The Draka Series (SM Stirling)

 

As I have noted in previous reviews, lack of plausibility alone is not a good reason to dismiss an alternate history book. The best of the genre teach us about history and people as well as telling a good story. It is impossible to describe the Draka books as plausible, but they do teach us, if nothing else, just how lucky we are to live in such a decent world. The world of the Draka is the dark reflection of our own world.

The core idea behind the series is that refugees from British North America settle South Africa (captured in the war) instead of Canada. This tiny band of refugees (and assorted immigrants, including refugees from the Confederate States after the end of the American Civil War) grows into a great nation to rival the United States. But there is a major difference between the two nations, one that defines the struggle that eventually ends in book 3. The Draka are the ultimate Master Race, a bare 1% of the population. Everyone else in their territory is a serf, a slave by any other name.

I believe that Stirling based the Draka at least partly on the society of Ancient Sparta (which is a fascinating area of history and well worth some study.) The Draka themselves are trained savagely almost from birth, with those who are defective isolated from the rest of the race and forbidden to breed, until even the merest Draka is a deadly enemy. Their military has a large reserve of manpower to call upon, one that compensates for its numerical weakness by being a raving meritocracy. Skilled Draka soldiers get heavily promoted; incompetents face barrack room justice. They are deadlier than the most dangerous units of Nazi Germany. Women serve on the front lines as equals to the men. The Draka cannot afford to apply gender prejudice to their war-fighting.

The serfs, by contrast, live highly restricted lives. They are legally nothing more than property (shades of Ancient Rome) and can be treated as their masters please. While overt sadistic behaviour is supposed to be controlled by social disapproval, the truth is that the serfs are permanently at the mercy of the citizens. The lucky ones farm, or work in mass production workshops; those who dare to rebel are impaled or sent to death camps to be worked to death. Being a male-dominated society, the Draka have no qualms about their young men having sex with serf women. Unlike western culture, young women chase men, competing with slave girls who literally can't say no. (Women are forbidden from sleeping with slave men until reliable contraception is developed. Lesbian love affairs are very common among the Draka.)

Most of the serfs are deliberately kept ignorant of the world around them. The principle exception are the Janissaries, serfs armed and trained to serve as a bludgeon force for Draka expansion. They are the most atrocity-prone force in history – indeed, atrocities are keenly encouraged except when they might interfere with combat operations. You’d think that they would rebel, but they never do. The Draka have managed to keep a vast number of humans trapped in permanent bondage.

Stirling deserves credit for creating a truly strange culture, one that traps both slave and free population in its claws. There are ‘good’ Draka, including some characters that are more sympathetic than they should be, but even the ones who admit that there are flaws in their society are powerless to change it. Some of the serfs are effectively domesticated and don’t even think to question their position, others are all-too-aware that it could have been worse. One odd scene contrasts the treatment of a serf wench (serfs are referred to as wenches or bucks, further dehumanising them and separating them from the overlords) with the treatment of women in Afghanistan. I don’t see much difference between the two, really.

The first book in the Draka Series, Marching Through Georgia, introduces us to the Draka by sending them into war against Nazi Germany. This alternate Germany is led by Hitler and has already beaten Soviet Russia, becoming overextended in the process, allowing the Draka to stab them in the back by invading up from OTL’s Iran. In many ways, this is the best book of the series, with the neat small-unit action against the Germans.

Following on, Under the Yoke looks at an alternate France – occupied by the Draka, who are literally enslaving the entire population. By far the most harrowing of the books, it follows the lives of a handful of characters forced to watch helplessly as France is crushed below the feet of its new masters. There is limited ground for optimism as the Draka face the Alliance for Democracy, an American-led analogue of NATO, that is attempting to slip supplies to the resistance against the Draka. But the small victory they produce in no way impedes the assimilation of Europe.

