LITMIR.BIZ

Blending academic objectivity with a clear agenda of devising a new strategic U.S. approach to Al Qaeda, McGrath proposes policy options for confronting terrorism. He asserts that Al Qaeda is primarily a political threat, rather than a military one that challenges the very nature of the U.S. political system and therefore requires a political response. He argues that while coercive means are necessary to reduce Al Qaeda’s capacity for violence, a coercive approach alone is insufficient.The U.S., McGrath contends, must politically undercut Al Qaeda by addressing key political disputes that fuel the US-Al Qaeda conflict in a manner consistent with traditional U.S. foreign policy values. He argues that not only will such an approach weaken Al Qaeda's internal cohesion and politically isolate Al Qaeda from the public that hides and assists it, but it will also stunt terrorism's subversive effects on the American political character.

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The Great War or the “War to end all Wars” as promised by President Woodrow Wilson was neither great nor ultimately conclusive. Precipitated by the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in the streets of Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914, World War I demolished the order established by the Concert of Vienna, an order that had maintained the peace in Europe for almost a century. The ensuing carnage laid the foundations for a second world war and the cold war that followed.World War I also left in its catastrophic wake three transformational legacies that remain largely unnoticed today. These legacies have provoked and will provoke massive and even tectonic change to the international order. But containing, mitigating, and preventing these disruptions from exploding into major crises will prove no less difficult a challenge than did restraining the forces that ignited the chaos and violence of the last century.The first legacy would create an excess of potential archdukes and an abundance of bullets any combination of which could detonate a regional or global crisis. The second began the unraveling of the Westphalian system of state-centric politics in place since 1648. And the third was to seat Four New Horsemen of the Apocalypse as the major threats and challenges to global peace and prosperity.In a sentence, these legacies would make Osama bin Laden into a modern day version of Gavrilo Princip, the Archduke’s assassin. They threaten to turn September 11th 2001 into a June 28th 1914 like event, but in many different and frightening ways. Instead of using a Beretta 9-mm pistol, bin Laden crashed three airliners into New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., starting a global war on terror.This book tells this story.Unfortunately, our current strategic mindset to deal with the twenty-first century threats remains firmly anchored in the past. That mindset must change if aspirations for peace and prosperity are to be met with decisive and effective actions.

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A top adviser at the Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism argues that winning the war against Militant Islamists requires a more nuanced understanding of their ideology. His book is among the first attempts to deconstruct and marginalize al-Qaida ideology using Islamic based arguments. By clearly defining the differences between Islam, Islamist, and Military Islamist, Aboul-Enein highlights how militant Islamist ideology takes fragments of Islamic history and theology and weaves them into a narrow, pseudo-intellectual ideology to justify their violence against Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In offering a comprehensive explanation of how Militant Islamists have hijacked the Islamic religion, Aboul-Enein provides a realistic description of the militant threat, which is different and distinct from Islamist political discourse and the wider religion of Islam.

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This book addresses both the practical and psychological needs of the families of returning warriors while providing them with a convenient list of helpful resources. Combining the knowledge of fifty experts, it provides answers to questions about the post-deployment transition process, how families experience this process, and how they can help their service member and themselves with the transition. All of the book's authors have either served in the military, counseled thousands of service members and military families through the reintegration process, or cared for their own wounded warriors at home. The authors give straight-forward answers to questions about the transition process, the warrior's experiences, how it impacts their children, and their own concerns. A one-stop source of information filled with useful advice, this book is unequaled. It is published in cooperation with the Association of the United States Army.

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A variety of viewpoints is offered in this timely analysis of China's economy and the future shape of Beijing's energy consumption. The authors, all noted authorities in the fields of economics, diplomacy, energy, and defense, consider an unprecedented range of influences and factors to avoid the limitations of looking at the subject myopically or with political bias. They conclude that while energy insecurity could eventually lead to an arms race at sea or even a naval conflict that neither side wants, there is ample room for Sino-American energy dialogue and cooperation in the maritime domain.

