Review: Memo to the President Elect–How We Can Restore America’s Reputation and Leadership

3 Star, Diplomacy

Albrights MemoAlternative Reading for Serious People, January 27, 2008

Madeleine Albright

Edit of 2 Feb 08: Added several images above to make this review more easily understandable in context of what Diplomacy should be and is not.

Based on the superb first review rating this book at two stars, I am going to save my time and money, but thought to add a list of ten books each of which is assuredly better than this one and more relevant to creating a prosperous planet at peace. Just reading my reviews of the ten books below will be helpful, whether you buy the Albright book or not.

By way of setting the stage, I respectfully point out that any Secretary of State who takes a back seat to the Pentagon and the spies, and who accepts a budget of $30B a year instead of $200B to wage peace, is a twit and of no consequence. We spent $950 billion this year waging war, and $60 billion on spies and secrecy. Anyone with sufficient stature to be asked to be Secretary of State (yes, I include Talbott) should also be deeply enough read and have a sufficiency of courage to make acceptance conditional on the President's promising to realign funds away from war and toward peace–anything less is craven servitude solely focused on prestige rather than substance.

There are two key points any future Secretary of State much make to the President:

1) For one third of what we spend on war, we could eradicate all ten high level threats to mankind and assure a good life for all with clean water, nourishing food, and free public education and health. See the image I have loaded. Medard Gabel, E. O. Wilson, and Lester Brown have made independent documented calculations, and they all bear this out. Right now State is a tribe of penniless messenger boys and girls with no substantive influence on what should be its most important product: peaceful commerce with all nations, and an end to our support for 42 of 44 dictators each brutalizing their rewspective populations and looking their commonwealth.

2) For what we spent to put up the spy satellite that is falling out of the sky (with a dangerous nuclear power pack that will scatter when it hits the ground), I could have provided free public intelligence for at least a year to every Congressional Committee, every Cabinet Secretary and all of their Assistant Secretaries, to the United Nations and Non-Governmental Organizations, and to the 250 Foundations that together spend $500 billion a year willy nilly without a Range of Gifts Table for eradicating the ten high level threats to Humanity.

A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
[above also available free online as a PDF]
Modern Strategy
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century
Security Studies for the 21st Century
Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century
House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Lester Brown, Plan 3.0
E.O. Wilson, The Future of Life
Medard Gabel, Seven Billion Billionaires (forthcoming, see the article on four billion billionaires, the pie chart image is his and used with permission. He is also the owner/inventor of the EarthGame.

See also, sorry I cannot link (we are allowed only ten links):

I do not link to books I have written, edited, or published, but want to mention five should anyone wish to read them free online at OSS.Net, or via Amazon:

The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption (author)

Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future (edited)

The Smart Nation Act: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest (with Congressman Rob Simmons)

Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (forthcoming 1 March 2008, free online now at Earth Intelligence Network)

Peace Intelligence: Assuring a Good Life for All (edited, 1 May)

War & Peace: The Seventh Generation (my offering to the public–the Chinese took Dick Cheney's plane down over Singapore, read about this in my memo by searching for <Chinese Irregular Warfare Memorandum Steele>. If we do not begin waging peace immediately, and pursuing the strategy devised by the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network, this planet will be toast within 25 years. Albright is part of the problem, We the People are the only power that can force informed democracy and open government back to the forefront.

I am sick and tired of the two political parties treating our taxes as their personal piggy bank, and of the near moronic “experts” that know almost nothing about reality, and everything about sucking up to the people who empower them without a clue as to their shallowness. The only expert still standing that I respect is LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft. He may be the last honest adult left in Washington, D.C.

Review: Madam Secretary–A Memoir

3 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Diplomacy

Amazon Page
Amazon Page

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, Not Great, Travelogue, not Strategic Dialog,