The Stone Dogs takes a twist from the first two books in being spread out over several decades, as the Alliance and the Draka prepare for the final conflict. Both sides are developing superweapons and militarising space as fast as possible. The Draka are engaged in an effort to turn themselves into superhumans, while the Alliance concentrates on an antimatter-powered generation ship to take a small number of refugees to the nearest star. But rogue players on both sides trigger the final war. It probably is no great spoiler to note that the Draka win the war, bringing about the end of history. Some have claimed that Stirling cheats by allowing the Draka to win, but it is the logical end result of the series.

Drakon is a cross between a cross-time and time travel story, where one of the Draka superhumans is accidentally thrown across the timelines into our own universe. She is effectively a different form of life altogether from humanity and promptly starts trying to take over, opposed by a cop and a time-traveller from Samothrace, the world settled by the Alliance at the end of the previous book. The more interesting parts of the story are the bits set in the Draka home timeline, where we see the end result of the Final Society. The former serfs have been genetically engineered into servitude, turned into a race that is literally born and bred to serve the Draka. At first glance, their world seems idyllic, but it isn't long before the reader realises just how warped and evil they are.

The Draka series introduced many of the tropes in alternate history, making the series more influential than most AH books out there. Massive armed airships, eternal empires and stable societies came from the Draka world. Stirling has a fair claim to being more influential than Harry Turtledove, even though Turtledove serves as most people’s introduction to AH.

Stirling does a good job of humanising the Draka (despite their evil) and of outlining his characters from the Alliance and Draka serfs. However, the same cannot be said for the Draka timeline itself. There are – thankfully – a number of issues with it, which have been outlined elsewhere. However, I will take a moment to mention a handful.

First and foremost, the Draka have an extraordinary run of luck, gestating down in Africa while the rest of the world runs along historical tracks. No one attacks the Draka; no one even seems to realise the threat they represent until the end of the alternate World War Two. States tend to react to threats, even potential threats from states that are historically friendly. The mere presence of the Draka should warp the geopolitical structure of their world. By 1850, perhaps earlier, states should be forming defensive alliances against them. The idea that Hitler would allow them to occupy Italy in 1941 is absurd. Hitler would know that they’d be a knife pointed at the heart of his world.

Second, the Draka are supremely competent, capable, and developed. They have weapons that are better than their opponents (Nazi Germany, the people who maintained technical supremacy until the end of WW2), better doctrine and even luck. Stirling does note that the Draka are historically weak in the pure sciences; instead of being ahead of the curve, they should be behind it. Their society is somehow able to make use of serf ingenuity without provoking serf revolts when the educated serfs realise how badly they’re screwed in the system. Soviet Russia couldn’t compete with the US; the Draka will be even less capable of staying in the race.

Third, the Draka expand far too quickly. Their population expands at awesomely high levels and they take large swaths of Africa which were historically lethal to Europeans until certain diseases were defeated. This rapidly becomes absurd – they leap forward and take Egypt during the Napoleonic Wars, and then refuse to leave...

Which leads neatly into the fourth point. Britain, the same state that banned the slave trade and did the most to stamp it out, tolerates the Draka treating their captive populations in ways that would make the worst of the CSA blanch. The Draka have extraordinary freedom right from the start.

Fifth, and most significant, the Draka are capable of holding literally millions of people in bondage and transplanting their society on top of occupied territories. This isn't the easiest thing to do even if one is prepared to be utterly ruthless...and yet the Draka steadily grind down two-thirds of the entire world. The communist bloc and, to some extent, Iran’s regime tried hard to keep the population down and the price they paid for it was losing the willing cooperation of people who benefited from their own work. And in the end they fell apart. The Russians talked about the ‘Soviet Man.’ The Drake actually created a new form of human life.

And yet, there is something about the Draka series that makes it compelling. Stirling set out to create an anti-America, a state and a world where all the freedoms we take for granted are stamped out of existence – and eventually become unthinkable. Just as the Alliance slowly lost sight of why it existed, of why they had to stand up to the Draka, the West lost sight of why the Soviet Union needed to be opposed, or why the Taliban had to be fought, or why it is so important to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. Evil wins in the Draka series because no one tried to stop it until it was too late.

