Download or read book Quagmire written by David Andrew Biggs and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2012 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History In the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of Vietnam’s most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in Vietnam’s turbulent past, from the struggles of colonialism to the Cold War and the present day. Quagmire considers these struggles, their antecedents, and their legacies through the lens of environmental history. Beginning with the French conquest in the 1860s, colonial reclamation schemes and pacification efforts centered on the development of a dense network of new canals to open land for agriculture. These projects helped precipitate economic and environmental crises in the 1930s, and subsequent struggles after 1945 led to the balkanization of the delta into a patchwork of regions controlled by the Viet Minh, paramilitary religious sects, and the struggling Franco-Vietnamese government. After 1954, new settlements were built with American funds and equipment in a crash program intended to solve continuing economic and environmental problems. Finally, the American military collapse in Vietnam is revealed as not simply a failure of policy makers but also a failure to understand the historical, political, and environmental complexity of the spaces American troops attempted to occupy and control. By exploring the delta as a quagmire in both natural and political terms, Biggs shows how engineered transformations of the Mekong Delta landscape - channelized rivers, a complex canal system, hydropower development, deforestation - have interacted with equally complex transformations in the geopolitics of the region. Quagmire delves beyond common stereotypes to present an intricate, rich history that shows how closely political and ecological issues are intertwined in the human interactions with the water environment in the Mekong Delta. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp1-UItZqsk

Download or read book Quagmire in Civil War written by Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-09 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rebuts the pervasive 'folk' notion that quagmire is intrinsic to a country or civil war. Shows that quagmire is made, not found.

Download or read book Quagmire written by Donald Anderson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quagmire shares a range of voices—men and women, military and civilian—and a range of perspectives from the homeland, the combat zone, and war’s aftermath covering fifteen years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Download or read book Obama s War written by James Gannon and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Woodward shows Obama making decisions on the Afghanistan War, the war in Pakistan and the worldwide fight against terrorism.

Download or read book Into the Quagmire written by Brian VanDeMark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-05-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In November of 1964, as Lyndon Johnson celebrated his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, the government of South Vietnam lay in a shambles. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor described it as a country beset by "chronic factionalism, civilian-military suspicion and distrust, absence of national spirit and motivation, lack of cohesion in the social structure, lack of experience in the conduct of government." Virtually no one in the Johnson Administration believed that Saigon could defeat the communist insurgency--and yet by July of 1965, a mere nine months later, they would lock the United States on a path toward massive military intervention which would ultimately destroy Johnson's presidency and polarize the American people. Into the Quagmire presents a closely rendered, almost day-by-day account of America's deepening involvement in Vietnam during those crucial nine months. Mining a wealth of recently opened material at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and elsewhere, Brian VanDeMark vividly depicts the painful unfolding of a national tragedy. We meet an LBJ forever fearful of a conservative backlash, which he felt would doom his Great Society, an unsure and troubled leader grappling with the unwanted burden of Vietnam; George Ball, a maverick on Vietnam, whose carefully reasoned (and, in retrospect, strikingly prescient) stand against escalation was discounted by Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy; and Clark Clifford, whose last-minute effort at a pivotal meeting at Camp David failed to dissuade Johnson from doubling the number of ground troops in Vietnam. What comes across strongly throughout the book is the deep pessimism of all the major participants as things grew worse--neither LBJ, nor Bundy, nor McNamara, nor Rusk felt confident that things would improve in South Vietnam, that there was any reasonable chance for victory, or that the South had the will or the ability to prevail against the North. And yet deeper into the quagmire they went. Whether describing a tense confrontation between George Ball and Dean Acheson ("You goddamned old bastards," Ball said to Acheson, "you remind me of nothing so much as a bunch of buzzards sitting on a fence and letting the young men die") or corrupt politicians in Saigon, VanDeMark provides readers with the full flavor of national policy in the making. More important, he sheds greater light on why America became entangled in the morass of Vietnam.