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America has been at war for years, but until now, it's not been clear with whom. We have been fighting without being clear for what. We have been waging war without using the full resources we need to win. With the publication of «War Footing», Frank Gaffney and his colleagues make it clear not only whom the enemy is and how high the stakes are, but also how we can prevail. Their book explains that we are engaged in nothing less than a War for the Free World – a fight to the death with Islamofascists who adhere to a political ideology bent on our destruction. It then offers ten specific steps that Americans, as individuals and as communities, can take to ensure our way of life and the safety and well-being of our children. These steps include specific recommendations about how to know the enemy, support our troops, provide for our energy security, stop investing in terror, equip the country for war at home, counter an EMP attack, secure our borders and interior against illegal immigration, wage political warfare, launch regional initiatives, and wield effective diplomacy. This definitive, highly readable «owner's manual» for the War for the Free World has been written by one of the most prominent national security experts of our time, Frank J. Gaffney, and his extraordinary team of respected experts. Among them are R. James Woolsey, Victor Davis Hanson, Generals Tom McInerney, USAF (Ret.) and Paul Vallely, USA (Ret.); Alex Alexiev, Andrew McCarthy, Claudia Rosett, Michael Rubin, Daniel Goure, Caroline Glick, Michael Waller, and many others.

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Daniel Gerstein draws on twenty-nine years of experience in the security and defense sectors to address the threat of bioterrorism. He argues that bioterrorism is a very real threat to humankind due to the 21st century’s confluence of globalization, terrorism and biotechnology. Each of these three components of bioterrorism is experiencing unprecedented – really exponential – growth and when examined collectively, these factors present a potentially serious challenge to both U.S. national security as well as to America’s scientific, organizational and cultural systems. This change is arguably the most dramatic in the field of biotechnology. As new discoveries are made, the potential misuse of this knowledge for bioterror grows as well. Since 2001 and the anthrax attacks in the United States, the bioterror question has received great scrutiny. Many argue that an Armageddon-like attack is imminent while others argue that the threat has been exaggerated. In this debate, it has become increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction. While billions of dollars have been spent attempting to deal with and manage the perceived threats and vulnerabilities, the argument about the severity of the threat of bioterror continues. In his analysis Gerstein examines the potential for a bioterror attack using a classical game theory approach because it provides an objective capability for assessing future threats, understanding emerging trends and developing mitigation strategies. The use of game theory to examine this issue is highly useful as this application can assist in understanding human interactions and ultimately the decisions we make. In this regard, Bioterror in the 21st Century is it is less about predicting future behavior with any certainty, and more about understanding the framework within which this critical nexus continues to allow for more and more dangerous capabilities to proliferate around the world.

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Operation MH/CHAOS was the code name for a domestic espionage project conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late1960s and early 1970s. MH/CHAOS: The CIA’s Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panters is an insider’s account of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff’s Special Operations Group first charged by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and later by Richard Nixon to find foreign intelligence, terrorist, organizations or government contacts, controlling or influencing Anti-Vietnam War activists or American black extremists protesting, bombing and carrying out other anti-government, unlawful or illegal activities in the United States. The operation was launched under Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, by chief of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, and headed by Richard Ober. The program's goal was to unmask possible foreign influences on the student antiwar movement. The «MH» designation signified that the program had a worldwide area of operations. When President Nixon came to office in 1969, all of the existing domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation MH/CHAOS and used CIA stations abroad to report on antiwar activities of United States citizens traveling abroad, employing methods such as physical surveillance and electronic eavesdropping, utilizing «liaison services» in maintaining such surveillance. The operations were later expanded to include 60 officers. In 1969, following the expansion, the operation began developing its own network of informants for the purposes of infiltrating various foreign antiwar groups located in foreign countries that might have ties to domestic groups. Eventually, CIA officers expanded the program to include other leftist or counter-cultural groups with no discernible connection to Vietnam, such as groups operating within the women's liberation movement, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panther Party and Women Strike for Peace. Also targeted was the Israeli embassy, and domestic Jewish groups such as the B'nai B'ritht. As a result of the Watergate break-in, involving two former CIA officers, Operation MH/CHAOS was discontinued. The secret nature of the program was exposed by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times on December 22, 1974. The following year, further details were revealed during Representative Bella Abzug's House Subcommittee on Government Information and individual Rights. The government, in response to the revelations, launched the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (The Rockefeller Commission), lead by then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, to investigate the depth of the surveillance. In MH/CHOAS, the author, who is a former CIA officer, refutes the charges made by the New York Times and the Washington Post at the time that this domestic spying program first made headlines, and takes issue with conclusions of the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee. He relates how the Special Operations Group began, was staffed and how it was transformed into an anti-terrorist unit before it ceased operation. Rafalko details the information that Special Operations Group collected against the New Left and Black extremists and makes the case that the MHCHAOS program was justified, why the CIA was the logical agency to conduct the collection, and the consequences suffered later by American counterintelligence because of these investigations.

