Clean Bombs and Dirty Wars


Book Description

"Clean Bombs and Dirty Wars: Air Power in Kosovo and Libya explores how the U.S. public, policymakers, and military services perceived and utilized air power and precision munitions before, during, and after Operation Allied Force in Kosovo in 1999 with incorrect assumptions"--




Dirty Wars


Book Description

A New York Times bestseller Now also an Oscar-nominated documentary In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater, takes us inside America's new covert wars. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies. Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and other private security contractors, the CIA's Special Activities Division and the Joint Special Operations Command ( JSOC), these elite soldiers operate worldwide, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than one hundred countries. Funded through "black budgets," Special Operations Forces conduct missions in denied areas, engage in targeted killings, snatch and grab individuals and direct drone, AC-130 and cruise missile strikes. While the Bush administration deployed these ghost militias, President Barack Obama has expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy. Dirty Wars follows the consequences of the declaration that "the world is a battlefield," as Scahill uncovers the most important foreign policy story of our time. From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond, Scahill reports from the frontlines in this high-stakes investigation and explores the depths of America's global killing machine. He goes beneath the surface of these covert wars, conducted in the shadows, outside the range of the press, without effective congressional oversight or public debate. And, based on unprecedented access, Scahill tells the chilling story of an American citizen marked for assassination by his own government. As US leaders draw the country deeper into conflicts across the globe, setting the world stage for enormous destabilization and blowback, Americans are not only at greater risk -- we are changing as a nation. Scahill unmasks the shadow warriors who prosecute these secret wars and puts a human face on the casualties of unaccountable violence that is now official policy: victims of night raids, secret prisons, cruise missile attacks and drone strikes, and whole classes of people branded as "suspected militants." Through his brave reporting, Scahill exposes the true nature of the dirty wars the United States government struggles to keep hidden.




Dirty War, Clean Hands


Book Description

The investigations continue and Garzon is still attempting to establish the full extent of the relationship between the former Spanish Government and the GAL's death squads."--Jacket.




Clean Bombs and Dirty Wars


Book Description

After the United States, along with NATO allies, bombed the Serbian forces of Slobodan Milosevic for seventy-eight days in 1999, Milosevic withdrew his army from Kosovo. With no troops on the ground, political and military leaders congratulated themselves on the success of Operation Allied Force, considered to be the first military victory won through the use of strategic air power alone. This apparent triumph motivated military and political leaders to embrace a policy of using “clean bombs” (precision munitions and air strikes)—without a dirty ground war—as the preferred choice for answering military aggression. Ten years later it inspired a similar air campaign against Muammar Gaddafi’s forces in Libya as a groundswell of protests erupted into revolution. Clean Bombs and Dirty Wars offers a fresh perspective on the role, relevance, and effectiveness of air power in contemporary warfare, including an exploration of the political motivations for its use as well as a candid examination of air-to-ground targeting processes. Using recently declassified materials from the William J. Clinton Presidential Library along with primary evidence culled from social media posted during the Arab Spring, Robert H. Gregory Jr. shows that the argument that air power eliminates the necessity for boots on the ground is an artificial and illusory claim.




Clean


Book Description

You have been called to a life of sexual success! Every Christian man is born into a sexual war. The enemy attacks the young, hoping to scar them permanently and leave them ruined. But your past is not enough to keep you from the enduringly clean life you want and deserve. Clean is a priceless, no-nonsense resource for every husband, father, brother, son, friend, pastor, and Christian leader on the front lines of this war. It is a soldier’s handbook for those ready to reclaim their homes, churches, and nations for the God who has built them to succeed. Dr. Doug Weiss has been clean for more than twenty-five years, and he has devoted his life to helping other men achieve victory. “This book,” says Dr. Weiss, “contains tested and tried weapons for you to get and stay clean, not for a week, month or year, but for the rest of your life.” Clean provides you with biblical, practical, dependable weapons for seizing and maintaining a clean life for yourself and those you love. You will even be equipped to reach out to your brothers-in-arms and teach them to walk with you in cleanness. “If the Devil wants war, bring it on!” says Dr. Weiss. Join the battle! Your sexual life is worth fighting for!




