Tonight's guests are General Anthony "Tony" Zinni on The Daily Show and Naomi Klein on The Colbert Report.
General Tony Zinni is a retired United States Marine Corps general and a former Commander in Chief of CENTCOM. He is also an author and his latest book is Before the First Shots Are Fired: How America Can Win Or Lose Off The Battlefield.
For the better part of the last half century, the United States has been the World’s Police, claiming to defend ideologies, allies, and our national security through brute force. But is military action always the most appropriate response? Drawing on his vast experience, from combat in Vietnam to peacekeeping in Somalia, to war games in Washington, DC and negotiations with former rebels in the Philippines, retired four-star General Tony Zinni argues that we have a lot of work to do to make the process of going to war—or not—more clear-eyed and ultimately successful. He examines the relationship between the executive and the military (including the difference between passive and engaged presidents); the failures of the Joint Chief of Staff; the challenges of working with the UN, coalition forces, and NATO; the difference between young, on the ground officers and less savvy senior leaders; the role of special forces and drone warfare; and the difficult choices that need to be made to create tomorrow’s military. Among his provocative points:
* Virtually every recent American military operation follows a disconnected series of actions that lead to outcomes we never foresaw or intended.
* We need to assign accountability for the political decisions that can make or break a mission.
* Words and ideas are as important to victory in today’s conflicts as bullets.
* The cyber “war” is ongoing. Either you must build better tech than the other guy, or you must steal it.
* Our foreign aid budget is pitiful, our State Department, USAID, and the other government agencies that we critically need to be on a par with our military are underfunded, undermanned, and poorly structured for their current objectives.
From the Oval Office to the battlefield, Before the First Shots Are Fired is a hard-hitting analysis of the history of America’s use of military action and a spirited call for change.
It sounds interesting, hopefully it will be a good interview.
Naomi Klein is a political activist and author best known for her books No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. She has a new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.
Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.
Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate review – Naomi Klein’s powerful and urgent polemic
Klein interprets the marginalisation of climate change in the political process as the result of the machinations of corporate elites. These elites “understand the real significance of climate change better than most of the ‘warmists’ in the political centre, the ones who are still insisting that the response can be gradual and painless and that we don’t need to go to war with anybody… The deniers get plenty of the details wrong… But when it comes to the scope and depth of change required to avert catastrophe, they are right on the money.”
The first of the book’s three sections details how the environmental movement has been derailed by the financial crisis and the aftermath of austerity, together with the corporate promotion of climate denial. In the last of the three Klein deals with the movements that are springing up in a wide variety of contexts to challenge the neoliberal order. The second section, dealing with what Klein calls “magical thinking”, is in many ways the core of the book. Here she considers technical fixes for climate change, including schemes of geoengineering. In one of the more grandiose schemes, dimming the rays of the sun with sulphate-spraying helium balloons has been proposed in order to mimic the cooling effect on the atmosphere of large volcanic eruptions. The risks of such technical mega-fixes are obvious. As any climate scientist will tell you, we simply don’t know enough about the Earth system to be able to re-engineer it safely. Yet as Klein notes, such madcap schemes will surely be attempted if abrupt climate change gets seriously under way.
Naomi spent an entire 1 hour newscast with
Amy Goodman on Democracy Now discussing her book, if you would like a more in depth look at it.
NAOMI KLEIN: So the book starts from the premise that the things we have done to try to address this crisis have failed. And this is not a controversial position. It can’t be, when we look at the numbers. And the numbers don’t lie. Governments started negotiating towards emission reduction in 1990. That’s when the official negotiations started. And since that time, emissions have gone up by 61 percent globally. So, it’s not just that we’re not solving the problem, it’s that we’re making it a lot worse.
And in concrete terms, we see this every day. I mean, we see the contradictory messages of those alarming reports—ever more alarming reports—coming from scientists, on the one hand, and on the other hand, political leaders doubling down on the dirtiest and highest-risk fossil fuels. We’re tearing up this continent to get at shale gas, to get at tar sands, to get at coal in mountains. You know, we’re detonating mountains. We are just going for it on the most horrendous level. So, how do people even hold these contradictions in their mind?
So, there have been all these theories put forward about why "we," you know, have failed to deal with climate change. And you often hear theories related to human nature—you know, we just can’t deal with a crisis that’s far off in the future. Or the political system is blamed, that politicians think short-term and this is a long-term crisis.
I’m putting forward a different theory. And that theory is, OK, all of these other things play a part, but the biggest problem is that this crisis landed on our laps at the worst possible historical moment. James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988, and he said that he could now decisively make the link between carbon emissions and warming. That was the moment when we lost all plausible deniability. Scientists knew beforehand, but this was the moment where it became the mainstream issue. That year, when the editors of Time magazine had to choose their "Man of the Year"—they were still calling it a "Man of the Year" then—they chose planet Earth and put planet Earth on the cover. That was the kind of consciousness that was rising.
So what I do in the book is I ask, OK, what else was happening in 1988? Well, the free trade deal between Canada and the U.S. was signed, a historic moment in the advance of corporate globalization. And the next year, the Berlin Wall collapsed. Francis Fukuyama is declaring history over. This was—you know, this, in many ways, is the story I told in The Shock Doctrine of how that triumphant ideology of market fundamentalism, as Joseph Stiglitz called it, swept the world. This was the moment when they declared victory, and there was no alternative, as Margaret Thatcher used to say.
So, the problem we had is that we have the essence of a collective problem. We can only solve it with real regulation, making the polluters pay, telling them they can’t dig the carbon out of the ground. And we need to come together collectively to respond to this crisis. We need to invest in the public sphere. But it hits us at the precise moment when all of these things become nonstarters—you have to cut back the public sphere, you can’t regulate, you have to embrace pure laissez-faire economics. And so, the argument I’m making is, we cannot solve this crisis without a profound ideological shift.
This sounds like an excellent book, hopefully I can find time to read it!
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
We 9/24: Tia Torres
Th 9/25: Steven Johnson
THE COLBERT REPORT
We 9/24: Bill Cosby
Th 9/25: Walter Mischel