Total Insecurity: The Myth of American Omnipotence (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Brightman, who won the NBCC Award for 1992’s Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World and edited the Viet-Report in the 1960s, here offers a critique of the war in Iraq, revisiting her own political coming-of-age in the process. Her thesis—that "there really is a psychology of insecurity that underlies American geopolitical strategy in the Middle East; and its dependence on military power rather than on economic leverage or diplomacy reflects it"—is one that she defends with a tempered mix of hope, despair, skepticism and disdain. Noting that she has not been to Iraq, Brightman focuses on lesser-known microevents of the run-up to the war, including the switch Iraq made in 2000 from the American dollar to the euro as the medium of oil exchange under what were then UN sanctions. She pays particular attention to the ways in which events have been spun by the government, media, corporations and other players throughout, showing how difficult it has been to get the facts from the available materials. Drawing comparisons to the Vietnam conflict (an approach that she concedes has its limits), Brightman concludes that the U.S. effort in Iraq is doomed to failure and U.S. enemies will make great gains. Her grand synthesis of historical theory and facts-on-the-ground can feel murky at times and spotty at others, but as a progressive citizen’s quick take on recent history, it makes for rewarding reading.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Fairly prominent in New Left protests during the 1960s, Brightman has in recent years written well-received books about critic Mary McCarthy and, most recently, the Grateful Dead (Sweet Chaos, 1998). Here, returning to the political dissent of her youth, she excoriates the invasion of Iraq and the war on terrorism. Unlike many polemics in this burgeoning genre of indignation, Brightman doesn't indict President Bush personally. She does assail defense and oil corporations, and the neoconservative politicians supposedly beholden to them for stoking an alleged American determination to dominate the world. Brightman's three chapters titled "The Political Economy of Death" develop her point of view in detail, while her recollections of opposing the American intervention in Vietnam make clear she remains true to the quasi-Marxist contention that America's capitalist-controlled political "system" is the root cause of international violence. Analytically left of the most-left segment of Democratic Party opinion, Brightman's vehement exegesis of current events very likely will be well received by like-minded library patrons. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Verso; First Edition edition (September 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844670104
• ISBN-13: 978-1844670109
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,783,273 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Angels in America, November 16, 2005

By	Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews

"Now that both the defense and energy industries, having thrown off nearly all vestiges of regulation, regard the US government as their best customer, they have implanted themselves at the helm of the ship of state," Brightman writes toward the end (page 177) of TOTAL INSECURITY, setting the table for the following remarkable observation: "There is no longer much government left to defend the interests of lesser institutions, including other businesses, or the welfare of mere citizens, or the actual security of the nation."

Brightman points out that Rumsfeld's 'reorganization' of the military is emblematic of the colonization of government by corporate interests. In the same way that the shills in Congress and the White House have been intent on destroying Social Security in order to benefit their stockjobbing cronies, Rumsfeld is in the process of selling off pieces of the military to private contractors like Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown and Root, doing so under the shop-worn rationalization of "modernization" and "transformation" (or is it "freedom" and "democracy" -- the rhetoric of business and government has become so commingled it's hard to keep it straight). As Brightman points out: "In budgetary terms, this is another massive diversion of taxpayer dollars from the public to the private sector..." It also serves as a "work around" for an administration hell bent on circumventing the rights of prisoners and citizens -- a real "win-win" for the lovers of cabalistic secrecy.

Expanding on the ramifications of this capture of the US government, Brightman, a few pages later, says: "'Industry and government function as two branches of the same operation -- a military-industrial-congressional complex, if you will -- which in this instance sells off military stock to private cartels..." The instance she is referring to in this case are the close links between key corporate nodes and the Bush administration such as Halliburton and Dick Cheney, Lockheed-Grumman and Bruce Jackson (Bush's former campaign fund-raiser who now represents the company), Lynne Cheney (who served on Lockheed's board), and Air Force Secretary James Roche, who was for seventeen years a top executive for Northrup Grumman.