Which is really the point, isn't it?

A Soldier's Duty (Theirs Not to Reason Why) - Jean Johnson

 

One of the persistent problems in writing military fiction is the temptation to make one’s main character a Mary Sue – basically, someone improbably perfect, as in the Flight Engineer or Starstrike books. Jean Johnson has fallen into this trap, to some degree, but she has a very good underlying reason for her main character’s supreme competence. Ia is a precognitive, perhaps the most powerful known to exist in the book’s universe. She is capable of seeing her own future in such detail that she can generally pick the most optimal course of action, creating the impression (to her superiors, who don’t know about her talent) that she is literally the near-perfect Marine.

Knowledge of the future is actually the core concept of the book, and I have to admit that it is pretty cool. Ia has visions of a future when society is almost completely destroyed in a few hundred years – and sets out on a one-woman mission to prevent it. So far, so good – her competence is well-explained. But she becomes irritatingly perfect very quickly, something that is at least partly noted within the book. There is little true dramatic tension because the outcome is already certain.

There are scenes where she engages in lecturing her superiors as to how the military works, which make her sound like a smart-ass, and scenes where she puts her fellow recruits in their place – sounding rather like an older veteran rather than an recruit. I don’t blame her fellows for getting annoyed with her – I would find her irritating as hell too. She also has friends in weird places who help her along her way, friends who aren’t particularly well explained.

In short, she’s a very thin character. I can understand why the author went that way, but it rather grates on me. Maybe it would have done better if told directly as a first-person novel, or through the eyes of one of her friends.

The universe isn't also well-defined either. If precognition exists – and she isn't the only one, with a notable historical example cited – why is she the only one with visions of disaster? Or, for that matter, why doesn't she start telling more and more people, or using her gift more widely. I could see several ways to build a commercial empire, or a stronger military machine if the threat was from outside human space.

In fact, wouldn't that make a cool story? She gets to the top and mounts a coup, convinced that military rule is the only thing that would save humanity. But it turns out that she’s actually making the threat worse...

The truth is that there just isn't anything very original about this story – except perhaps for the core idea. And that alone can’t make the book work.

Green Lantern–The Movie

 

Yes, I know I’m a bit behind the times. I never go to the cinema without my fiancé, but today I borrowed a DVD.

I never liked Hal Jordon. The movie manages to remind me why I don’t like him. Hal comes across as a bit of a jerk in the first few segments, although he does grow up pretty quickly with the end of everything bearing down on him.

But that’s just me. Back when I was younger, DC had Hal become weighed down by the loss of Coast City, steal a great deal of power from the Guardians, attempt to reshape reality itself in the hope of making a better world, die saving Earth and be resurrected as the Spectre. It was the only time I really liked Hal, but the Hal-Spectre series was trash and pretty quickly it was all ret-conned away. But I liked Kyle and Guy. They’re both flawed characters and far more interesting than Hal.

There are some cool special effects in this movie. And I liked the training scene when Hal is put through his paces by the corps. But...

First, the fear-entity is not one of the best enemies in the Green Lantern universe. It certainly isn't one that can be depicted on screen very well. There is a certain link between Fear and Will – Will overcomes Fear, logically Hal should have won by overcoming his fear. Instead, he dumps the fear-entity into the sun. Will that actually kill the entity?

Second, I rather liked the portrait of Sinestro, but the movie lost a chance to shine when Sinestro chose not to put on the yellow ring (at least at first). It could have made Sinestro into a tragic villain, corrupted by fear and I expected him to be the main enemy. But instead they stuck with the fear-entity. A bad choice, IMHO.

Third, the lanterns are supposed to be able to create anything they can imagine, right? Well, why don’t they? There are some cool special effects, but nothing really spectacular. Why not?

