NYT Kakutani hails Hersh "muckraker outrage," and "Chain of Command"

[DeepModem Mom]

BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'CHAIN OF COMMAND'
Controversial Reports Become Accepted Wisdom
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: September 28, 2004

....Whether consumed in this volume or in the pages of The New Yorker, Mr. Hersh's work is necessary reading for anyone remotely interested in what went wrong and continues to go wrong in Iraq, and how the Bush administration came to take America to war there in the first place. Some readers may question Mr. Hersh's heavy reliance on unidentified sources (described by their jobs or expertise but often not by name), but as David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, notes in the book's introduction, "the problem is that in the areas in which Hersh reports, especially intelligence, it is usually impossible to get officials to provide revelatory, even classified, information and at the same time announce themselves to the world."

As the book's vociferous epilogue makes clear, Mr. Hersh does not write in the decorous tradition often associated with The New Yorker but in a much feistier vein. And some of his subjects may take issue with the conclusions he draws from his reporting, as many in the current Bush administration already have. He asserts at one point, for instance, that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion - and eye-for-eye retribution - in fighting terrorism."

The outrage that stokes Mr. Hersh's writing, however, seems less like ideological or partisan outrage than an old-fashioned muckraker's outrage, fueled by the disparity he sees between the reality described by senior-level officials and spinmeisters, and the reality on the ground as observed by soldiers, lower-level bureaucrats, operational experts and by the reporter himself.

In these pages Mr. Hersh points up the chasm between the administration's idealistic talk about a new regime in Iraq leading to a blossoming of democracy in the Middle East and the current reality of a growing insurgency, coupled with a mounting death toll among both American G.I.'s and Iraqi civilians. He also juxtaposes the Bush administration's fear-inducing pronouncements about a "mushroom cloud," emanating from Saddam Hussein's hidden arsenals in the walk-up to the war, with the postwar consensus that Iraq did not have significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction....

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/books/28kaku.html

[leftchick]

1. now I have to buy his book!

I wasn't going to because I still have three on my "need to read" shelf. This just sounds to good to pass up! Thank you for posting it!

:)