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thundara  ·  3828 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: U.S. Warplanes Strike ISIS in Iraq

    You like the FBI book?

It's not a particularly moral reason why, but I enjoyed the CIA book more because of how over the top ridiculously unprofessional our officials were in it. It at least gave more stories, even if those ended in dictators in power and hundreds of thousands dead.

Enemies is much more focused on J. Edgar Hoover and is almost completely a biography of him, since he ran the FBI for so many (48!!!) years. He's worth the read, imo, but other than him, it's primarily government appointees doing government appointee tasks mostly within the boundaries of the law. Past that, it has history on where it came from, the thinking behind spying on Americans (I think it was the FBI that went through pushes and pulls with the DOJ over spying, but it's late and my memory of the two books has blurred together), and times when the FBI tried pulling strings abroad.

Other than that, there's some interesting tidbits, like the FBI subverting the KKK, but really the TL;DR is: "Came for the FBI, stayed for the Hoover"

    If you presume that geopolitics is a zero-sum game, conquest of the Middle East to secure what oil is left and prevent it from aiding China, Europe or Russia makes a lot of sense. The problem is in presuming that geopolitics is a zero-sum game.

Given the trillions of dollars wars cost, I can't help but wonder how much more effective it is to just invest in more expensive forms of energy closer to home. That's a lot of tar sands, deep water rigs, and green initiatives...