Overall? Don’t pay full price for this movie.

Himmler’s War - Robert Conroy

 

Writing alternate history (and period fiction) is a tricky task. There is always the temptation to bend details for the sake of a good story – and then there will be some humourless reader who will then write long posts on why it couldn't happen the way you suggested. I tend to judge the book on both its merits as a piece of alternate history and the writer’s skill in telling a story. A world where Hitler successfully invaded Britain might be implausible, but that doesn't mean that someone can't write a good story set in such a world.

Himmler’s War takes a look at what the world might have looked like if someone more rational than Hitler had been in control of Germany during the crucial years of 1944. A bombing run by an American bomber kills Hitler just after D-Day begins. Calling Himmler more rational than Hitler is rather tricky – but at least Himmler has the sense to actually listen to his generals. A few pages into the book and the story hangs together rather well. Conroy does a reasonable job with a vast cast of characters, showing their reactions to the war – and how they might react when confronted with different possibilities. One weakness shows itself clearly, here – many of his characters are very similar to his other characters from earlier books.

One character who does stand out is Harry Truman, who asserts himself in a manner that is quite historical. The situation in the US that makes it necessary, however, is a little harder to follow. FDR was certainly weaker than the American public knew at the time, but he wasn't senile.

Unfortunately, I find it difficult to follow the logic behind the course the war follows. Himmler would probably allow the German generals to run the war the way they wanted to run it – and yes, this would certainly cause huge problems for the Allies. It is quite likely that an increase in German production earlier than historically would make it more likely that the Germans would bleed the allies badly. However, there is little logic in the Soviets accepting a truce with Germany – let alone shipping hundreds of tanks to the Nazis. Stalin might well have accepted a truce with the Germans – a period of six months for the Red Army to catch its breath would have been very helpful – but I can't see him helping the Germans. The Red Army needed the supplies it was getting from the West and deliberately betraying the Allies would have been disastrous.

The problems get worse as the story continues. Historically, the German nuclear program was unable to produce a bomb. The idea that they can jump to building a working device – and then slipping it to Moscow to blow up Stalin – is implausible, to say the least. Conroy hand-waves desperately here, assuming that we won’t notice. At the end of the story, it seems that the West has managed to take all of Germany – with the Poles still under Russian domination. Quite why the Russians fell apart so quickly is beyond me. A case could be made that Moscow falling in 1942 would have crippled the USSR, but the situation was different in 1944.

There’s also the issue of international politics. It is true that both Britain and France had reservations about fighting to the bitter end. However, it is unlikely that either of them would have resorted to considering deals with Himmler. The French Communists might have risen against the Free French on Moscow’s command, but frankly I’m not convinced that that would have won them any friends.

Assuming that the POD works, what is likely to happen? The chances are that the Germans would certainly manage to stall the Allies for much longer, but their ability to take the offensive would be very limited. Why? The Allies (mainly the USAAF, but the RAF as well) had overwhelming air superiority. They could (and did) hammer the Germans from the air, despite German jet fighters that were (in theory) superior to anything the Allies had. (The Germans might have done better if they’d diverted resources to more propeller aircraft than jet fighters.) However, the war would have ended only a few months after OTL.

Why? Unlike the German program, the American nuclear program produced a working nuclear bomb. If Germany had held out a few months longer, the US would have started dropping atomic bombs on Germany. I assume that the German generals would have been smart enough to overthrow Himmler’s regime and surrender to the West. That would have opened up a whole new can of worms – a fitting place for a story.

The plotline of this story is familiar. It is very like Fox on the Line and Fox at the Front, which – IMHO – explored the possibilities far better. Overall, Himmler’s War is worth one read, if you can put your doubts aside. But it doesn't deserve more than that. The author’s 1901 was a much better read.

A War of Choice: The British War In Iraq - Jack Fairweather

 

Let us admit it freely, as a civilised people should,

We have had no end of a lesson, which will do us no end of good.

