Hearts Minds And Hydras
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| Author | : William Nester |
| Publisher | : Potomac Books, Inc. |
| Total Pages | : 321 |
| Release | : 2012-09-30 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1597979503 |
Insurgencies are like the hydra, the many-headed beast of Greek mythology. Once one begins, the measures a government takes to eliminate militantsùto cut off the insurgencyÆs headùcan provoke countless others to join the enemy ranks. Tactical victories often breed strategic de¼feats. Traditional ôsearch, destroy, and withdrawö missions that rely on firepower to wipe out reb¼els frequently destroy the livelihoods and loved ones of innocent people caught in the cross fire. U.S. troops have seen the pattern repeated as their initially successful offensives toppled en¼emy regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, but soon transformed into grueling guerrilla wars. Hearts, Minds, and Hydras outlines the reasons for these worsening situations. The most cru¼cial were self-defeating decisions made by the George W. Bush administration, whose neocon¼servatism and hubris rather than careful analy¼sis of genuine threats, national interests, and reasonable options shaped its policies. Although the Americans were eventually able to contain and diminish the insurgency in Iraq, the one in Afghanistan not only steadily intensified but also spread into neighboring Pakistan. The near abandonment of the war in Afghanistan and the neoconservative campaign in Iraq were godsends for al Qaeda and all other enemies of the United States. Then, as AmericaÆs position deteriorated in both wars, the neoconservatives became even more determined to stay the course. William Nester analyzes some of the more prom¼inent dilemmas haunting American policymak¼ers now struggling to win in Afghanistan, fight terrorism in the United States, and reshape their relationship with Pakistan. In doing so, he reveals the nature of that all-too-real monster of insur¼gency, what feeds it, and how to starve it.
| Author | : Nancy Sherman |
| Publisher | : W. W. Norton & Company |
| Total Pages | : 353 |
| Release | : 2011-08-23 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 0393341003 |
This unique analysis of the moral weight of warfare today filters complex problems through the lenses of philosophy and psychology.
| Author | : William Nester |
| Publisher | : Frontline Books |
| Total Pages | : 725 |
| Release | : 2021-03-03 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 1526782782 |
This deep dive into the mind of the complex, controversial political and military leader is “a great addition to the field of Napoleonics” (Journal of Military History). No historical figure has provoked more controversy than Napoleon Bonaparte. Was he an enlightened ruler or brutal tyrant? An insatiable warmonger or a defender of France against the aggression of the other great powers? Kind or cruel, farsighted or blinkered, a sophisticate or a philistine, a builder or a destroyer? Napoleon was at once all that his partisans laud, his enemies condemn, and much more. He remains fascinating, because he so dramatically changed the course of history and had such a complex, paradoxical character. One thing is certain: If the art of leadership is about getting what one wants, then Napoleon was among history’s greatest masters. He understood and asserted the dynamic relationship among military, economic, diplomatic, technological, cultural, psychological—and thus political—power. War was the medium through which he was able to demonstrate his innate skills, leading his armies to victories across Europe. He overthrew France’s corrupt republican government in a coup, then asserted near dictatorial powers. Those powers were then wielded with great dexterity in transforming France from feudalism to modernity with a new law code, canals, roads, ports, schools, factories, national bank, currency, and standard weights and measures. With those successes, he convinced the Senate to proclaim him France’s emperor and even got the pope to preside over his coronation. He reorganized swaths of Europe into new states and placed his brothers and sisters on the thrones. This is Napoleon as has never been seen before. No previous book has explored his seething labyrinth of a mind more deeply and broadly or revealed more of its complex, provocative, and paradoxical dimensions. Napoleon has never before spoken so thoroughly about his life and times through the pages of a book, nor has an author so deftly examined the veracity or mendacity of his words. Within are dimensions of Napoleon that may charm, appall, or perplex, many buried for two centuries and brought to light for the first time. Napoleon and the Art of Leadership is a psychologically penetrating study of the man who had such a profound effect on the world around him that the entire era still bears his name.
