Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power

by David E. Sanger Narrated by Robertson Dean

Overview

“Stunning revelations...This is an account that long will be consulted by anyone trying to understand not just Iran but warfare in the 21st century...an important book.” -Tom Ricks, New York Times
*
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE INHERITANCE, A REVEALING *AND NEWS-BREAKING ACCOUNT OF OBAMA'S AGGRESSIVE USE OF INNOVATIVE WEAPONS AND NEW TOOLS OF AMERICAN POWER TO MANAGE A RAPIDLY SHIFTING WORLD OF GLOBAL THREATS AND CHALLENGES

Inside the White House Situation Room, the newly elected Barack Obama immerses himself in the details of a remark­able new American capability to launch cyberwar against Iran-and escalates covert operations to delay the day when the mullahs could obtain a nuclear weapon. Over the next three years Obama accelerates drone attacks as an alter­native to putting troops on the ground in Pakistan, and becomes increasingly reliant on the Special Forces, whose hunting of al-Qaeda illuminates the path out of an unwin­nable war in Afghanistan.
*
Confront and Conceal provides readers with a picture of an administration that came to office with the world on fire. It takes them into the Situation Room debate over how to undermine Iran's program while simultaneously trying to prevent Israel from taking military action that could plunge the region into another war. It dissects how the bin Laden raid worsened the dysfunctional relationship with Pakistan. And it traces how Obama's early idealism about fighting “a war of necessity” in Afghanistan quickly turned to fatigue and frustration.
*
One of the most trusted and acclaimed national security correspondents in the country, David Sanger of the New York Times takes readers deep inside the Obama adminis­tration's most perilous decisions: The president dispatch­es an emergency search team to the Gulf when the White House briefly fears the Taliban may have obtained the Bomb, but he rejects a plan in late 2011 to send in Special Forces to recover a stealth drone that went down in Iran. Obama overrules his advisers and takes the riskiest path in killing Osama bin Laden, and ignores their advice when he helps oust Hosni Mubarak from the presidency of Egypt.
*
“The surprise is his aggressiveness,” a key ambassador who works closely with Obama reports.
*
Yet the president has also pivoted American foreign policy away from the attritional wars of the past decade, attempting to preserve America's influence with a lighter, defter touch-all while focusing on a new era of diplomacy in Asia and reconfiguring America's role during a time of economic turmoil and austerity.
*
As the world seeks to understand whether there is an Obama Doctrine, Confront and Conceal is a fascinating, unflinching account of these complex years, in which the president and his administration have found themselves struggling to stay ahead in a world where power is diffuse and America's ability to exert control grows ever more elusive.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review

…[a] penetrating history of the president's effort to grapple with a world in flux and an inherited overseas posture of military swagger.
—Robert W. Merry

The New York Times

The heart of this book is the chapter titled "Olympic Games," which Mr. Sanger writes is the code name for a joint program of Israel and the United States to insert malicious software into the machinery of the Iranian military-industrial complex and so set back Iran's ability to manufacture weapons-grade uranium…This is an account that long will be consulted by anyone trying to understand not just Iran but warfare in the 21st century. It alone is worth the price of the book.
—Thomas E. Ricks

From the Publisher

"A must-read for policy wonks and a good primer on how American power works beyond our borders."
—Kirkus

"Penetrating history of the presiden'ts effort to grapple with a world in flux..."
—New York Times 

"Sanger is one of the leading national security reporters in the United States, and this astonishingly revealing insider's account of the Obama administration's foreign policy process is a triumph of the genre.''
—Foreign Affairs

"Meticulously reported, immensely readable..."
—The Washington Post

Kirkus Reviews

A bracing rejoinder to those who think Barack Obama is a wimp, to say nothing of anti-American. Readers who worry about the proper limits of executive power, on the other hand, will keep on worrying after reading New York Times correspondent Sanger's (The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, 2009) account of just how far-reaching President Obama's search for America's enemies has been. That account begins not with grisly wetwork, though there's plenty of that, but instead with a worm, developed by "a small team of computer warriors at Fort Meade and their counterparts, half a world away, inside a military intelligence agency that Israel barely acknowledges exists." The worm's targets were the computer-controlled centrifuges enriching uranium for Iran's nuclear program. That sort of use of power arguably befits the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, but what of the heavier ordinance required to, say, "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda," as the military mantra has it? As Sanger carefully relates, that's a difficult dance: President Obama may profess, for instance, confidence that Pakistan can keep its nuclear arsenal out of the hands of militants, but he has to verify more than trust, no easy matter when relations between the United States and Pakistan are perhaps at their lowest point in history. The author provides plenty of intriguing news, from the conduct of secret operations within Afghanistan to the dispatch of Osama bin Laden. On the latter matter, he hazards that there was never any question but that bin Laden would be killed and his body secretly disposed of. No one in the administration wanted a grave that would become a site of pilgrimage, nor an endless trial, either. President Obama's foreign policy, it becomes clear here, is tougher than his mild-mannered, even professorial mien might let on--and particularly in the case not just of obvious enemies such as the Taliban, but also of less obvious ones such as China's People's Liberation Army. A must-read for policy wonks and a good primer on how American power works beyond our borders.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169757378
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/05/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Confront and Conceal"
by .
Copyright © 2013 David E. Sanger.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Videos