So wrote a poet whose works are no longer studied in British schools, about a war that is now regarded as rather embarrassing. History teaches many lessons, but the main lesson it teaches is that those who refuse to learn from the past have to pay a price for the lessons in the future. Britain’s involvement in Iraq had a whole wealth of history to draw upon, with useful lessons that could have been used to ensure that the British covered themselves in glory during the occupation of Southern Iraq. But those lessons went unheeded and Britain’s involvement in the occupation became a disaster. Our American cousins learned from their screw-ups and managed to pull victory – of a sort – from the crushing jaws of a largely self-inflicted defeat. It pains me to admit that the British Government, Civil Service and Military proved unwilling to adapt to the situation on the ground in 2003. Our involvement in Iraq was a defeat fully comparable to the disaster at Singapore, in 1941. The long term consequences of the defeat may be just as disastrous.

A War of Choice is not the only overall look at the campaign in Basra and the collapse of British power. I have previously reviewed Ministry of Defeat, which presented a very bitter picture of the situation on the ground. This new book, however, has the insight granted by new sources that came into existence since the previous book. As such, it is a bitter pill to swallow, but one that must be read by all British citizens.

Britain’s involvement in modern-day Iraq stemmed from somewhat murky origins, but was primarily due to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s discovery that humanitarian missions (such as the stunning success in Sierra Leone) could be carried out by the British military. Blair, despite being a Labour PM, enjoys the record for committing modern British forces to war, with deployments to Bosnia, Afghanistan and even Iraq. His thinking tallied neatly with that of President Bush, who believed (correctly) that the sources of terrorism had to be dealt with overseas to prevent them coming home. Bush and Blair were unlikely partners, but Blair – desperate for British involvement and influence – effectively wrote his American partner a blank check. This had two major effects on the British war; the first was that concerns about the lack of post-war planning were ignored while the second – absurdly – was that the MOD was prohibited from buying supplies as it would cause political problems for Blair. This screw-up cost lives through bad or insufficient equipment.

No one (British or Iraqi) appeared to have genuinely believed that the US had no post-war plan. What little planning was done was utterly insufficient and largely based on wishful thinking. (This led to a bitter moment when Iraqis came to believe that the US wanted the post-war chaos.) While this was mainly an American fuck-up – and I use the term quite deliberately – Blair missed an opportunity to do the US a vast favour, or at least keep British forces out of the chaos. But it was not to be.

The decision to put British forces in Basra came fairly late during the planning for the war (originally, the UK would have invaded through Turkey, but the Turks torpedoed that plan.) While the capture of Basra was a well-executed campaign, the post-war occupation was poorly managed from the beginning. The forces assigned to hold Basra were utterly insufficient for the task at hand (at least partly because no one seemed to take a serious look at the requirements before the invasion) and the task of reconstructing the city faltered as the Coalition authority ordered that all Bathists were to be removed from office. As everyone who wanted to work in Iraq had to be a member of the party, this decision pushed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis out of work. It is clear that both American and British officers on the ground opposed this decision, but it was handed down regardless. This – again – was an American decision, yet Blair was in a position to countermand it in Basra. The opportunity to prevent chaos in the South was lost almost before anyone realised that it existed.

There are only two ways to win an insurgency. The first involves winning hearts and minds by providing security, opportunity and – eventually – a peaceful transfer of power. Malaysia, where a communist insurgency threatened to overwhelm the British-backed government, was a victory for the British military, which was able to win the hearts and minds of the population. The second way to win is effectively genocide. Saddam had crushed opposition in Basra’s living memory, while the USSR and the Turks had committed genocide to prevent future challenges to their rule. While the British military could look back on a long and generally successful series of counter-insurgency campaigns, the institutional memory of the army had lost the skills it required to conduct such a campaign and the political environment has changed beyond recognition. Put bluntly, the occupation force in Basra was not strong enough to either provide security or crush all opposition.

