Having already read most of Hersh's articles in the New Yorker, I come late to Chain of Command which bundles the banality of evil and incompetence that was the Bush administration. It makes me sad to note that most of the perpetrators fell upwards. All honorable men, indeed. Only the powerless received punishment.

The book is a kaleidoscope of the early Bush years, a fractured impression of many scandals in eight parts. The book opens with the Abu Ghraib scandal and its iconic ugly America. Nearly five years later, no general officer has spent time in jail. Donald Rumsfeld simply sat out the scandal and remained in office long after. The second part moves back in time to the intelligence failures of 9/11. The third part discusses the Afghanistan invasion. The fourth, fifth and sixth part deal with the snake oil salesmen of the Iraq War as well as the invasion itself. The seventh part sheds light on Pakistan and its peculiar friend of George W. Bush, Musharraf. The eighth and final is a tour de horizon of the US policy in the Middle East.

The book offers three major lessons. The first lesson is that even egregious failure does not lead to punishment or disgrace for members of the elite. Being a good German pays off with tenure, places on the bench, stars and other sinecures. The power of media disclosure (as far as the US corporate media allows) has lost much of its strength. If perpetrators manage to survive a media cycle, interest will wane.

The second lesson is that the failures of the Bush administration can look back on a long tradition of US foreign policy failure. The US has a penchant for allying with dictators and other nasty folks for short-term gain, selling their principles of liberty and democracy for small concessions - with a huge price tag in the future as the mistaken trade-offs hit home. A better US foreign policy would stick to promoting its core values and not try to accommodate bad guys just to do some business.

The third lesson is the on-going incompetence of the CIA, the state and defense departments in dealing with foreigners. How long does it take them to learn that speaking a foreigner's language is a sine qua non in playing the intelligence game? Having a huge inward-looking bureaucracy in Langley is of little value.

Overall, the articles have aged well. Rereading them leaves me sad and angry. The US used to be a beacon of hope. ( )

Seymour Hersh is an investigative reporter who made a name for himself by breaking the story of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. The 21st century found him breaking another similar story: the Abu Ghraib scandal. "Chain Of Command" is a collection of his magazine and newspaper pieces spanning 9/11 to the Iraq War, mid-2005. Unfortunately, Hersh's work reads better in its original format; the stories lack important contextual moorings which would have been immediately obvious to anyone reading them contemporaneously, but which are no longer so due to the passage of time. Furthermore, Hersh only bothered to do the minimum amount of editing when compiling his disparate articles into full length book format, and the narrative is subsequently choppy and oftentimes topical as a result. Hersh's work is nevertheless important reading for anyone hoping to get some sense of what was going on during this time period, but I'd recommend reading it in the magazines and newspapers in which it was originally published if you don't already have a good working knowledge of these events.

This is a must read book about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The author writes from an amazing background of previous books. In 1968 he publised Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal. In 1970 he wrote about My Lai. Those who have reviewed the book earlier for Library Thing have commented on how it is difficult readin. The best way is to take each chapter as a self contained unit, rather like a magazine article and not view if as a chronological approach. A good book to read with it is Alfonsi's Circle in the Sand which does give such a chronological approach. One thing to note about the author's approach is his frequent in person or telephone interviews that add to other documentation.This will long be a standard work for the history of the period.

You may know of Seymour Hersch already. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who often writes for the New Yorker. More particularly he is the one who broke the story of both the My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib. Yes, if there's one man in this country doing real reporting, it's him. For his impeccable investigative skills, I picked up the 2004 book Chain of Command.

Hersch is remarkable. In this book he details just how something like Abu Ghraib could have happened. Who said what to whom to allow such atrocities to begin and continue? How did the reorganization and power juggling within the Administration lead to a failure of intelligence before 9/11? Who knew what when about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

Chain of Command is a magnum opus, but also a difficult one to read. Is it the subject matter? The mendacity of this Administration? The atrocities? No, it is precisely the attention to detail that makes Hersch such a good journalist. Take for example his insistence on context for each statement. I can't help but be reminded of Homer. As in the Iliad every introduction of a person includes his entire history. Just for comparison:

"Kalchas, Thestor's son, far the best of the bird interpreters who knew all things that were...."
"Robert Baer, an Arabic speaker who was considered perhaps the best on-the ground field officer in the Middle East..."

See what I mean? It's informative, it gives you all the context for the following statement you could ever desire, but it is rather cumbersome. I quickly began to wish that I could read this book in short 15 page article segments instead of 400 pages at a time. Hersch is scrupulous about his sources, about his sources' sources, about his timelines and places and facts. That's a wonderful thing in a journalist, but makes for dry reading.

The best moments of the book are in the Epilogue. Here he scathingly attacks the Administration and caught my breath with his conclusion. After a long list of facts and press statements Hersch concludes with this:
"There are many who believe George Bush is a liar, a President who knowingly and deliberately twists facts for political gain. But lying would indicate an understanding of what is desired, what is possible, and how best to get there. A more plausible explanation is that words have no meaning for this President beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real. It is a terrifying possibility."

Terrifying indeed. I recommend this book to anyone who wants an in depth knowledge of what went wrong, and in many cases, what is still going wrong. Hersch is of course still reporting, so instead of reading this book already 3 years old, you may want to take a gander at the New Yorker Online for his latest analyses of politics in the Middle East. Hersch is a truthspeaker in a time when we so desperately need transparency and honesty. ( )