About this item
The first rule of perpetual war is to never stop, a fact which former NBC News analyst William M. Arkin knows better than anyone, having served in the Army and having covered all of America's wars over the past three decades. He has spent his career investigating how the military throws around the word "war" to justify everything, from physical combat to today's globe-straddling cyber and intelligence network. In The Generals Have No Clothes, Arkin traces how we got where we are - bombing ten countries, killing terrorists in dozens more - all without Congressional approval or public knowledge. Starting after the 9/11 attacks, the government put forth a singular idea that perpetual war was the only way to keep the American people safe. Arkin explains why President Obama failed to achieve his national security goal of ending war in Iraq and reducing our military engagements, and shows how President Trump has been frustrated in his attempts to end conflict in Afghanistan and Syria.
About the Author
William Arkin is an author, journalist and analyst who has been working on the subject of national security for over 50 years. He currently works for Newsweek magazine as a senior national security correspondent. His unique career spans an early assignment in Army intelligence in Cold War Berlin to being a best-selling author today. He has written articles that have appeared on the front page of The New York Times,The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. He has worked as a military advisor to the most influential non-governmental human rights and environmental organizations, equally at ease heading Greenpeace International's response to the first Gulf War or teaching at the U.S. Air Force's premier strategy school. He is weirdly proud to say that he spent the night in Saddam General Hospital after being injured by an unexploded cluster bomb in Iraq and that some of his fondest memories were picking through the rubble of Slobodan Milosevic's Belgrade villa and Mullah Omar's compound in Afghanistan. He is probably the only person alive who can say that he has written for both The Nation magazine and Marine Corps Gazette.In 2021, Arkin will publish three books, The Generals Have No Clothes: The Untold Story of Our Endless Wars (Simon & Schuster) , History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11 (Featherproof Books) , and On That Day: The Definitive Timeline of 9/11 (PublicAffairs) .Arkin is co-author of the multi-award winning and national best seller Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (Little Brown) , based up a four-part series Arkin and Dana Priest wrote in 2010. The book and series were the results of a three-year investigation into the shadows of the enormous system of military, intelligence and corporate interests created in the decade after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The series was accompanied by The Washington Post's largest ever online presentation, earned the authors the George Polk Award for National Reporting, the Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists award for Public Service, was a Goldsmith finalist for Investigative Reporting and Pulitzer award nominee, as well as recipient of a half dozen other major journalism awards.Arkin's other national bestseller was Nuclear Battlefields (Ballinger/Harper & Row) with Richardl Fieldhouse, the first book to reveal the locations of nuclear weapons around the world and introduce the concept of the "infrastructure" behind war. The book was a news sensation from the front pages of The New York Times to media in Italy, Germany, and Japan, and even earned Arkin a mention in a monologue on the Johnny Carson show. The Reagan Administration went as far as to seek to put Arkin in jail for revealing the locations of American (and Soviet) nuclear weapons; those were the days.Arkin's then worked on the multi-volume Nuclear Weapons Databook series for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a set of references which the Reaga
