Breach of Trust

Andrew Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country
Reviewed by  Rachel Maddow in the New York Times.

What we are steaming toward, at the end of more than 12 years of continual hot warfare, is not so much cold warfare or even peace, but rather a kind of high idle, with the expectation of constant overseas military involvement, at some level, somewhere.

If you don’t read the book by Bacevich, read Maddow’s review.  It is fitting Autumn reading.

Photo credit: Penywise from morguefile.com

One of the things that most impressed me is that the author, Bacevich is both a professor and a veteran.  There are not many of these guys who have served their country by serving and by teaching besides Hubby.  I am always impressed when I find Profs who are Veterans.  Of course this is a relatively new phenomenon beginning after the draft.  Before that it was common.

There are individuals far more appropriate to talk about political science and U.S. Foreign Policy than me, but there are not all that many bloggers, women bloggers, who manage to talk about politics in a way that makes this topic seem relevant to women who are more inclined to read and write about topics other than what sort of seems like a male preoccupation. This is the primary reason I write about politics far more often than 98 per cent of bloggers.

I recommend watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC .  I just heard about this book on Andrea Mitchell’s MSNBC program.  Rachel was a guest after Andrea talked to Bacevich.

Andrea Mitchell and Rachel Maddow talking to each other on MSNBC and proposing things akin to “we should just change things”  and stating facts about the debt ceiling and the constitution makes so damn much sense.  While Andrea Mitchell has always been a bit suspect in my book for being a bit too pro-Israel and because of her being married to Alan Greenspan who was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, she is obviously very informed and intelligent.  Rachel Maddow is well, amazing, amazingly smart.  She studied at Stanford then at Oxford for graduate work via a Rhodes scholarship.  PhD, author, excellent anchor whose research behind the topics of the day make for the most informed, shouldn’t miss it, TV show for the last five years, at least that is the way I see it.