October 10, 2003
Madeleine Albright
This is a diplomatic companion to Hillary Clinton's lightweight personal story. Madame Secretary will never be confused with Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. It merits comment that Hillary appears to have had a great deal to do with Albright getting the job. If you want a read that covers the years superficially, and glosses over a great deal of what actually did or did not transpire, this is the book for you. If you want serious reading about international relations, or grand strategy, or how to deal with the twenty big problems facing the world, see the other books I have reviewed for Amazon, including Joe Nye, Kissinger, Boren et al, Jonathan Schell, Shultz et al, E.O. Wilson, J. F. Rischard, and so on. Half the book is about the personal path to power, the other half is about very narrow slices of what the Clinton Administration chose to focus on–an administration where foreign policy and national security were largely on automatic pilot and very much in a back seat compared to domestic matters.Most troubling to me is the chapter on terrorism, chapter 22, titled “A Special Kind of Evil.” In exactly 17 pages (.03 of 512 text pages), Albright manages to gloss over the fact that she deliberately and repeatedly sided with Sandy Burger in constantly suppressing intelligence that warned suicidal terrorism was on the rise, and took a back seat–or no seat–on the subject of devising a national grand strategy for counter-terrorism. She is proudest of getting $1 billion for turning our Embassies into bunkers, something 9-11 demonstrated to be inconsequential.

She says “The response by the Clinton administration to the Africa embassy bombings and other attacks on our watch resulted in the apprehension of many terrorist suspects and established a strong precedent for international cooperation in fighting terror.” This is absolute and utter baloney. The reality is that neither the CIA nor the FBI or any foreign governments were actually put on a war footing, because the Clinton's did not want to dim the lights and bear down.

I find it quite noteworthy that “intelligence” does not appear in the index as a term. This is a book about travel and personal meetings, which is how Clinton's national security team spent its time. We have gone from that extreme to the other, of neo-conservatives who never served in uniform throwing military force around unilaterally and indiscriminately.

The next president must find a middle ground, an informed middle ground where intelligence, strategy, policy and spending (“it's not policy until it's in the budget”) are fully integrated, and America is able to devise a sustainable, strong, smart foreign policy that includes a robust homeland defense with homeland counterintelligence, a massive peace force, a considerable global constabulary force, and a big war force sufficient for two major regional conflicts at once. We cannot cut the national security budget by one penny, but by golly, we can do a *lot” better than either the passive Clintonians or the psychopathic Bushies.

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Review: Madame Secretary–A Memoir

3 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Democracy
Amazon Page
3.0 out of 5 stars Good, Not Great, Travelogue, not Strategic Dialog
October 10, 2003
Madeline Albirght

This is a diplomatic companion to Hillary Clinton's lightweight personal story. Madame Secretary will never be confused with Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. It merits comment that Hillary appears to have had a great deal to do with Albright getting the job. If you want a read that covers the years superficially, and glosses over a great deal of what actually did or did not transpire, this is the book for you. If you want serious reading about international relations, or grand strategy, or how to deal with the twenty big problems facing the world, see the other books I have reviewed for Amazon, including Joe Nye, Kissinger, Boren et al, Jonathan Schell, Shultz et al, E.O. Wilson, J. F. Rischard, and so on. Half the book is about the personal path to power, the other half is about very narrow slices of what the Clinton Administration chose to focus on–an administration where foreign policy and national security were largely on automatic pilot and very much in a back seat compared to domestic matters.

Most troubling to me is the chapter on terrorism, chapter 22, titled “A Special Kind of Evil.” In exactly 17 pages (.03 of 512 text pages), Albright manages to gloss over the fact that she deliberately and repeatedly sided with Sandy Burger in constantly suppressing intelligence that warned suicidal terrorism was on the rise, and took a back seat–or no seat–on the subject of devising a national grand strategy for counter-terrorism. She is proudest of getting $1 billion for turning our Embassies into bunkers, something 9-11 demonstrated to be inconsequential.

She says “The response by the Clinton administration to the Africa embassy bombings and other attacks on our watch resulted in the apprehension of many terrorist suspects and established a strong precedent for international cooperation in fighting terror.” This is absolute and utter baloney. The reality is that neither the CIA nor the FBI or any foreign governments were actually put on a war footing, because the Clinton's did not want to dim the lights and bear down.

I find it quite noteworthy that “intelligence” does not appear in the index as a term. This is a book about travel and personal meetings, which is how Clinton's national security team spent its time. We have gone from that extreme to the other, of neo-conservatives who never served in uniform throwing military force around unilaterally and indiscriminately.

The next president must find a middle ground, an informed middle ground where intelligence, strategy, policy and spending (“it's not policy until it's in the budget”) are fully integrated, and America is able to devise a sustainable, strong, smart foreign policy that includes a robust homeland defense with homeland counterintelligence, a massive peace force, a considerable global constabulary force, and a big war force sufficient for two major regional conflicts at once. We cannot cut the national security budget by one penny, but by golly, we can do a *lot” better than either the passive Clintonians or the psychopathic Bushies.

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