Book Review: Goerge Soros - "The bubble of American Supremacy ..."

I bought this book at a discount price on a business trip to the City of Miri, Sarawak (actually I don’t think this place qualifies as a city at all, but that’s another story).

Goerge Soros is a student of Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of Science, so his writing is very much philosophical as it is political. He made a lot of money from currency speculation (once he speculated on the British pound and made 1 billion pound profits in one day! He's eventually known as the man who broke the Bank of England). He sees opportunities in movement of currency exchange and deals with it to gain profits. Some would say he is a modern day robber – may be a Robin Hood in reverse, as in the case of Asian monetary crisis he robbed from the poor (us) and gave it to the rich (them). But he's not regarded as a criminal because, I guess, he's not gone against any international law.

He wrote "the bubble of American Supremacy ..." just before the 2004 American election in order to persuade American people not to vote for Bush. He's very much anti-Bush, anti-neo-cons and anti-War. He supports the Democrats. He says in his book that the Iraq war had been planned by the neo-cons since 1997 when a group of neo-cons urged the then President Clinton to increase American military spending. In effect, these neo-conswere pushing for the president to exercise American military might to maintain American Supremacy ("Project for New American Century"). He's saying if these neo-cons are able to control America and the world by influencing Mr Bush's decision, American image to the world will be hurt. He agrees that the US should exercise leadership in the world but that it should not adopt a heavy-handed approach. America will be more respected by showing leadership through diplomacy than military action. Unfortunately, as we all know, Mr Bush got re-elected and he's going to carry out the neo-cons plans to attack Muslim contries with huge oil resources whose leaders are not yet undertheir control. Only history will tell whether the American Empire, based upon coercion and military force will rule the world, or like empires before it, will crumble into the dustbin of history.

So that's the gist of it. I am sure many have heard/read about this before. The Malaysian press is not really fond of him after he broke the Bank Negara in 1997 sending this country and the region into a regional financial, and later political crisis. Mahathir wrote a very fiery book on the 1997 crisis and hurled a lot of bad accusations against him.Surprisingly, he only had one sentence reference to the man who had called him a moron. He called him a repressive ruler.

23/9/2004