The Management of Savagery - by Max Blumenthal (Paperback)

About the Book

"In the Management of Savagery, Max Blumenthal excavates the real story behind America's dealings with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America's imperial designs. Washington's secret funding of the mujahedin provoked the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. With guns and money, the United States has ever since sustained the extremists, including Osama Bin Laden, who have become its enemies. The Pentagon has trained and armed jihadist elements in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya; it has launched military interventions to change regimes in the Middle East. In doing so, it created fertile ground for the Islamic State and brought foreign conflicts home to American soil. These failed wars abroad have made the United States more vulnerable to both terrorism as well as native ultra-nationalism. The Trump presidency is the inevitable consequence of neoconservative imperialism in the post-Cold War age. Trump's dealings in the Middle East are likely only to exacerbate the situation." -- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

How America's failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria have resulted in increased threats at home--from jihadist terrorism to the rise of Western ultra-nationalism.

In the Management of Savagery, Max Blumenthal excavates the real story behind America's dealings with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America's imperial designs.

Washington's secret funding of the mujahedin provoked the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. With guns and money, the United States has ever since sustained the extremists, including Osama Bin Laden, who have become its enemies. The Pentagon has trained and armed jihadist elements in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya; it has launched military interventions to change regimes in the Middle East. In doing so, it created fertile ground for the Islamic State and brought foreign conflicts home to American soil.

These failed wars abroad have made the United States more vulnerable to both terrorism as well as native ultra-nationalism. The Trump presidency is the inevitable consequence of neoconservative imperialism in the post-Cold War age. Trump's dealings in the Middle East are likely only to exacerbate the situation.

Review Quotes

"Max Blumenthal has spent the last decade transforming himself into one of the most vital voices in journalism today, always speaking truth to power with fearlessness and integrity."
--Reza Aslan, author of Zealot

"One of the finest and most intrepid journalists working in America today."
--Andrew Cockburn, author of Kill Chain

"Max Blumenthal audaciously takes in-your-face, on-the-ground journalism into the realm of geopolitics."
--Juan Cole, author of The New Arabs and Engaging the Muslim World

"Looking for honest journalism--read Max Blumenthal."
--Oliver Stone

"A thought-provoking disturbing book about America's foreign wars and the impact on the USA itself. Max Blumental cuts through official propaganda to the facts. He illuminates the darker corners of foreign policy drawing incisive and unnerving conclusions we ignore at our peril. He is a courageous and essential commentator for our troubled times. We all need to read this book to better understand the world we live in."
--Gabriel Byrne

"Insighful ... The failure, as Blumenthal writes, to place these conflicts in context, to examine our own complicity in fueling a justifiable anger, even rage, dooms us to perpetual misunderstanding and perpetual warfare. Our response is to employ greater and greater levels of violence that only expand the extremism at home and abroad."
--Chris Hedges, TruthDig

"The strength of the book is in connecting the dots, and the masterful narrative it weaves together. Most readers will find much that is new to them. A journalistic achievement whose importance could barely be exaggerated."
-- Asa Winstanley, Middle East Monitor

"A useful antidote to the torrents of pro-empire bilge promoted by conservatives and liberals alike."
--Morning Star

"Blumenthal's angry book provokes anger, as well it should. He makes a convincing case that the cynical and failed policies of America's secretive military-intelligence apparatus helped deliver Trump into the Oval Office."
--The Deep State

"A far more cogent explanation for the US wars in Afghanistan along with Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria. It reads like a real-life whodunit tracing the shadowy back channels of the CIA, FBI, DIA, and NSA piping jihadists around the greater Middle East to create chaos only to find their assets turning against them. Besides being well written, the analysis of the maturation of the neoliberal imperial project by the world's sole remaining superpower illuminates the current bi-partisan consensus for militarism."
--Roger D. Harris, MintPress News

"A serious read for anyone that wants to understand the role that US Foreign Policy played in the arrival of Jihadists groups like al-Qaeda, al-Nusra and ISIS. And the arrival of Trump."
--Mick Wallace, MEP

About the Author

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author whose articles and video documentaries have appeared in the New York Times, Daily Beast, Guardian, Huffington Post, Salon, Al Jazeera English and many other publications. He is Senior Editor of AlterNet's Grayzone Project and the author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, which won the 2014 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Notable Book Award, the New York Times bestseller Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, and The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. His documentaries and on-the-ground reports have been seen by millions.