagan political adviser, William Casey. Strong emphasis on Casey’s crusade against the USSR, his unprecedented role for a CIA chief in foreign policy and the ideological struggle over the control over Reagan’s foreign policy. I have a great deal of admiration for Bill Casey and wish someone like him were running the IC today. We’d all be a lot better off.

The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed by David Stockman

The mendacious, arrogant and disloyal ex-Congressman David Stockman nevertheless manages to have an array of interesting, insightful, amusing, if unflattering, anecdotes and opinions about key domestic policy players in the early Reagan White House and in the Democratic leadership in Congress, whom Stockman called “the politburo of the welfare state”. While it was Stockman who failed Reagan rather than the reverse, this book is the most interesting memoir by far of the “dissenters” who left the administration under a cloud.

Turmoil & Triumph by George Schultz

This is not an interesting memoir. It is a ponderous, dull tome, which is surprising given Shultz’s critically acclaimed intellect and forceful persona. The reason for inclusion here is that Schultz obviously felt a duty to “set the record straight” about his battles over foreign policy with Cap Weinberger, Bill Casey and several NSC advisers and his memoir contains a wealth of minute detail about US foreign policy and national security. An invaluable resource.

What books on or about Ronald Reagan would you suggest?

February 6th 2011 marks the centennial of the birth of America’s 40th president, Ronald Wilson Reagan and it is an appropriate time to reflect on the legacy of a man whose presidency altered the course of his party, his nation and the world. It is no exaggeration to say that events set in motion by the Reagan administration are still unfolding today and the ideas and values championed by Ronald Reagan continue to shape our public policies and frame our political discourse.

Therefore, to commemorate and debate this important legacy, The Ronald Reagan Roundtable, hosted at Chicago Boyz blog will begin February 6th and end on the 16th.

Past Chicago Boyz Roundtables have featured discussions about specific books – On War by Carl von Clausewitz, Science, Strategy and War by Col. Frans Osinga and The Anabasis of Cyrus by Xenophon. They were well-regarded and thought-provoking enterprises. This roundtable will be a little more like the last one on Afghanistan 2050, in that there is no set book to evaluate but a wide-open and free-wheeling discussion of Ronald Reagan, his administration and the historical record.

Contributors will be free to address the topic narrowly or broadly, from Left, Center or Right, in scholarly or polemical tone, with a focus on the present or the past, at whatever length or number of posts they feel is required. Book reviews of the burgeoning number of titles related to Ronald Reagan and his times are also very welcome.

Participants will be encouraged to comment upon one another’s posts and interact with the readers who leave comments but that is not obligatory, contributions can also stand on their own.

Those interested in in joining the Ronald Reagan Roundtable should contact me or Lexington Green and we will make the arrangements with a final “head count” to be announced on or about February 1st

Hope to see you there!

“Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.”
  – Ronald Reagan

Actually, an article at SWJ with an impressive list of resources on Mexico’s burgeoning cartel war:

Criminal Insurgencies in Mexico: Web and Social Media Resources by Dr. Robert Bunker and John Sullivan

The authors of this piece, individually, collectively, and in cooperation with other scholars and analysts, have written about the criminal insurgencies in Mexico and various themes related to them in Small Wars Journal and in many other publications for some years now. The Small Wars publications alone include “State of Siege: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” “Plazas for Profit: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” “Cartel v. Cartel: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” “The Spiritual Significance of ¿Plata O Plomo?,” “Explosive Escalation?: Reflections on the Car Bombing in Ciudad Juarez,” and “The U.S. Strategic Imperative Must Shift From Iraq/Afghanistan to Mexico/The Americas and the Stabilization of Europe.” Certain truths have become evident from such writings and the raging conflicts that they describe and analyze.

First, the criminal insurgencies in Mexico have been increasing in intensity since the formal declaration of war-penned with the initial deployment of Army units into Michoacán and Ciudad Juárez against the insurgent gangs and cartels-by the Calderón administration in December 2006. Over 30,000 deaths in Mexico, just over ten-times the death toll from the 9-11 attacks, have now resulted from these conflicts with 2010 surpassing the earlier end of year tallies with almost 13,000 total killings. While most of these deaths have been attributed to cartel on cartel violence, an increasing proportion of them include law enforcement officers (albeit many of them on cartel payroll), military and governmental personnel, journalists, and innocent civilians. While some successes have been made against the Mexican cartels, via the capture and targeted killings of some of the capos and ensuing organizational fragmentation, the conflicts between these criminal groups and the Mexican state, and even for neighboring countries such as Guatemala, is overall not currently going well for these besieged sovereign nations. Recent headlines like those stating “Mexico army no match for drug cartels” and “Drug gang suspects threaten ‘war’ in Guatemala” are becoming all too common. Further, it is currently estimated that in Mexico about 98% of all crimes are never solved-providing an air of impunity to cartel and gang hit men and foot soldiers, many of whom take great delight in engaging in the torture and beheading of their victims.

Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order by Charles Hill

Heard way too many good things about this book from regular commenters like Scott Shipman (read his review here) to ignore it. The blurbs on the dust jacket are from some genuine heavyweights (and provoked an amusing academic political tantrum masquerading as a review  in FP.com from some minor departmental nemesis of Hill’s at Yale, where Hill is one of the founding lecturers of their Grand Strategy Program).

