
FINALLY -- IN AUDIOBOOK!
ALSO AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK
"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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Jun
24
Written by:
Diana West
Friday, June 24, 2011 3:17 AM
This week's syndicated column:
We have watched, rapt, as Barack Obama deliberated over exactly how many troops to withdraw from Afghanistan. The White House mission, as I see it, was to present the illusion of winding down an unpopular war without also disavowing or halting the disastrous Bush-Obama brand of nation-building -- which continues, we are told, until 2014. Life-and-death troop movements came to resemble a contest to guess how many jellybeans are in the jar. Distracted, no one seemed to notice the ground shifting ... in Iraq.
While we were looking the other way, the Iraq of anyone's lingering "surge" dreams vanished. But not under the drifts of rubble from the latest car-bombings to further bury the "fragile" security once secured by U.S. troops. Dream Iraq -- the "ally in the war on terror," the veritable Switzerland of Sunni-Shiite cooperation surge-improved security was supposed to enable -- completely disappeared (if it was ever there) in the hardened, U.S.-won corridors of Iraq's ruling institutions.
As the 2011 deadline for the departure of 50,000 remaining U.S. forces in Iraq approaches, the United States has been hinting, heavy-breathing with the desperation of a discarded mistress, that we might be prevailed upon to stay, just for the asking. Why? Probably to postpone the total, down-to-the-spool unraveling of Iraq during Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. This political ruse is strenuously supported by Iraq hawks of the neoconservative persuasion who want to postpone that unraveling indefinitely, even if it means turning the U.S. military into a foreign legion to do so.
Against this backdrop, the following, symbolically momentous but barely noticed events took place.
First, the government of Iraq actually asked a delegation of six U.S. congressmen to leave Iraq! This took place on June 11 after Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, suggested to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that Iraq repay the United States for its unstinting war and reconstruction expenditures -- something, don't forget, the Bush administration promised us way back when. Historical precedent set from Finland to Great Britain to Kuwait overwhelmingly favors reimbursement; the United States itself eventually managed to repay France after the American Revolution.
Rohrabacher has politely parsed Iraq's angry exit-invitation as "unofficial," but Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh left no room for doubt: "We as a government reject such statements, and we have informed the American embassy that these congressmen are not welcome in Iraq."
Second, anti-American, Iranian pawn Moqtada al-Sadr claimed to have polled religious authorities about U.S. troops remaining in Iraq and received unanimous disapproval. This is no surprise, but there is a slap in the face in the fatwa which Iran's Fars News Service reports was issued by senior Iraqi Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Kazzem al-Hosseini al-Haeri: "The extended mission of the infidel occupiers in Iraq even for one single day after the mentioned date (as cited in the security agreement) is haram." "Haram" means against Islam.
Third, the Iraqi parliament accuses the United States of looting $17 billion from Iraq. The speaker of the Iraqi parliament traveled to Washington this week partly to make this charge to Vice President Joe Biden. Last month, The Australian newspaper reports, the Iraqi parliament's "anti-graft committee" sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council openly accusing "U.S. institutions" of "stealing the money." The Australian quoted Iraqi parliamentarian Jawad al-Shehaili as saying: "The issue is not about returning the money. It's about revealing that the U.S. side did nothing for Iraq. It gave from the right hand and stole from the left."
How rancorous can a country -- for whom more than 4,000 Americans died -- get?
As recently as 2007, the Bush Iraq Strategy Review predicted Iraq would be "an ally in the war on terror." In December 2008, Charles Krauthammer saw in Iraq "our best hope for the kind of fundamental political-cultural change in the Arab sphere that alone will bring about the defeat of Islamic extremism." Last year, John McCain burbled on about an Iraq that "over time will be a beacon, a model to other nations."
Beacon of American hostility, he should have said.
The dream is over, and what a nightmare -- and that includes the demonstrably failed strategic impact of the surge. Bizarrely, the surge still enjoys golden status. After all, Obama not only replicated it in Afghanistan, he tapped its leading practitioner as CIA director.
When do we get to wake up?
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