Download or read book Beyond Terror and Martyrdom written by Gilles Kepel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 2001, two dominant worldviews have clashed in the global arena: a neoconservative nightmare of an insidious Islamic terrorist threat to civilized life, and a jihadist myth of martyrdom through the slaughter of infidels. Across the airwaves and on the ground, an ill-defined and uncontrollable war has raged between these two opposing scenarios. Deadly images and threats—from the televised beheading of Western hostages to graphic pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib, from the destruction wrought by suicide bombers in London and Madrid to civilian deaths at the hands of American occupation forces in Iraq—have polarized populations on both sides of this divide. Yet, as the noted Middle East scholar and commentator Gilles Kepel demonstrates, President Bush’s War on Terror masks a complex political agenda in the Middle East—enforcing democracy, accessing Iraqi oil, securing Israel, and seeking regime change in Iran. Osama bin Laden’s call for martyrs to rise up against the apostate and hasten the dawn of a universal Islamic state papers over a fractured, fragmented Islamic world that is waging war against itself. Beyond Terror and Martyrdom sounds the alarm to the West and to Islam that both of these exhausted narratives are bankrupt—neither productive of democratic change in the Middle East nor of unity in Islam. Kepel urges us to escape the ideological quagmire of terrorism and martyrdom and explore the terms of a new and constructive dialogue between Islam and the West, one for which Europe, with its expanding and restless Muslim populations, may be the proving ground.

Download or read book The Making of a Quagmire written by David Halberstam and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer-prize winning author David Halberstam's eyewitness account provides a riveting narrative of how the United States created a major foreign policy disaster for itself in a faraway land it knew little about. In the introduction to this edition, historian Daniel J. Singal supplies crucial background information that was unavailable in the mid-1960s when the book was written. With its numerous firsthand recollections of life in the war zone, The Making of a Quagmire penetrates to the essence of what went wrong in Vietnam. Although its focus is the Kennedy era, its analysis of the blunders and misconceptions of American military and political leaders holds true for the entire war.

Download or read book The Progression of International Law written by Yoram Dinstein and published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. This book was released on 2011-11-11 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume was produced to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Israel Yearbook on Human Rights. Forty years have yielded an impressive forty annual volumes. When it was started in 1971, the Yearbook was the first of its kind anywhere in the world. It has always understood its mandate as transcending the narrow borders of the discipline of either national or international human rights. From the outset, international humanitarian law and international criminal law were understood as coming within the proper framework of the Yearbook, as were on occasion articles on diverse freedoms that may seem out of bounds to a strict interpreter of the phrase “human rights”.

Download or read book Before the Quagmire written by William J. Rust and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decade preceding the first U.S. combat operations in Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration sought to defeat a communist-led insurgency in neighboring Laos. Although U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s focused primarily on threats posed by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the American engagement in Laos evolved from a small cold war skirmish into a superpower confrontation near the end of President Eisenhower's second term. Ultimately, the American experience in Laos foreshadowed many of the mistakes made by the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s. In Before the Quagmire: American Intervention in Laos, 1954–1961, William J. Rust delves into key policy decisions made in Washington and their implementation in Laos, which became first steps on the path to the wider war in Southeast Asia. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, Before the Quagmire documents how ineffective and sometimes self-defeating assistance to Laotian anticommunist elites reflected fundamental misunderstandings about the country's politics, history, and culture. The American goal of preventing a communist takeover in Laos was further hindered by divisions among Western allies and U.S. officials themselves, who at one point provided aid to both the Royal Lao Government and to a Laotian general who plotted to overthrow it. Before the Quagmire is a vivid analysis of a critical period of cold war history, filling a gap in our understanding of U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia and America's entry into the Vietnam War.

Download or read book Revolution of the Ordinary written by Toril Moi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy—a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell—to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy’s unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text. Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, which refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter.

Download or read book The Psychedelic Policy Quagmire written by J. Harold Ellens and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by two preeminent scholars, this book provides coverage of the policy issues related to the increasingly diverse treatments, practices, and applications of psychedelics. Hallucinogenic substances like LSD, mescaline, peyote, MDMA, and ayahuasca have a reputation as harmful substances that are enjoyed only by recreational users committing criminal acts. But leading international researchers and scholars who contributed to this book hold that the use of psychedelic substances for health, religious, intellectual, and artistic purposes is a Constitutional right—and a human right. Based on that conclusion, these scholars focus on policy issues that regulate the use of psychedelic drugs in medicine, religion, personal life, and higher education, arguing that existing regulations should match current and anticipated future uses. This volume has two parts. The first surveys research on the use of psychedelic drugs in medicine, religion, and truth-seeking, following these topics through history and contemporary practice. The second section treats government policices that regulate the psychological, physiological, biochemical, and spiritual aspects of research and experience in these fields. The Psychedelic Policy Quagmire: Health, Law, Freedom, and Society challenges medical and legal policy experts, ethicists, scientists, and scholars with the question: How can we formulate policies that reduce the dangers of psychedelics' misuse and at the same time maximize the emerging diverse benefits?

