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"It is not simply a good book about history. It is one of those books which makes history. ... "
-- Vladimir Bukovsky, co-founder of the Soviet dissident movement and author of Judgment in Moscow, and Pavel Stroilov, author of Behind the Desert Storm.
"Diana West is distinguished from almost all political commentators because she seeks less to defend ideas and proposals than to investigate and understand what happens and what has happened. This gives her modest and unpretentious books and articles the status of true scientific inquiry, shifting the debate from the field of liking and disliking to being and non-being."
-- Olavo de Carvalho
If you're looking for something to read, this is the most dazzling, mind-warping book I have read in a long time. It has been criticized by the folks at Front Page, but they don't quite get what Ms. West has set out to do and accomplished. I have a whole library of books on communism, but -- "Witness" excepted -- this may be the best.
-- Jack Cashill, author of Deconstructing Obama: The Lives, Loves and Letters of America's First Postmodern President and First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America
"Every once in a while, something happens that turns a whole structure of preconceived ideas upside down, shattering tales and narratives long taken for granted, destroying prejudice, clearing space for new understanding to grow. Diana West's latest book, American Betrayal, is such an event."
-- Henrik Raeder Clausen, Europe News
West's lesson to Americans: Reality can't be redacted, buried, fabricated, falsified, or omitted. Her book is eloquent proof of it.
-- Edward Cline, Family Security Matters
"I have read it, and agree wholeheartedly."
-- Angelo Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston Unversity, and fellow of the Claremont Institute.
Enlightening. I give American Betrayal five stars only because it is not possible to give it six.
-- John Dietrich, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy.
After reading American Betrayal and much of the vituperation generated by neoconservative "consensus" historians, I conclude that we cannot ignore what West has demonstrated through evidence and cogent argument.
-- John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
"A brilliantly researched and argued book."
-- Edward Jay Epstein, author of Deception: The Invisible War between the KGB and the CIA, The Annals 0f Unsolved Crime
"This explosive book is a long-needed answer to court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow. Must-reading for serious students of security issues and Cold War deceptions, both foreign and domestic."
-- M. Stanton Evans, author of Stalin's Secret Agents and Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies
Her task is ambitious; her sweep of crucial but too-little-known facts of history is impressive; and her arguments are eloquent and witty. ... American Betrayal is one of those books that will change the way many of us see the world.
-- Susan Freis Falknor, Blue Ridge Forum
"American Betrayal is absolutely required reading. Essential. You're sleepwalking without it."
-- Chris Farrell, director of investigations research, Judicial Watch
"Diana West wrote a brilliant book called American Betrayal, which I recommend to everybody ... It is a seminal work that will grow in importance."
-- Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker
"This is a must read for any serious student of history and anyone working to understand the Marxist counter-state in America."
-- John Guandolo, president, Understanding the Threat, former FBI special agent
It is myth, or a series of myths, concerning WW2 that Diana West is aiming to replace with history in 2013’s American Betrayal.
If West’s startling revisionism is anywhere near the historical truth, the book is what Nietzsche wished his writings to be, dynamite.
-- Mark Gullick, British Intelligence
“What Diana West has done is to dynamite her way through several miles of bedrock. On the other side of the tunnel there is a vista of a new past. Of course folks are baffled. Few people have the capacity to take this in. Her book is among the most well documented I have ever read. It is written in an unusual style viewed from the perspective of the historian—but it probably couldn’t have been done any other way.”
-- Lars Hedegaard, historian, journalist, founder, Danish Free Press Society
The polemics against your Betrayal have a familiar smell: The masters of the guild get angry when someone less worthy than they are ventures into the orchard in which only they are privileged to harvest. The harvest the outsider brought in, they ritually burn.
-- Hans Jansen, former professor of Islamic Thought, University of Utrecht
No book has ever frightened me as much as American Betrayal. ... [West] patiently builds a story outlining a network of subversion so bizarrely immense that to write it down will seem too fantastic to anyone without the book’s detailed breadth and depth. It all adds up to a story so disturbing that it has changed my attitude to almost everything I think about how the world actually is. ... By the time you put the book down, you have a very different view of America’s war aims and strategies. The core question is, did the USA follow a strategy that served its own best interests, or Stalin’s? And it’s not that it was Stalin’s that is so compelling, since you knew that had to be the answer, but the evidence in detail that West provides that makes this a book you cannot ignore.
