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xv, [3], 233, [5] pages. Foreword by Tom Clancy. Illustrations. Index. Inscribed by Zinni on half-title page. Minor inscription ink bleeding onto title page. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Anthony Charles Zinni (born September 17, 1943) is a retired United States Marine Corps general and a former Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command (CENTCOM). In 2002, he was selected to be a special envoy for the United States to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. While serving as special envoy, Zinni was also an instructor in the Department of International Studies at the Virginia Military Institute. He was an instructor at Duke University, a public speaker, and an author of best-selling books on his military career and foreign affairs, including Battle for Peace. Zinni has served on the advisory boards of a number of companies, including the security testing firm, Mu Dynamics, based in Sunnyvale, California. He joined Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy in Spring 2008 as the Sanford Distinguished Lecturer in Residence and taught a new course in the Hart Leadership Program. As of 2014, he serves as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Middle East Institute. He has been credited for foresight in predicting the dangers of terrorism coming out of Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks of 2001 and supporting the Iraq War troop surge of 2007. Derived from a Kirkus review: Retired Marine Corps general Zinni warns of the dangers of spending time in the so-called Arc of Instability-precisely the area where America's course of empire-building has led. Zinni (with Koltz, both of them two-time co-authors with Tom Clancy) allows, with admirable candor, that "we are an empire." Zinni looks at some of the ways in which that influence, which exists side-by-side with a refusal to learn anything of the world beyond America's borders. Zinni offers a blend of anecdote, memoir and policy to deliver a message that might be distilled thus: If you act in the world, act well, for you must live with the consequences-and, in what strategists call the Zone of Conflict, to live with them for a very long time. Zinni clearly disapproves of the Bush administration's unilateralism, and heading his list of prescriptions for building a better world is the care and feeding of international alliances. The real enemy, he concludes, is not insurgent Islam or terrorism but instability, which is just the sort of thing that nation-building and international aid can combat; though "it doesn't take much for unstable societies to fall over the edge," Zinni observes, optimistically, "it doesn't take much to keep most of those societies from falling over the edge." The details are a little sketchy. Still, it's worth pondering the well-traveled, culturally aware general's program for restoring at least some of America's good name in the world.
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