Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War,   ISBN:9781568584133

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Seeing Mark Danner in conversation with Bill Moyers inspired me to read his book, Stripping Bare the Body. In a quiet and deeply informed way, Danner pulls apart the threads of America's various foreign interventions of the past 25 years, from Haiti to Bosnia to Iraq. In each case he shows us the complexities of the local reality and how American foreign policy interventions got it all wrong. The usual scenario is action based on misinformation and/or support for the villain in power who promises us whatever he thinks we want to hear. In the general outline of the story, Danner uses more current interventions to relate what some of us have been hearing since the early 1950s. But his journalism has taken him deep into these places, often to where his life was on the line, so he shares details of each place that are new and that bring into sharp relief the larger policy questions. In this he reminds me of Rory Stewart's brilliant narratives about Iraq and Afghanistan.