Brightman argues that the need for new markets and new raw materials has always driven American foreign policy: the Spanish American War was fought for coaling stations in the Philippines to extend the reach of the American merchant fleet, the interference of the U.S. in Nicaraguan and Panamanian politics was prelude to building the Panama Canal deemed a necessary means to the end of taking over the Panama Canal project and to provide for the controlled circulation of US goods and military might across both hemispheres. More recently the extraordinary economic advantage the US enjoyed post--WWII, a "good war," emphatically demonstrated the profits that could be reaped by the American industrial complex when linked with the needs and desires of the American military.

So closely are these interests now aligned, Brightman asserts, and so weak has become the regulatory apparatus of the state that we now have a "government" driven by the sales production goals of the defense and energy sectors. This "government" best expresses Schumpeter's "gales of creative capitalist destruction" when those two corporate interests most closely coincide -- such as in the pursuit of the Mid East policies crafted by the "Vulcans" -- the Wolfowitzes, Perles, Feiths, Libbys, the more lately vulcanized Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Brightman notes, however, that these interests are in often in conflict with the larger economy. "The Bush administration, in effect, is practicing economic warfare on its own economy, including a significant sector of the investor class. And it's doing so with a powerful but risky instrument of late capitalist development. This is the privatization of military, energy, and foreign policy-making by a small group of people who move back and forth between the corporate boards of Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed-Grumman, the Fluor Corporation, Phillips Petroleum, Booz Allen Hamilton, et. al., and the upper echelon of government."

Recently we have seen the results of the privatization and the rollback of the U.S. government in the spectacle of destitute Americans in New Orleans, who, under the much hyped regime of free market supply and demand, were found by that regime to be unworthy and ineligible for corporate assistance prior to and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, of course, Halliburton and KBR are super-eligible for such assistance, so much so that their former employees now in government are assigning to their former (and no doubt future) company, those sweet no-bid government contracts. Katrina at last uncovered for the average American a view of the devastation caused by the much heralded free market angel, exposing the fact that this much-exalted spirit of social and economic justice best serves the interests of those least in need of its blessings. Finally, the economic angel was revealed as a demon, a destroyer of the poor, infirm, and the elderly, scourge and goad of a struggling middle class.

In an early chapter Brightman recounts her early experience as a teenage volunteer for the second Adlai Stevenson campaign, waged under the slogan "The Party for You -- Not Just for the Few." It was a recession year, 1956, she says, and "Big Business was the villain." Democratic speechwriters noted that under the GOP, "General Motors had made a billion and farm income dropped a billion..."The rise in corporation profits as a whole was seven times greater than the rise of the average American's income." (pg. 34). Now, of course, the Democratic Party would never dare suggest that Big Business is the villain. And certainly, it would never suggest throwing the defense and energy interests out of the temple of the people's government. For, as Brightman shows in grim detail, those interests are now both foundation and keystone of the American system.

A bit dated now (May 2004 pub.), but still dead on its description of the heretofore mostly hidden grope for control of the people's government, TOTAL INSECURITY is a must read for all concerned Americans.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sharp Mind Goes to Work on Where We Are Today, October 25, 2004

By	Margo Viscusi - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

While others have gone to Iraq and written about their experiences or talked to Washington insiders and turned out "my informants told me" books, Carol Brightman, it would seem, has been up in Maine reading extensively, both print materials and on the internet, and asking, How? Why? She has also been analyzing her own experience over several decades as a dissenting observer of American foreign policy beginning with her college years and continuing through the Vietnam era and beyond. From this somewhat removed, uncompromised position she has constructed a cool and original account of our present situation. Brightman shows that this situation did not originate with 9/11 but has roots in American beliefs and attitudes and actions over many years. The evidence she presents is relentless and largely convincing. This is an engrossing, in-your-face, and challenging meditation on where America is today that provides no easy solutions. It sharpens the mind much as a large dose of wasabi clears the head.

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Total Insecurity: The Myth of American Omnipotence, September 15, 2004

By	Lotta Lumenz (California) - See all my reviews

I think this is a superb analysis of an indescribably tragic situation. But also a book that can make a difference; it's so well grounded in documented fact. And it's a good read.