Operation Hotel California

Operation Hotel California
Author: Mike Tucker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2010-05-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0762799048

Operation Hotel California is the definitive inside account of the secret CIA mission that paved the way for the Iraq War. Based on exclusive interviews with the team leader, Charles S. Faddis—who retired in 2008 and whose name was publicly revealed in this book for the first time—it is also the most blistering indictment by any U.S. counterterrorism officer of America’s blunders vis-à-vis Al-Qaeda and Iraq. Its lessons are vital as a new administration seeks to withdraw securely from Iraq and fight extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

A Military History of the Modern Middle East

A Military History of the Modern Middle East
Author: James Brian McNabb
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2017-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1440829640

This timely study synthesizes past history with the major military events and dynamics of the 20th- and 21st-century Middle East, helping readers understand the region's present-and look into its future. The Middle East has been-and will continue to be-a major influence on policy around the globe. This work reviews the impact of past epochs on the modern Middle East and analyzes key military events that contributed to forming the region and its people. By helping readers recognize historical patterns of conflict, the book will stimulate a greater understanding of the Middle East as it exists today. The work probes cause and effect in major conflicts that include the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the World Wars, the Arab-Israeli wars, and the U.S. wars with Iraq, examining the manner in which military operations have been conducted by both internal and external actors. New regional groups-for example, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-are addressed, and pertinent events in Afghanistan and Pakistan are scrutinized. Since military affairs are traditionally an extension of politics and economics, the three are considered together in historical context as they relate to war and peace. The book closes with a chapter on the Arab Awakening and its impact on the future balance of power.

American Covert Operations

American Covert Operations
Author: J. Ransom Clark
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-07-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Traces our country's long history of covert and special operations, focusing on the similarities and differences in the practice from the Revolutionary War to the present. Long before the creation of the CIA, the American government utilized special intelligence strategies with varying degrees of success. Even though critics throughout time have questioned the effectiveness and legitimacy of these tactics, presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama have employed secret operations to benefit the nation's best interest. This book follows America's history of intelligence gathering, undercover operations, and irregular warfare. Through chronologically organized chapters, the author examines secret military maneuvers, highlighting the elements common to covert and special operations across historical eras, and concluding with a chapter on national security since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Turning Point 9.11

Turning Point 9.11
Author: Betty R. Kennedy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2012
Genre: September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001
ISBN:

Cultural Memory and Popular Dance

Cultural Memory and Popular Dance
Author: Clare Parfitt
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2021-12-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030710831

This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday’s steps to today’s concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.

Beyond Repair

Beyond Repair
Author: Charles Faddis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2011-10-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0762798653

NOW IN PAPERBACK—with a new preface by the author An insider’s account of why the CIA is ill-prepared to protect America, and why it must be replaced without delay * “A devastating portrait of the agency’s culture—with details that only an insider would know.” —David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and author of Body of Lies “Faddis, a career CIA operations officer, pulls no punches in this provocative critique of the iconic and dysfunctional spy agency. . . . In a world where threats are multiplying and becoming more complex, [his] bleak assessment of the CIA should be required reading.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) In Beyond Repair, one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most respected former operatives mounts a scathing cri­tique of the preparedness of today’s CIA—and, spe­cifically, the Directorate of Operations at its core—to defend America against the dizzying dangers of the twenty-first century. In a compelling blend of analy­sis and fascinating true-life stories, Charles S. Faddis argues that the CIA has devolved into a low-risk or, often, no-risk bureaucracy of careerists whose mantra might be summed up thus: “Don’t fall.” He discusses the birth of the CIA, how the agency works from the inside out, why things have gone awry—and how to build a new entity that will maintain the midnight watch, so Americans can sleep well at night.

Irregular Soldiers and Rebellious States

Irregular Soldiers and Rebellious States
Author: Michael P. Noonan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1442271310

With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seemingly drawing down, and with new calls to focus on the threats of great power competition posed by states such as China and Russia on the rise, what will happen to U.S. capabilities for dealing with conflicts that occur in messy political-military environments? Irregular Soldiers and Rebellious States offers, for both expert and non-expert audiences, a useful typology and background for examining interventions where U.S. advisors and forces operating on a small-scale basis will either work with a foreign government to help defend it from threats of subversion or insurgency (known as Foreign Internal Defense) or to assist insurgents or guerrilla forces in countering a hostile regime (known as Unconventional Warfare). It uses nine examples to illustrate how the U.S.—and the British in one case—used such capabilities in either limited or assertive ways to defend (El Salvador, Philippines, Sahel, and Dhofar) or counter (Angola, Nicaragua, northern Iraq, and Afghanistan) foreign governments. Placing such interventions within the broader contexts of American military history and the cultures of the armed forces, it offers three key findings and six policy prescriptions for wisely and judiciously using these capabilities in the present and future.