I will upjump this in my antilibrary queue to be read after I finish with Luttwak.

Actually, we are probably not that far apart, really.

Originally, in a past year, Dr. Finel wrote this.

I am not wholly convinced as a matter of ontology that there exists a coherent phenomena that can be termed “insurgency.” My sense, instead, is that there are various sub-state armed threats that exists to states, several of which we usually lump in together under the rubric of insurgency, but which have very different causes and consequences, and hence require different strategic approaches.  I am not just referring, by the way, to the various motivations for “insurgency” – i.e. religious vs. leftist vs. ethnic – but also that there are at least some groups that have strategic orientations quite at odds from the image of an organized group with ambitions to replace the existing government.

My curiousity piqued, I responded here:

Why are submaximum strategic goals (i.e. something < regime change) an indicator of “non-insurgency” ? I think this standard would eliminate most of the popular uprisings in recorded history – for every Taiping Rebellion or Emelian Pugachev, there’s a dozen smaller, hopeless, desperate, peasant revolts.

Why the implicit use of the Maoist model as the defining characteristic of “insurgency”? That is, to the extent Bernard considers insurgency to exist. 

Dr. Finel replied yesterday with this ( I will intersperse my comments to make it easier on the readers):

I guess I should have been clearer.  I have no interest in debates over semantics. My interest is in ensuring that terms we use actually have a useful and coherent meaning and analytical utility.  You want to call the “Maoist model” a “war of national liberation” rather than insurgency, go ahead.  You want to call narcoviolence, “insurgency,” fine go ahead.  But don’t call a Maoist model and narcoviolence by the same name because if you, you confuse the issue.  I really don’t care what terms is applied to the various phenemena under consideration, but I do care that before we lump things together we make sure the analytic containers are, in fact, meaningful.

I am all for analytical clarity. Narco-cartels in Mexico were originally engaged in purely economically motivated violence, mostly against each other and corrupt officials in their pay. That is in my view, criminal activity. When the narcos changed their goal to encompass establishing TAZs that supplant the political authority of the Mexican state and engaged in systematic campaigns of assassination, intimidation and infiltration of local, state and Federal Mexican goverment entities they evolved from organized criminals into an insurgency.

Is there a calculated political challenge to state power by non-state actors manifested in organized violence? If so, that to my mind is an insurgency, regardless of whether they seek to topple the state or carve out some sort of niche where they can dominate.

Why is this relevant? Because, as a practical matter there are actually insurgencies that grow out of legitimacy gaps and that are best fought – perhaps – by population-centric counter-insurgency measures designed to provide good governance. But not all forms of sub-state violence are that sort of insurgency, and as a result, not all forms of sub-state violence require (or are even usefully addressed) by the sort of clear-hold-build model of integrated military operations and development initiatives.

We are facing a world with a great deal of sub-state disorder. The mistake is assuming that all of this reflects a unified dynamic (e.g. insurgency) that can be addressed with a single response (e.g. population-centric counter-insurgency).

Tend to agree with Bernard here, but with a more generous inclination to Pop-centric COIN. It isn’t a silver bullet but it has some uses. Frankly, if a regime lacks all moral scruples, democidal assault against probable supporters of insurgents (i.e.  death squads, reigns of terror) is often successful in short order. Not always. Rwanda’s genocide of the Tutsi contributed to the overthrow of the radical Hutu government by Tutsi rebels but it worked in Guatemala in the 1970’s, in French Indochina and El Salvador in the 1930’s.

Or there is a middle ground. El Salvador in the 1980’s fought a brutal war against the Communist FMLN with a focus on kinetics and extrajudicial murder but the government abandoned an oligarchical military junta for a representative democracy, addressing concerns about legitimacy. Colombia in the 1990’s combined unleashing vicious loyalist paramilitaries with an aggressive effort to establish competent governance, in order to push back against the marxist rebels of  FARC and the ELN. At a minimum, if counterinsurgents want better intelligence, they need to win the trust of locals, at least some of them, most of the time.

This is not just a theoretical critique. The situation in Iraq was not an “insurgency” in the classic meaning of the term.  Indeed, much of what we considered insurgency was actually little more than a terror campaign aimed at maximizing political leverage.  Other parts involved contestation for power between various Shi’a factions.  And a third, was a simple, and straight-forward sectarian conflict over a relatively small slice of contested territory. None of those conflicts required a comprehensive COIN/Development strategy to manage.

The classic insurgency, the “Maoist model”, should probably have ceased being regarded as definitive twenty years ago. Decentralized, quasi-anarchic “open source insurgency” as conceptualized by John Robb, are more probable in multicultural, weak states with artificial borders drawn by long dead colonialists.

Just to be clear. I am not, as a matter of analytical commitments, always a “splitter.” It is not my desire to disaggregate these domestic conflicts simply for the sake of disaggregating them. Personally, coming out of a mainstream political science orientation, I actually prefer to be a “lumper.” Lumping is how you get the most powerful and parsimonious theories.  But in this case, we’re lumping too many dissimilar concepts together into the basket of insurgency and it is hurting both the academic study of the phenemenon as well as leading to inappropriate policy recommendations.

Insurgency, like terrorism, is both a tactic and a categorical classification. Some movements will combine insurgency with terrorism, peaceful political activities and economic development. Or with criminal enterprises. But does the violence in sum have a political objective? Is it directed against the state?

These are the key questions.