-- Steven Kates, RMIT (Australia) Associate Professor of Economics, Quadrant
"Diana West's new book rewrites WWII and Cold War history not by disclosing secrets, but by illuminating facts that have been hidden in plain sight for decades. Furthermore, she integrates intelligence and political history in ways never done before."
-- Jeffrey Norwitz, former professor of counterterrorism, Naval War College
[American Betrayal is] the most important anti-Communist book of our time ... a book that can open people's eyes to the historical roots of our present malaise ... full of insights, factual corroboration, and psychological nuance.
-- J.R. Nyquist, author, Origins of the Fourth World War
Although I know [Christopher] Andrew well, and have met [Oleg] Gordievsky twice, I now doubt their characterization of Hopkins -- also embraced by Radosh and the scholarly community. I now support West's conclusions after rereading KGB: The Inside Story account 23 years later [relevant passages cited in American Betrayal]. It does not ring true that Hopkins was an innocent dupe dedicated solely to defeating the Nazis. Hopkins comes over in history as crafty, secretive and no one's fool, hardly the personality traits of a naïve fellow traveler. And his fingerprints are on the large majority of pro-Soviet policies implemented by the Roosevelt administration. West deserves respect for cutting through the dross that obscures the evidence about Hopkins, and for screaming from the rooftops that the U.S. was the victim of a successful Soviet intelligence operation.
-- Bernie Reeves, founder of The Raleigh Spy Conference, American Thinker
Diana West’s American Betrayal — a remarkable, novel-like work of sorely needed historical re-analysis — is punctuated by the Cassandra-like quality of “multi-temporal” awareness. ... But West, although passionate and direct, is able to convey her profoundly disturbing, multi-temporal narrative with cool brilliance, conjoining meticulous research, innovative assessment, evocative prose, and wit.
-- Andrew G. Bostom, PJ Media
Do not be dissuaded by the controversy that has erupted around this book which, if you insist on complete accuracy, would be characterized as a disinformation campaign.
-- Jed Babbin, The American Spectator
In American Betrayal, Ms. West's well-established reputation for attacking "sacred cows" remains intact. The resulting beneficiaries are the readers, especially those who can deal with the truth.
-- Wes Vernon, Renew America
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Mar
31
Written by:
Diana West
Thursday, March 31, 2011 5:31 AM
There is a new divide by which we define ourselves: Those who suck in the acrid smell of jihad in the Middle East, pronounce their hallucinations "Arab Spring," crave more ... and those who don't. Among those of us who "just say no" to this nowhere trip, it should be noted, are those who take their sharia seriously, and see its extension as the lingering and insidious side effect, the one that take us down when the vapors are no more.
The Fox News commentariat is where you find the highest and most persistent rate of "Arab Spring" abuse, as Andy McCarthy notes here, Fred Grandy here, but its use is widespread and indiscriminate because it enables users to see the world as they want to see it. On the conservative side of the spectrum, one dose of "Arab Spring" and the "Bush freedom agenda" looks like a brilliantly red, white and blue success, not the bleak, endless nightmare that it is.
Melanie Phillips weighs in today (via Ruthfully Yours) on the appropriately outraged side of Political Temperance. She concludes that the West has made itself "an open goal for its enemies," and pronounces herself "[gaping] in stunned amazement at the extent of the idiocy being displayed by the leaders of America, Britain and Europe over the `Arab Spring' -- which should surely be renamed `the Arab Boomerang.' "
Boomerang is right. Among the cautionary lore supporting the skeptics is the boomerang effect of empowering active jihadist groups, which, first and foremost, will strike at the tip of the spear against the jihad, Israel. The other beneficiary is the jihadist state of Iran.
