Strong Borders Secure Nation or Lightning out of Lebanon

Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China's Territorial Disputes

Author: M Taylor Fravel

As China emerges as an international economic and military power, the world waits to see how the nation will assert itself globally. Yet, as M. Taylor Fravel shows in Strong Borders, Secure Nation, concerns that China might be prone to violent conflict over territory are overstated. The first comprehensive study of China's territorial disputes, Strong Borders, Secure Nation contends that China over the past sixty years has been more likely to compromise in these conflicts with its Asian neighbors and less likely to use force than many scholars or analysts might expect.

By developing theories of cooperation and escalation in territorial disputes, Fravel explains China's willingness to either compromise or use force. When faced with internal threats to regime security, especially ethnic rebellion, China has been willing to offer concessions in exchange for assistance that strengthens the state's control over its territory and people. By contrast, China has used force to halt or reverse decline in its bargaining power in disputes with its militarily most powerful neighbors or in disputes where it has controlled none of the land being contested. Drawing on a rich array of previously unexamined Chinese language sources, Strong Borders, Secure Nation offers a compelling account of China's foreign policy on one of the most volatile issues in international relations.

Interesting book: Quick Facts or Just Us Girls

Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil

Author: Tom Diaz

Before September 11, 2001, one terrorist group had killed more Americans than any other: Hezbollah, the “Party of God.” Today it remains potentially more dangerous than even al Qaeda. Yet little has been known about its inner workings, past successes, and future plans–until now.

Written by an accomplished journalist and a law-enforcement expert, Lightning Out of Lebanon is a chilling and essential addition to our understanding of the external and internal threats to America. In disturbing detail, it portrays the degree to which Hezbollah has infiltrated this country and the extent to which it intends to do us harm.

Formed in Lebanon by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in 1982, Hezbollah is fueled by hatred of Israel and the United States. Its 1983 truck-bomb attack against the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut killed 241 soldiers–the largest peacetime loss ever for the U.S. military–and caused President Reagan to withdraw all troops from Lebanon. Since then, among other atrocities, Hezbollah has murdered Americans at the U.S. embassy in Lebanon and the Khobar Towers U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia; tortured and killed the CIA station chief in Beirut; held organizational meetings with top members of al Qaeda–including Osama bin Laden–and established sleeper cells in the United States and Canada.

Lightning Out of Lebanon reveals how, starting in 1982, a cunning and deadly Hezbollah terrorist named Mohammed Youssef Hammoud operated a cell in Charlotte, North Carolina, under the radar of American intelligence. The story of how FBI special agent Rick Schwein captured him in 2002 is a brilliantly researchedand written account.

Yet the past is only prologue in the unsettling odyssey of Hezbollah. Using their exclusive sources in the Middle East and inside the U.S. counterterrorism establishment, the authors of Lightning Out of Lebanon imagine the deadly future of Hezbollah and posit how best to combat the group which top American counterintelligence officials and Senator Bob Graham, vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have called “the A Team of terrorism.”

The Washington Post - Daniel Byman

The book shines when discussing FBI operations and the mundane realities of the Hezbollah operatives' daily existence. The FBI officials faced numerous problems, most of which stemmed from byzantine or misguided regulations and procedures rather than the craftiness of their prey. Time and again, opportunities were lost because the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the State Department didn't share information. The artificial "wall" separating criminal and intelligence investigations within the FBI also created roadblocks, making it far harder for investigators to put the pieces together and act effectively.

Publishers Weekly

In a compact and cogent addition to the literature on terrorism, two expert journalists join forces for a portrait of how a Hezbollah cell in Charlotte, N.C., was broken up a little more than a year before September 11. In clear prose with a minimum of political ax-grinding, Newman (The Covenant) and Diaz (Making a Killing) provide biographies of cell leader Mohammed Youssef Hammoud (from his origins in the Shiite slums of Beirut) and member Said Harb; the FBI agents and federal prosecutors (who overcame bureaucratic inertia and civil libertarian-fostered barriers to accumulate the evidence that led to Hammoud's prosecution); and many incidental players along the way. They also provide clear historical summaries of the religious and ethnic divides in the Middle East, and portraits of lesser-known phenomena such as the role of Paraguay (and its borders with Argentina and Brazil) in providing havens for international terrorists. The authors' skill at characterization of friends and foes puts a great many thriller writers in the shade, and at no point do they fall into stereotyping. Embedded in the book is an argument for the kind of interagency intelligence sharing that is still in its infancy. (Mar. 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	"You've got to be taught ..."	3
	"For the violence done in Lebanon ..."	32
	"I knew what he was thinking ..."	61
	"I believe in the sun ..."	93
	"Like a soccer goalkeeper ..."	128
	"Doing something illegal to be legal ..."	161
	"God keep our land glorious and free! ..."	185
	"Rise for Jihad! ..."	218

The Selected Political Writings of John Locke or Global Financial Warriors

The Selected Political Writings of John Locke (Norton Critical Editions Series)

Author: John Lock

"This Norton Critical Edition begins with Paul E. Sigmund's comprehensive introduction to the volume, which provides readers with biographical background and a history of the interpretation of Locke's writings, giving particular attention to the ideologically influenced debates of the last fifty years. Locke's most important political writings - The Two Treatises of Government (The First Treatise generously excerpted; The Second Treatise complete) and A Letter Concerning Toleration - are accompanied by explanatory annotations. The Selected Political Writings of John Locke is the only student edition available that includes, in addition to Locke's political texts, selections from his ethical, epistemological, and religious writings - Essay on the Law of Nature, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and The Reasonableness of Christianity." "Sources" includes writings by the major political theorists who influenced Locke. Twenty-one "Interpretations," judiciously chosen from the thousands of books and articles on Locke's political writings, have been thematically organized to allow students to explore the full range of Locke's influence on political and social controversies and developments.

