At the Point of a Gun
Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention
1st Edition
Published on 4. June 2013
288 pages
978-1-4767-3748-5 (ISBN)
Description
Veteran journalist David Rieff's essays draw a searing portrait of what happens when the grandiose schemes of policymakers and human rights activists go horribly wrong in the field.
Writing for publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to The Nation to France's Le Monde, David Rieff witnessed firsthand most of the armed interventions since the Cold War waged by the West or the United Nations in the name of human rights and democratization. In this timely collection of his most illuminating articles, Rieff, one of our leading experts on the subject, reassesses some of his own judgments about the use of military might to solve the world's most pressing humanitarian problems.
At the Point of a Gun raises critical questions we cannot ignore in this era of gunboat democracy. When, if ever, is it appropriate to intervene militarily in the domestic affairs of other nations? Are human rights and humanitarian concerns legitimate reasons for intervening, or is the assault on sovereignty a flag of convenience for the recolonization of part of the world? And, above all, can democracy be imposed through the barrel of an M16? This is not an optimistic report, but the questions Rieff raises are of the essence as the United States grapples with the harsh consequences of what it has wrought on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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David Rieff
At the Point Of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention
Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention
Book
08/2006
Scribner
€19.00
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Rieff
At the Point of A Gun
Other
03/2005
Simon & Schuster
€44.73
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Person
David Rieff is the author of eight previous books, including Swimming in a Sea of Death, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. He lives in New York City.
Content
- Intro
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One The Un and International Relations Leading Up to Iraq
- Hope Is Not Enough
- A New Age of Liberal Imperialism?
- An Age of Genocide
- In Defense of Afro-Pessimism
- Lost Kosovo
- Goodbye, New World Order
- Part Two The Iraq War and its Aftermath
- The Lives They Lived: Collateral Damage
- The Specter of Imperialism: The Marriage of the Human Rights Left and the New Imperialist Right
- End of Empire
- The Way We Live Now: A Notion of War
- Were Sanctions Right?
- Blueprint for a Mess
- The Shiite Surge
- Afterword
- Acknowledgments
- About David Rieff
- Index
- Copyright