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The Business of Martyrdom is the only comprehensive history of suicide bombing from its origins in Imperial Russia to the present day. It makes use of a framework from the history and philosophy of technology to explain the diffusion and evolution of suicide bombing over the past several decades. It is primarily a work of synthesis meant to reach a broad audience and endeavors to integrate as much of the recent scholarly literature as possible, including reconciling explanatory mechanisms that seem to be at odds with one another. In addition, this book is able to draw on very recent changes in suicide bombing in the years 2008-2010 that allow it to have a slightly different perspective than earlier studies. For the first time the global number of suicide attacks has declined significantly for three years in a row. This book therefore has the advantage of addressing the phenomenon of suicide bombing as a bounded phenomenon with limits to its growth and diffusion. To this point the impression that suicide bombers are the smartest bombs yet created has been widespread but confined to the area of metaphor. Drawing well-established ideas from the history of technology, The Business of Martyrdom argues that the metaphor should be taken literally. Suicide bombing is a technology that has been invented and re-invented at different times in different areas but always for the same purpose: resolving a mismatch in military capabilities between antagonists by utilizing the available cultural and human resources. Over the past several years, analysts have produced a large number of monographs and articles examining suicide bombing. The best contributions in this new and growing literature have shed considerable light on the complexity of suicide bombing in practice, particularly regarding the structure of the organizations that deploy suicide bombers and the relationships between these organizations and the recruits whom they utilize in their attacks. Nevertheless, nagging inconsistencies and questions remain. These inconsistencies can be explained by examining suicide bombing as a technological system that integrates human beings, cultures, and devices and directs them toward specific ends. Such an analysis requires that neither the individual bombers nor their sponsoring organizations be the basic unit of discussion. Instead, the bombers must be understood as components within a much larger system that has been shaped by a host of social, cultural, and operational constraints throughout its existence. Integrating insights from the historical analysis of other technological systems with the recent literature specifically devoted to suicide bombing therefore allows The Business of Martyrdom to develop a fuller understanding of suicide bombing as a unified yet diverse phenomenon

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In this critique and extension of the work of S.H.Foulkes, Farhad Dalal presents a thorough contemporary appraisal of the theory of group analysis and its relevance to psychoanalysis as a whole. The author argues that Foulkes failed to develop a specific set of group concepts, relying instead on the traditional individualistic framework of Freud. The book explores why Foulkes failed to escape from the orthodox mother-infant paradigm and offers a new post-Foulkesian interpretation of group analytic theory. Taking the Group Seriously is divided into six parts which trace the history of ideas behind group work, and draws on a wide range of subjects to support its thesis: not only psychoanalysis and group analysis, but also sociology, biology, chaos theory, genetics, economics, game theory and discourse theory. Using the author's practical group experience and including the latest ideas on the subject, this volume will be of interest to all those working in the field of psychoanalysis.

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