Book review: Youre Only Young Twice or Dressing Smart for Men

Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World

Author: John B Taylor

Sworn in as head of the U.S. Treasury Department's international finance division just three months prior to 9/11, John B. Taylor soon found himself at the center of the war on terror. Global Financial Warriors takes you inside the White House Situation Room, to the meetings of the G7 finance ministers, and to cities worldwide as Taylor assembles a coalition to freeze terrorist assets, plans the financial reconstruction in Afghanistan, oversees the development of a new currency in Iraq, and deals with the spread of financial crises. From reforming the IMF and the World Bank to negotiating international agreements to reduce Iraq's debt by 80 percent and cancel the debt of very poor countries, Taylor's unparalleled access offers the reader an insider's account of a pivotal time in international finance. 16 pages of illustrations.

The Washington Post - Jeffrey E. Garten

If most people were asked about President Bush's foreign policy priorities, they would probably point to Iraq, al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea -- crises characterized by the actual or potential use of military force. But in Global Financial Warriors, an account of the administration's international financial efforts from Sept. 11, 2001, to April 2005, John B. Taylor, then the Treasury Department's undersecretary for international affairs, gives us an intriguing and highly personalized view of some other dimensions of international policy that get far less attention these days than they deserve … Taylor has written a valuable insider's account of financial diplomacy in the Bush administration. Coming so soon after the events themselves, it is a worthy first draft of some important recent history.

Library Journal

From freezing terrorists' assets to figuring out how to reduce Iraq's debt, Taylor had a lot to do after being sworn in as head of the U.S. Treasury Department's international finance division just months before 9/11. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

1	The first shot in the global war on terror	1
2	Financial reconstruction in Afghanistan	29
3	Avoiding global financial contagion	70
4	New rules for the international monetary fund	98
5	Accountability at the World Bank and beyond	133
6	Financial diplomacy and the Turkish option	166
7	A plan for financial stability in Iraq	197
8	Iraq achieves financial stability	220
9	Negotiating the mother of all debt deals	250
10	Exchange rate diplomacy	274

The Anthropology of Development and Globalization or The Greek Wars

The Anthropology of Development and Globalization

Author: Marc Edelman

Development — is it a powerful vision of a better life for the half of the world’s population who subsist on two dollars a day? Or is it a failed Enlightenment legacy, an oppressive 'master narrative'? Such questions inspire a field newly animated by theories of globalization, modernity, cultural hybridity, and transnationalism. The Anthropology of Development and Globalization is a collection of readings that provides an unprecedented overview of this field that ranges from its classical origins to today’s debates about the 'magic' of the free market.

The volume is framed by an encyclopedic introduction that will prove indispensable to students and experts alike. Subsequent readings range from classics by Weber and Marx and Engels to contemporary works on the politics of development knowledge, consumption, environment, gender, international NGO networks, the International Monetary Fund, campaigns to reform the World Bank, the collapse of socialism, and the limits of “post-developmentalism.” Explicitly designed for teaching, The Anthropology of Development and Globalization fills a crucial gap; no other available text so richly mingles historical, cultural, political, and economic perspectives on development and globalization, and none captures such a wide variety of theoretical approaches and topics as does this exciting collection.

Book about: Plain Lives in a Golden Age or Travel Perspectives

The Greek Wars: The Failure of Persia

Author: George Cawkwell

The Greek Wars treats the whole course of Persian relations with the Greeks from the coming of Cyrus in the 540s down to Alexander the Great's defeat of Darius III in 331 BC. Cawkwell discusses from a Persian perspective major questions such as why Xerxes' invasion of Greece failed, and how important a part the Great King played in Greek affairs in the fourth century. Cawkwell's views are at many points original: in particular, his explanation of how and why the Persian invasion of Greece failed challenges the prevailing orthodoxy, as does his view of the importance of Persia in Greek affairs for the two decades after the King's Peace. Persia, he concludes, was destroyed by Macedonian military might but moral decline had no part in it; the Macedonians who had subjected Greece were too good an army, but their victory was not easy.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction

2. The subjection of the Greeks of Asia

3. `The lands beyond the sea'

4. The Ionian Revolt

5. The conquest of Greece

6. The war in the East Aegean

7. Peace with Athens, 449-412 BC

8. The recovery of the Greeks of Asia

9. From the King's Peace to the end of the Social War

10. The end of the Achaemenids