All, however, would agree that tectonic plates are shifting, and they move at such a rate as to blur the emerging pattern. For example, why intervention in Libya where a terror-kingpin-dictator is killing his people, but not in Syria where a terror-kingpin-dictator is killing his people? The trigger-happy Obama administration's rationale is perfectly lame.
But maybe not. Phillips, picking up on the apparent discrepancy, writes:
As a result, moderate Arabs are appalled by western hypocrisy. In
two articles in Al Sharq al Awsat its editor Tariq Alhomayed suggested that the U.S. had failed to realize that the demands of the Shi’ite protestors in Bahrain were not democratic, but a manifestation of Iran’s threat to Bahrain and the Gulf states.:
‘Amidst America’s contradictory comments regarding the events in our region, one particular statement always stands out, namely the call for restraint. Two days ago, the Americans reiterated this same statement in comments on the [GCC's] Peninsula Shield Force’s entering Manama, at Bahrain’s request.
...
How can the U.S. defense secretary say that Bahrain must enact speedy reforms to put an end to Iranian interference… while the Americans are also issuing statements saying that in Yemen, protests are not the solution, and that there must be dialogue? Why must the Bahrain government to act immediately, while the demonstrators in Yemen must to wait? This is wrong, and it raises both suspicion and doubt.
…This is not to mention that that the U.S. is ignoring what is happening in Iran, where the state oppresses its minorities. [As recently as] yesterday, the Iranian opposition has tried to come out and protest in Tehran, only to be repressed, and its key figures have been arrested. This is a perplexing matter indeed, but it clearly tells us something – that is, that Washington does not have a clear picture of what is going on in the region, and that even if it does, it is too weak to act.”
Or, possibly, that Washington really has nothing much against the Iranian status quo and even expansion. "Clear picture" and this "region" don't necessarily converge, but is it the case that a trend is emerging whereby it is discernible US policy not to repulse the Iranian-axis?
Let me rephrase the question, because it is has been US policy since the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran not to repulse the Iranian axis, even though Iran has committed innumerable, catastrophic and unavenged and unaddressed acts of war against the US.
Is a trend emerging from the sands of Arab Spring of -- how to describe -- a more concerted, more definite US policy to tolerate the Iranian axis?
It is the very interesting case that America has eschewed all forms of solicitude for Saudi Arabian concerns, the rival Muslim power in the region, whom the US has long served as loving (blech) ally and arms pureyor while simultaneously enacting sanctions and other coolnesses on Iran. Surely, this is an unexpected turn from the president who bowed to the Saudi king. And surely, there are strategic implications to this overt shift. (UPDATE: See this McClatchey rundown on the springtime "wedge" between the US and the Saudis by my old Wash Times colleague Warren Strobel here.)
What are they? It begins to look as if the Al Sharq al Awsat editor is touching on something, that Libya yes, Syria no is suggesting something, along with the White House's abuse of Israel as a point of policy to the emboldenment of Hamas (although this also pleases the rest of the umma, from Riyadh to Tehran): There seems to be a marked determination to follow a hands-off-Iran policy.
Had the US been operating to counter Iran (and therefore in alignment with what has always been forced down our gullets, with a steady IV drip of oil, as "our great ally Saudi Arabia"), we would have supported Mubarak, would now support Bahrain against Iranian-ginned-up Shia opposition protests --- or at least wouldn't be pressuring Bahrain to appease this Iran-linked opposition, a potential regional flashpoint. (Elliott Abrams, meanwhile, doesn't see any evidence of Iranian "colonization"of Bahrain's Shiites.) Syria, so far exempted from US intervention, humanitarian or otherwise, while we push for diplomatic solutions, is a special terror pal of Iran's. As even the Wall Street Journal has noticed in surveying the landscape, "hardliners in Syria and Iran, and those within Lebanon's Hezbollah leadership and Gaza's Hamas government, still seem secure."
A veritable Iranian axis, seemingly unopposed at every turn by the US.
Is this purely accidental? I'm not suggesting the US did or could engineer this array of Iran-positive powers left standing -- which, of could, with a big enough wind, could also fall. But have we in effect gotten out Iran's way? Is that what we're doing? Are these our new boys?
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