America, Indicted.

Review It's striking that two grimly titled but very different new books about America's decline - Last Best Hope by George Packer and After the Apocalypse by Andrew Bacevich - both invoke a little-remembered 1940 jeremiad by the French historian Marc Bloch called Strange Defeat. Packer, in his book, offhandedly calls the Iraq War a "strategic folly enabled by lies and self-deception" without acknowledging that he personally had a hand in America's current derangement; he and other leading U.S. pundits largely supported the Iraq invasion at the time. This is where Packer and Bacevich do an important service in demanding that we rethink the basic terms of the debate - about who Americans are and what the United States should be in the world. Almost to prove this point, Bacevich goes on to argue that the United States should simply stand by the "global community", without acknowledging that the United States and the major Western nations in effect created this global community and remain its critical mainstays today. [Extracted from the article]