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

by David E. Sanger

Overview

This astonishingly revealing insider's account of the Obama administration's foreign policy process is a triumph. --Foreign Affairs

President Obama's administration came to office with the world on fire. Confront and Conceal is the story of how, in his first term, Obama secretly used the most innovative weapons and tools of American power, including our most sophisticated--and still unacknowledged--arsenal of cyberweapons, aimed at Iran's nuclear program.

Washington and the world were rocked by Confront and Conceal, which goes deep into the Situation Room as Obama questions whether this new weapon can slow Iran and avoid a war--or whether it will create blowback, as the Iranians and others retaliate with cyberattacks on the United States. It describes how the bin Laden raid worsened the dysfunctional relationship with Pakistan, and how Obama's early idealism about fighting a war of necessity in Afghanistan quickly turned to fatigue, frustration, and now withdrawal. As the world seeks to understand how Obama will cope with nationalistic leaders in Beijing, a North Korea bent on developing a nuclear weapon that can reach American shores, and an Arab world where promising revolutions turned to chaos, Confront and Conceal--with an updated epilogue for this paperback edition--provides an unflinching account of these complex years of presidential struggle, in which America's ability to exert control grows ever more elusive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307718037
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/23/2013
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	1,146,473
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

DAVID E. SANGER is the chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times and bestselling author of The Inheritance. He has been a member of two teams that won the Pulitzer Prize and has received numerous awards for coverage of the presidency and national security policy.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
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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.

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Table of Contents

Prologue ix

Part I Afghanistan and Pakistan: The Curse of Unfinished Business

Chapter 1 Blowing Smoke 3

Chapter 2 "Afghan Good Enough" 15

Chapter 3 The Bomb Scare 58

Chapter 4 Getting bin Laden, Losing Pakistan 68

Chapter 5 The Long Game: Getting Out, Without Really Leaving 114

Part II Iran: The Zone of Immunity

Chapter 6 The Secret War 141

Chapter 7 "Cut Off the Head of the Snake" 152

Chapter 8 Olympic Games 188

Chapter 9 "The Land of Lousy Options" 226

Part III Drones and Cyber: The Remote-Control War

Chapter 10 The Dark Side of the Light Footprint 243

Part IV Arab Spring: The Revolts, and the Rise of the Brotherhood

Chapter 11 "You Sold Out the Revolution" 273

Chapter 12 Searching for the "Right Side of History" 277

Chapter 13 The Riddle of the Brotherhood 304

Chapter 14 What Works Once Doesn't Always Work Twice 335

Part V China and North Korea: The Rebalancing

Chapter 15 Restraining the Tiger, Containing the Kims 369

Epilogue 417

Acknowledgments 429

A Note on Sources 435

Endnotes 437

Index 464

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

…[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 Book Review

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

The New York Times

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.

Kirkus Reviews