Why did Basra seem peaceful for so long? One response is obvious – it wasn’t. A second response is that power slipped, largely unnoticed, into the Shia militias. The UK simply couldn't provide anything like the resources required to protect the Iraqis who were willing to work with the Coalition, which meant that the Iraqi Police (for example) were either intimidated into submission or actually ‘semi-legal’ arms of the militias. The British forces on the ground had little appreciation of the scale of this problem, often stamping on Iraqi toes in the process – and therefore making a difficult job almost impossible.

To complicate matters still further, the Iraqi Government (backed by the Americans and heavily dominated by the Shia) had extensive ties with Shia militias in Basra. Known insurgent leaders were off-limits to British forces and extensive pressure was applied to prevent the occupation force from pushing an offensive to a successful conclusion. Promising operations against the Mahdi Army were called off, resulting in tactical successes, but strategic defeats. A rather jaded American CO once remarked that the Iraqis lost all the battles and won all the negotiations. He was talking about Fallujah, but he could just have easily been talking about Basra.

The curious factor about President Bush was that he had the vices of his virtues. He was loyal to his subordinates, even when they should have been unceremoniously sacked. Rumsfeld was able to remain in office despite bearing primary responsibility for extremely poor decisions that cost American lives. Blair, on the other hand, had little loyalty to his followers, but chose to avoid confronting the Iraq question directly, with the result that British policy drifted rather than being refocused. Bush learned from his mistakes; Blair chose to try to sweep them under the carpet. Blair was luckier than he deserved; I have little doubt that if he had been in opposition at the time, he would have been the leading antiwar speaker. Bush had principles; Blair showed none.

Blair was not the only British official who made serious errors of judgement. The military leadership at the MOD comes in for much-deserved bashing; Britain’s military leadership accepted commitments that the UK couldn't handle. In effect, the UK was fighting a war on two fronts – Iraq and Afghanistan – and was doing it with the results of years of poor procurement decisions, with the result that military kit was either unsuitable, or only available in insufficient numbers. Sometimes the results were farce. At other times, they were tragic.

Listing all the mistakes made by British forces in Iraq would take an entire book. I can only provide an overview. First, as noted above, the forces and equipment were simply insufficient for the task at hand. Second, clumsy decisions by people with little awareness of local realities were allowed to impede operations on the ground. Third, there were insufficient aid funds available for development projects in Basra that might have provided a source of employment (some elements of the British international aid program refused to cooperate, a decision that should be considered treason). Fourth, the command and control system in Iraq was hopelessly complicated. Fifth, there were far too few interpreters and a lack of resources to protect the lives and families of Iraqis who were willing to aid the Coalition forces. Sixth, British military units arrived without local knowledge and were rotated out by the time they had a grip on what was going on, a process that was endlessly repeated – forcing the same lessons to be learned and learned again. Seventh, and most disastrously, there was zero political will to come to grips with the problems and actually fix them. Domestic policy was driving military decisions. (This was an American problem as well, but the Americans had far greater resources to deploy to Iraq.) Pitt, Churchill and Thatcher would be turning in their graves.

The final years of the occupation starkly underlined the results of years of failure. Basra was effectively abandoned to the militias, who imposed their own version of Islamic Law on the population – at the same time as the Americans were turning the remainder of Iraq around. It was not a British operation, but an Iraqi-led offensive that broke (for a while, at least) the power of the militias. Blair and Brown claimed that Iraq had been a success. One wonders just what world they were living in. Whoever actually won the war, it wasn't the UK.

But the core problem, I feel, is one that has taken root in the West since the end of the Cold War. Military operations, we are told, are to be short, casualty-free (both friendly and enemy) and perfect. This is, put bluntly, nonsense. War is, by nature, a chancy process at the best of times, and deaths and defeats have to be expected. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. There will be reverses, but a reverse does not mean that the war is lost. I shudder to think how the modern media would have reported Pearl Harbour, or Dunkirk, or even D-Day. The Japanese expansion into Asia would have been portrayed as an unstoppable juggernaut; no doubt the New York Times would have been insisting that the United States should surrender at once.

