Long-term peace-builders?
"Everyone's guide to the War on Terror – yesterday, today, and beyond bin Laden." That sums up Keith Spicer’s blunt – yet cautiously optimistic – new book SITTING ON BAYONETS: America's Endless War on Terror and the Paths to Peace.
Published in June 2011 by Amazon subsidiary CreateSpace, Spicer's critical yet entertaining 426-page book aims to explain to "ordinary" people how America and the West ended up in a contest of ideas, then a series of debilitating wars, with millions of Muslims worldwide.
Written in jargon-free language – sometimes with humor, sometimes with anger – SITTING ON BAYONETS offers non-specialist readers a "Short Guide to What's Going On, What's Going Wrong, and What Could Go Much Better." Amply documented from respected U.S. sources and full of far-afield examples, the book argues for abandonment of big-army invasions of Muslim lands.
Instead, while recognizing the need for robust counter-terrorist action, it proposes a powerful new focus on more affordable U.S. investment in "smarter" options: diplomacy, the education of Muslim girls and women, small-business training, mind-changing cultural exchanges, and a far more sophisticated, respectful approach to public information abroad. This should include, as in the 2011 Arab Spring, non-intrusive U.S. assistance in ideas and technology to democracy activists challenging despots.
Broadly, the book offers strong support for the agendas of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It supports Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world (including women) and Clinton's vision of "women’s rights as human rights." Both Obama and Clinton see women's progress as a unique multiplier of economic, social and political benefits. These approaches are the keys to long-term reconciliation with Islam worldwide. To work, they demand urgent attempts to settle the world-poisoning Israeli-Palestinian and Kashmir conflicts.
Apart from urging smarter, more positive policies, the book argues vividly against America's "unwinnable, trillion-dollar wars. "It demonstrates how the U.S. can no longer afford the crushing and corrupting burdens imposed by the entrenched "military-industry complex" – a scandal denounced in 1961 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Is budget discipline a national-defense issue? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, warned in June 2010 that "the biggest threat to our national security is our debt.