Review of The Dark Side

Via the Dish, a very good review of Jane Mayer's The Dark Side that criticizes her tendency to overlook American war crimes pre-Bush in the interest of supporting her narrative of a Great Nation Fallen. I recommend reading the whole thing--it is extremely well-written (the writer, Wesley Yang, writes for n+1--which doesn't surprise me, since just about everything I read from there is really, really good).

While I basically agree with Yang's criticism, I also think that Mayer's "wounded innocence" routine is serving a very specific rhetorical purpose. If your goal is to make a persuasive case to the Washington and media establishment, then you don't want to waste time, energy, and the reader's indulgence by criticizing stuff the United States did in Vietnam, valid as those criticisms might be. Instead, you want to establish your pro-America credentials, so that the reader won't dismiss you as some kind of shrill activist type when later on you detail all the ways in which America has been behaving like the Spanish Inquisition.