We have grown used to instant gratification. And yet we forget why we can enjoy a lifestyle that our ancestors would have regarded as heavenly.

The perception exists, rightly or wrongly, that a handful of casualties will make the West back off. The ultimate legacy of Blair’s war in Iraq will be measured in more casualties among British servicemen, men and women who will die when attacked because the military reputation of Britain has been shattered. I highly doubt that we could win a second Falklands War – an event that has been made more likely by recent remarks made by Hilary Clinton.

This book really should have been called Blair’s Betrayal. Blair betrayed the men he sent to war. The gallantry and incredible bravery of British soldiers was squandered by a man who knew nothing of war, history or the limitations of power, a man who wasn’t even savvy enough to extract anything for Britain from the disaster. He lives the high life, even now, while ex-soldiers have to eke out a life in a Britain that doesn't care. That will be his legacy – that of a knave and a fool.

Read this book. And don’t forget to ask Blair why he failed so badly if you ever meet him.

Invasion–Eric L. Harry

 

If you approach this book with any understanding of geopolitics, logistics, military technology and simple common sense, you will hit a point very quickly where you will have to declaim – loudly – that it simply couldn't happen like that. Harry’s novel is almost unique as it postulates a near-future (it was written pre-9/11) invasion of the Continental United States by China – a super-China that has invaded Japan, India, Australia, much of the Middle East and finally expanded into Cuba. Along the way, it has developed a working ABM system that has crippled orbital reconnaissance, given a very nasty bloody nose to the European Union, used nuclear weapons to crush Israel and just kept going. Suffice it to say that the logistical problems in invading the United States are monstrous even without the presence of American submarines and even the Chinese do not have the manpower to fight such a conventional war, a problem made worse by the decision to launch an invasion of Northern Florida rather than advancing up from Mexico. It simply could not have happened like that.

Reading more carefully, it is clear that Harry stacked the odds in favour of the Chinese. The United States spent eight years under a Democratic President who resisted all calls for intervention against China. Indeed, the US may be more advanced than the Chinese, but the Chinese have a massive superiority in numbers. This hypothetical President allowed the Chinese to take the Middle East without objecting, something that would do immense harm to the American economy. His replacement, an ex-movie star who reassembles Reagan, has to play with a very weak hand. America has lost control of the seas and the Chinese are coming.

Putting that aside – if you can – Invasion isn’t actually that bad a read, although some of it is suspiciously contrived. The American President’s daughter is an infantrywoman who fights to slow down the Chinese advance. (There are some remarkable insights into woman in the field.) Her mother had a relationship with one of the Chinese diplomats and her aunt had a child with the Chinese diplomat, a child who fights on the side of the Chinese Army. The American President’s lover is a spy for a group of coup-plotters in America, who believe that the time to go nuclear is now. Untangling the network of relationships and betrayals is a complex and difficult task.

Overall, Invasion is light entertainment – little else. If you can get over the impossible situation displayed in the book, you’ll enjoy it. It isn't, however, a conclusive story. I have a feeling that the author intended to write a sequel and never got around to it.

Three out of five.

The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11

 

Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan

It is a commonplace problem, put bluntly, that hindsight is always clearer than foresight. This tends to lead to books and articles that claim that something was predicable and the people on the spot were stupid (or deliberately made mistakes) prior to the disaster. As attitudes go, it is far from helpful. The person on the spot will not view a future event as inevitable – and lacks the benefit of hindsight.

It is nearly a decade since 9/11, the day when the world changed once again, tossing our Western Civilisation into uncharted waters. 9/11 brought into plain view the ‘new world disorder,’ the Western existential crisis, the fallacies of Cold War-era thinking and the growing threat of Islamic terrorism. Nothing will ever been quite the same; to paraphrase someone I’ve forgotten, things aren’t what they used to be – but then they never were.

