The Management of Savagery

The purpose of the is book is to bring semi-covert operations like those that ravaged Syria, Libya and Afghanistan out into the light where their destructive effects can be examined. Citizens of the West deserve to have the context they need to connect the dots between the proxy wars their governments' have waged and the rise of the far-right in their own societies. What's more, the unelected architects of these wars must be exposed for the moral injury they have exacted on millions of innocent people, from Mosul to Misrata to Manchester.

Trump has learned that most assured way -- perhaps the only way -- to elicit approval from the mainstream press and his liberal opponents was by bombing Russian allies. In April, after heauthorized cruise missile strikes against the Syrian government for an alleged chemical attack that presented no danger to American national security, some of his most ardent critics erupted with almost orgasmic delight.

As this book makes clear, no good can come from wars of regime change or covert operations, except perhaps to the class of deep state elites that profit from their persistence, and to the jihadists who inevitably pay back their patrons in blood, wielding the deadly techniques they had learned as their proxies.