Download or read book Beyond the Abortion Wars written by Charles C. Camosy and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The abortion debate in the United States is confused. Ratings-driven media coverage highlights extreme views and creates the illusion that we are stuck in a hopeless stalemate. In this book Charles Camosy argues that our polarized public discourse hides the fact that most Americans actually agree on the major issues at stake in abortion morality and law. Unpacking the complexity of the abortion issue, Camosy shows that placing oneself on either side of the typical polarizations -- pro-life vs. pro-choice, liberal vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican -- only serves to further confuse the debate and limits our ability to have fruitful dialogue. Camosy then proposes a new public policy that he believes is consistent with the beliefs of the broad majority of Americans and supported by the best ideas and arguments about abortion from both secular and religious sources.

Download or read book Beyond Trans written by Heath Fogg Davis and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-06-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goes beyond the category of transgender to question the need for gender classification Beyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places and forms just mechanisms of exclusion? Heath Fogg Davis offers an impassioned call to rethink the usefulness of dividing the world into not just Male and Female categories but even additional categories of Transgender and gender fluid. Davis, himself a transgender man, explores the underlying gender-enforcing policies and customs in American life that have led to transgender bathroom bills, college admissions controversies, and more, arguing that it is necessary for our society to take real steps to challenge the assumption that gender matters. He examines four areas where we need to re-think our sex-classification systems: sex-marked identity documents such as birth certificates, driver’s licenses and passports; sex-segregated public restrooms; single-sex colleges; and sex-segregated sports. Speaking from his own experience and drawing upon major cases of sex discrimination in the news and in the courts, Davis presents a persuasive case for challenging how individuals are classified according to sex and offers concrete recommendations for alleviating sex identity discrimination and sex-based disadvantage. For anyone in search of pragmatic ways to make our world more inclusive, Davis’ recommendations provide much-needed practical guidance about how to work through this complex issue. A provocative call to action, Beyond Trans pushes us to think how we can work to make America truly inclusive of all people.

Download or read book Iron Tears written by Stanley Weintraub and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-01-18 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This startling new history of the Revolutionary War, told for the first time from the perspective of both the colonists and the colonizers, demonstrates that for the Americans, it was a war of rebellion, for the British, it became their Vietnam.

Download or read book The Sense of Brown written by José Esteban Muñoz and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

Download or read book Beyond the Sahara written by Agbor Emmanuel and published by Partridge Africa. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Migration through the Sahara and the Mediterranean has been going on for decades. It was brought to the limelight by political upheavals in the Maghreb and Syria. Beyond the Sahara tells the story of a young Cameroonian who dreams of playing professional football in Europe. Not having the means to pay for a visa and an air ticket, he decides to defy the Sahara and the Mediterranean. The journey takes him from Cameroon through Nigeria in Boko Haram territory. He is rescued by Nigerian security forces and he enters the Republic of Niger. From there he enters Algeria and from Algeria they move on to Libya after losing a friend in the desert. He and his friend smuggle themselves into a merchant ship bound for Barcelona. They are identified and his friend is killed while he jumps into the sea in a desperate attempt to escape. Some of his companions are arrested and deported to Nigeria. The story criticizes the socio political situation in Africa and depicts many aspects of the African tradition. The man from Australia is your brother; the woman from Afghanistan is your sister; the man from Syria is your brother; the woman from America is your sister and the man from Africa is your brother too.

Download or read book Everyman in Vietnam written by Michael Adas and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Everyman in Vietnam: A Soldier's Journey into the Quagmire by Michael Adas and Joseph Gilch interweaves a macro perspective of American foreign policy during the war, with the individual-level perspective of one of the many soldiers who lived and died in the "quagmire." This unique perspective is made possible through the personal letters of Private James "Jimmy" Gilch, the late uncle of co-author, Joseph Gilch. Throughout his time on the ground in Vietnam, Jimmy sent dozens of letters back to his family in New Jersey, which detailed everything from the brutal, callous nature of basic training to the daily life of a GI in the jungles of Vietnam. Fascinated by these letters from an early age, Joseph Gilch poured over the nearly 80 letters ravenously. A graduate student at Rutgers University, Joseph has been working with Dr. Michael Adas to situate the story of Private Jimmy Gilch into the broader narrative of the United States' involvement in Vietnam. What comes out of this perspective is a truly remarkable and extraordinary picture of one of America's defining wars through the eyes of one of its many soldiers in a generation forever marked by the conflict."--Provided by publisher.