| Author | : William R. Nester |
| Publisher | : Lexington Books |
| Total Pages | : 405 |
| Release | : 2018-03-06 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1498575315 |
A specter haunts America, the specter of Global Jihad, Islamic Holy War. This specter was never more horrific than on September 11, 2001, when nineteen fanatics hijacked four jetliners and used them as guided missiles to destroy the twin World Trade Towers, damage the Pentagon, murder nearly 3,000 people, and cause as much as several hundred billion dollars’ worth of direct and indirect damage to New York City and the national economy. But Jihadists have periodically attacked Americans ever since November 1979, when mobs shouting death to America overran the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 officials hostage for 444 days. President George W. Bush responded to the September 11 atrocities by declaring a global war on terror. Now in its second decade, that war has cost the United States thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Americans are haunted by horrific televised images from across a swath of the Muslim world of bomb-blasted cities, hundreds of slaughtered bodies, thousands of refugees huddled in squalid camps, and American journalists in orange jump suits kneeling in the desert before the black robed and masked men who will behead them. Americans increasingly question whether the global war on terror has been worth those costs for their own nation and the lands where it is fought. This book analyzes America’s crusade against Jihadism. The key related questions it addresses are these: Looking back, what were the successes and failures of Washington’s counter-Jihadist strategy before and after September 11? Looking ahead, should Americans stay the course or cut their losses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere? Was the catastrophic September 11 attack a one-time event or could its equivalent or worse in death and destruction happen again? Renowned Harvard professor Samuel Huntington asserted that: “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, it is Islam, a different civilization, whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” Is that true? Just what of Muhammad’s words and deeds, if any, justifies the barbarism of al Qaeda, Islamic State, and other Jihadists? Finally, just how corporeal is that specter of global Jihad to the United States? A startling surprise awaits the reader in the final chapter as acclaimed expert William Nester weighs the specter of global Jihad against an array of other national security threats.
| Author | : Hartmut Elsenhans |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 274 |
| Release | : 2016-02-17 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1317013603 |
Including contributions from leading scholars from Algeria, France, Germany, India and the United States this book traces the rise and turn to moderation of the New Cultural Identitarian Political Movements, often labelled in the West as fundamentalists. Arguing that culturally based ideologies are often the instruments, rather than the motivating force though which segments of a rising middle strata challenge entrenched elites the expert contributors trace the rise of these movements to changes in their respective countries’ political economy and class structures. This approach explains why, as a result of an ongoing contestation and recreation of bourgeois values, the more powerful of these movements then tend towards moderation. As Western countries realise the need to engage with the more moderate wings of fundamentalist political groups their rationale and aims become of increasing importance and so academics, decision-makers and business people interested in South Asia and the Muslim world will find this an invaluable account.
| Author | : William Nester |
| Publisher | : Rowman & Littlefield |
| Total Pages | : 473 |
| Release | : 2024-01-16 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0811773795 |
World of War is an epic journey through America’s array of wars for diverse reasons with diverse results over the course of its existence. It reveals the crucial effects of brilliant, mediocre, and dismal military and civilian leaders; the dynamic among America’s expanding economic power, changing technologies, and the types and settings of its wars; and the human, financial, and moral costs to the nation, its allies, and its enemies. Nester explores the violent conflicts of the United States—on land, at sea, and in the air—with meticulous scholarship, thought-provoking analysis, and vivid prose.
| Author | : Jodi Kanter |
| Publisher | : SIU Press |
| Total Pages | : 198 |
| Release | : 2016-08-11 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 0809335212 |
How do the funding, setting architecture, and exhibition of a presidential library shape our understanding of the president’s character? And how do diverse performances of the presidency create radically different opportunities for the practice of American citizenship? In Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush, Jodi Kanter analyzes presidential libraries as performances that encourage visitors to think in particular ways about executive leadership and about their own roles in public life. Kanter considers the moments in the presidents’ lives the museums choose to interpret, and not to interpret, and how the libraries approach common subjects in the presidential museum narrative—the presidents’ early years in relation to cultural ideals, the libraries’ representations of presidential failures, personal and political, and the question of presidential legacy. Identifying the limited number of strategies the libraries currently use to represent the diversity of the American experience and American character, Kanter offers concrete suggestions for reinventing and reshaping the practices of museum professionals and visitors within the walls of these institutions. Presidential museums can tell us important things about the relationships between performance and politics, entertainment and history, and leaders and the people they lead. Kanter demonstrates how the presidential libraries generate normative narratives about individual presidents, historical events, and what it means to be an American.
