Steven Rosefielde and D. Quinn Mills, Masters of Illusion: American Leadership in the Media Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 568 pp., $34.00.
AS AMERICA's great experiment to refashion the greater Middle East appears to be floundering, swept by the currents of reality onto the shoals of ancient enmities, socio-religious pathologies and radicalized insurgencies, there is no shortage of scholars, journalists, retired military officers, out-of-office politicians and assorted pundits proffering "strategies" to the nation. The authors of these prescriptions, however, have largely forgotten the very useful distinction offered by Carl von Clausewitz, arguably the greatest strategic thinker Western civilization has ever produced:
