If you can endure Abella's Timespeak-style writing-- which, unfortunately, is industry standard these days-- there are actually a few interesting facts to be gleaned from this book.

It is good that we have a book that tells a sort of history of the Rand Corporation, the think tank which started as a computational contractor for the Air Force and wound up driving policy with its seductive formula of fear by the numbers. It's too bad that it's written by in a fawning, sycophantic tone that avoids objectivity in favor of glib characterizations and heroic portrature.

While this book is a study in CIA-sponsored propaganda, written in a style of which C. D Jackson and Henry Luce would have approved, to one capable of reading between the lines, author Abella manages to convey the basic facts: that RAND itself served as a sort of high-level propaganda agency, using intellectual blowhards to push disastrous policies iminical to the interests of the American population upon an unwilling military, media and legislature.

That it was also the incubator for the bastards-- notably Perle and Wolfowitz-- who have so recently screwed us all so royally should not come as a surprise. This is a book, like THE WISE MEN by Isaacson and Thomas and THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST by Halberstam, that serves up a hagiography of a criminal elite and their ass-kissing flunkies and calls it history. Maybe worth a read for the background, but I suggest you steal it.