Bombs without Boots


Book Description

Airpower can achieve military objectives—sometimes, in some circumstances It sounds simple: using airpower to intervene militarily in conflicts, thus minimizing the deaths of soldiers and civilians while achieving both tactical and strategic objectives. In reality, airpower alone sometimes does win battles, but the costs can be high and the long-term consequences may fall short of what decision-makers had in mind. This book by a long-time U.S. intelligence analyst assesses the military operations and post-conflict outcomes in five cases since the mid-1990s in which the United States and/or its allies used airpower to “solve” military problems: Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Lebanon in 2006, and Libya in 2011. In each of these cases, airpower helped achieve the immediate objective, but the long-term outcomes often diverged significantly from the original intent of policymakers. The author concludes that airpower sometimes can be effective when used to support indigenous ground forces, but decision-makers should carefully consider all the circumstances before sending planes, drones, or missiles aloft.




American Ground Zero


Book Description

One photojournalist's decade-long commitment, a gripping collection of portraits and interviews of those whose lives were crossed by radioactive fallout.




Liberal Democracies at War


Book Description

Liberal democracies have always accepted the need to go to war, despite the fact that war can undermine liberal values. Wars may be won or lost, not only on the battlefield, but in the perceptions of the publics who pay for them. Presentation is therefore increasingly important. Starting with the First World War, the first major war fought by liberal democracies after the emergence on mass media, Liberal Democracies at War explores the relationship between representations of liberal violence and the ways in which the liberal state understands 'rights' in war. Experts in the field explore crucial questions such as: · How have the violences of war perpetrated in their names been communicated to publics of liberal democracies? · How have representations of conflict changed over time? · How far have the victims of liberal wars been able to insert their stories into the record?




NATO's Air War for Kosovo


Book Description

This book offers a thorough appraisal of Operation Allied Force, NATO's 78-day air war to compel the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, to end his campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The author sheds light both on the operation's strengths and on its most salient weaknesses. He outlines the key highlights of the air war and examines the various factors that interacted to induce Milosevic to capitulate when he did. He then explores air power's most critical accomplishments in Operation Allied Force as well as the problems that hindered the operation both in its planning and in its execution. Finally, he assesses Operation Allied Force from a political and strategic perspective, calling attention to those issues that are likely to have the greatest bearing on future military policymaking. The book concludes that the air war, although by no means the only factor responsible for the allies' victory, certainly set the stage for Milosevic's surrender by making it clear that he had little to gain by holding out. It concludes that in the end, Operation Allied Force's most noteworthy distinction may lie in the fact that the allies prevailed despite the myriad impediments they faced.




The Pandora Principle


Book Description

Growth is commonly regarded as something positive, as something to be rewarded. At the same time the growth of the global population and economy leads to depletion of resources, violent competition and consequently, to the impairment of the quality of life on earth. Science has opened innumerable Pandora boxes, and humankind has no option but to live with the consequences. Once any item of knowledge has entered the world, it is practically impossible to remove it from the world. We could do away with all weapons of mass destruction, but still could not remove the fundamental ability of humans to construct such weapons. Progress is always accompanied by destruction. Where cities grow nature must give way, when a new technology arises it pushes aside older technologies, and where one group of humans appropriates resources it deprives another group of humans of them. The discovery of fossil fuels as energy resource around 250 years ago has allowed for tremendous growth and progress in a very short time span. If the current CO2 emissions continue, the atmospheric CO2 concentrations will reach concentrations that negatively affect cognitive functions within the lifetime of our children and reach lethal concentrations within a few generations. Methane is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and might apart from human economic activities be released in large amounts from melting permafrost areas of the earth. With melting of polar ice shields global warming will accelerate as sun energy that previously was reflected through the albedo effect gets saved in the oceans. With depletion of resources we think of resources to keep up our civilisation such as oil and gas. However we also have to consider the depletion of resources essential for the pure survival of human beings, such as water. While human populations grow exponentially , ground water levels shrink nearly everywhere. If we are not facing near term human extinction we will at least face enormous challenges in the coming years with potential mass dying in some regions of the world, most of them probably in poor developing countries of the tropics. The creative power of destruction is the destructive power of creation.