The Eleventh Day starts by recounting everything that took place on 9/11, starting with the terrorists boarding the planes and running through the confusion and shock that prevailed as air traffic controllers, the government and even the military struggled to cope with the chaos. The book pulls no punches in detailing how badly those in charge coped, making mistakes and errors that almost certainly cost lives. It then moves on to the desperate struggle to save people from the Twin Towers.

It rapidly dismisses most of the conspiracy theories centred around 9/11. The idea that ‘Bush did it,’ or ‘Bush let it happen’ has been prevalent, as have theories wondering if the Twin Towers were actually hit by missiles or some other form of covert operation, perhaps including explosives previously placed in the towers by military or intelligence-service engineers. The theories mostly don’t stand up to scrutiny, although it is possible to wonder if the CIA didn’t tell the FBI about the terrorists because the CIA intended to recruit them and may not have realised that they were on a strike mission. As always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and little has been presented.

The book then moves on to discus the intelligence failures that allowed the terrorists to get into position and strike without being intercepted. There were very definitely heart-breaking moments when the plot could have been stopped, but most of them became clear only with the benefit of hindsight. Certainly, no one could have reasonably connected the death of a prominent anti-Taliban fighter with a terrorist plot in New York. Part of the problem is that intelligence agencies soak in a great deal of crap – lies, nonsense and miscommunications – every day. Valid leads can sometimes be lost in the white noise.

A further problem lay in the political-legal framework established since the end of the Cold War. Congress loaded restrictions on the CIA that barred it, for example, from recruiting known terrorists (precisely how much notice the CIA paid to this instruction is a matter of conjecture). Furthermore, the FBI agents were concerned about following up tips about Middle Eastern men studying aircraft piloting for fear of being accused of racial profiling. The fact remains that the vast majority of suspects who might have been recruited by AQ are generally – publicly, at least – practicing Muslims. It is a fact that it is politically unacceptable to admit.

This was quite bad enough, but it got worse. AQ is/was a more trans-national organisation than most NGOs and corporations. It quite simply didn’t fit in with the terrorist groups of the Cold War; the IRA, for example, was focused on Ireland. The British didn’t have to invade Ireland to win the war; they already controlled Northern Ireland. It was possible to limit AQ’s dependence on other states, but it was never controlled by a single state or even based in a single state. And the one state that could be regarded as a base – Afghanistan – was so poorly governed that even if the Taliban had wanted to hand OBL over, they might not have been able to do it.

Pre-9/11, our networks and precedents were not set up to cope with anything like AQ. It was extremely difficult to track, let alone destroy. And even if we did, there was zero legal precedent to deal with them – unless we counted them as spies, who could be legally shot.

Finally, the book raises a disquieting question that has been largely buried since the attacks. Was a foreign government involved in 9/11? The book focuses on Saudi Arabia in particular, noting that the Saudis never cooperated with the US on tracking terrorism and were unprepared to stop their citizens donating money to terrorists until the terrorists came home in 2004. Given the strange nature of the Saudi Government, it is quite possible that the Saudis did fund AQ, if only to keep their own heads on their shoulders. And there was a great deal of jubilation in Saudi Arabia over 9/11.

Bush is roundly condemned for not focusing on this. The authors do not ask if he could actually have done anything. Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producer in the world. An American invasion of Saudi Arabia would cause a massive global oil shock. In that light, Bush’s decision to invade Iraq makes a great deal of sense; if Iraqi oil came online in great quantities, Saudi Arabia would be far less influential. The US would then be able to deal with it at leisure. Of course, accepting this means accepting that Bush wasn’t actually an idiot.

Overall, The Eleventh Day adds a great deal to our knowledge of 9/11, as well as usefully compiling already-known knowledge and dismissing numerous absurd theories. I doubt, however, if it is truly the final account of 9/11. Much remains to be discovered that may shed new light on the most tragic day of modern history.