| Author | : William Nester |
| Publisher | : Rowman & Littlefield |
| Total Pages | : 521 |
| Release | : 2023-05-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0811772497 |
War in Europe began with the first human migrants. Rival bands fought for thousands of years before the Greeks and Romans began writing about their military history, first as legend—for instance, the hero Achilles battling the Trojans—and then as fact. War developed from sticks and stones to bronze, iron, and steel, including armor and edged weapons. Then came gunpowder, guns, and cannons, which eventually replaced edged weapons. Finally, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, technology exploded: railroads, steamships, telegraphs, machine guns, automobiles, airplanes, and tanks enabled European states to muster, equip, arm, transport, and command more men than ever before, with more firepower than ever before. In the past seventy-five years, atomic weapons changed the military landscape of Europe—as have the internet and cyber warfare. In this colorful new telling of European warfare—and indeed European history through the continent’s all too numerous wars and conflicts—William Nester describes millennia of armed conflict. He covers the “greatest hits” of military history both ancient and current: Thermopylae, the Peloponnesian War, the wars of the Roman Empire across the continent, the Battle of Hastings, the Crusades, Agincourt, Waterloo, Napoleon and Wellington, the Somme, the Spanish Civil War, Stalingrad and Normandy, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin, Bosnia, and up through Putin’s attempts to redraw the map of Europe. Nester highlights how warfare has been deeply entwined with European statesmanship and undergirds modern institutions such as NATO and the European Union. Europe’s sense of itself is bound up in its military history. Land of War is an epic odyssey from Europe’s mythic origins through its latest violent conflicts.
| Author | : W. Nester |
| Publisher | : Springer |
| Total Pages | : 260 |
| Release | : 2014-12-16 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1137483946 |
This book explores the following: What is the art of power? What is the art of French power? How did Charles de Gaulle understand and assert power, establishing the Fifth Republic and breaking centuries of political instability? How well or poorly have his successors wielded the art of French power to define, defend, or enhance French interests?
| Author | : Adam Alexander Haviaras |
| Publisher | : Adam Alexander Haviaras |
| Total Pages | : 796 |
| Release | : 2018-09-20 |
| Genre | : Fiction |
| ISBN | : 0987762443 |
At the peak of Rome’s might a dragon is born among eagles, an heir to a line both blessed and cursed by the Gods for ages. In Killing the Hydra, Lucius Metellus Anguis returns to North Africa, determined to investigate the death of his centurion and root out the treason that has infiltrated the ranks of his cohort. With his wife, Adara, safe in Athens, Lucius finds himself alone on a dangerous road back to the legionary base at Lambaesis. Praetorian spies and other unknown enemies are hunting him, and it is only with help from the Empress, a Punic prostitute, and an ancient group of warriors that Lucius is able to survive. But the Sibyl’s prophecy haunts Lucius’s dreams, and he clings desperately to the hope that he is making the right decisions for his men, for himself, and for his family. As his world is ravaged by pain on all fronts, Lucius Metellus Anguis must decide whether or not to make his move against the enemies that have plagued his family for far too long, including the most powerful man in the Roman Empire. How far will the Dragon go to protect his family and avenge the spirits of the dead? Only the Gods know... Killing the Hydra is the third novel in Adam Alexander Haviaras’ ground-breaking Eagles and Dragons historical fantasy series. If you like books by Douglas Jackson, Manda Scott, and Conn Iggulden, or movies like Gladiatorand Pompeii, then you will love this historical series that combines adventure, romance, and the supernatural. Buy Killing the Hydra today and set off on an adventure that throws you headlong into the Roman Empire! Here is what readers have to say about Eagles and Dragons: Historic Novel Society: “...Haviaras handles it all with smooth skill. The world of third-century Rome—both the city and its African outposts—is colorfully vivid here, and Haviaras manages to invest even his secondary and tertiary characters with believable, three-dimensional humanity.” Amazon Readers: “Historical fiction at its best! ... if you like your historical fiction to be an education as well as a fun read, this is the book for you!” “An outstanding and compelling novel!” “I would add this author to some of the great historical writers such as Conn Iggulden, Simon Scarrow and David Gemmell. The characters were described in such a way that it was easy to picture them as if they were real and have lived in the past, the book flowed with an ease that any reader, novice to advanced can enjoy and become fully immersed...” Goodreads: “... a very entertaining read; Haviaras has both a fluid writing style, and a good eye for historical detail, and explores in far more detail the faith of the average Roman than do most authors.”
