Saturday, December 30, 2006

Permanent Martial Dominance

Review of House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006, 657 pp.)

Just as North Korea’s crossing of the 38th parallel in 1950 had “rescued” the national security state, so Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 rescued the Pentagon’s perpetual motion machine made for war, James Carroll writes in his new book, House of War. Talk of redirecting our tax dollars from the Defense (War) Department and other military agencies to social programs through a “peace dividend” was henceforth deemed objectionable in ruling class circles.

Carroll, son of Lieutenant General Joseph Francis Carroll, the founding director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, explains that President George H. W. Bush immediately ordered a military response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait because the end of the Cold War had ever so briefly intensified calls for the military-industrial complex to go on a crash diet.

Bush’s decision to send more than half a million troops to the region had nothing to do with being offended by the rank aggression because Bush had violated Panama’s sovereignty only eight months earlier, Carroll tells us. Bush’s “firm martial” reaction was not because Saddam’s increased control of oil was a major threat; the Iraqi leader was as bound by the rules of the oil markets as other Arab dictators.

“No, Bush’s quick and instinctive militarizing of what could have been handled as a diplomatic crisis—and what should have been handled mainly by Arab leaders in the region—had everything to do with shoring up and justifying America’s dependence on the threat and use of force,” Carroll argues.

A dozen years later, Carroll notes, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, in an internal Pentagon memo, that his office lacks the “metrics to know if we are winning or losing the Global War on Terror.” This “odd assessment” from a secretary of defense, Carroll says, “reflects the Pentagon’s interest in an open-ended war. Permanent war means permanent martial dominance.”

Carroll focuses on martial dominance beyond the two Bush administrations. His House of War is a meticulously detailed look at U.S. defense policy and actions since the Pentagon’s construction groundbreaking ceremony on Sept. 11, 1941 – “60 years, almost to the minute, before American Airlines 77 arrowed into the side of the Pentagon that faces Arlington Cemetery.”

House of War is a book dense with facts about U.S. military policy and history. But House of War is a brisk read. Carroll, a novelist, playwright and op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe, punctuates each passage with refreshing insights into the workings of the hideous institution known as the Pentagon.

Update:

Brent Scowcroft is now heralded by many in the ruling political and media establishment as a wise, old Washington figure who wouldn’t have allowed Iraq to turn into such a mess—whatever that means—if President George W. Bush had sought out his advice. Establishment writers contend that Scowcroft and James Baker, co-chairman of the so-called Iraq study group, do not share the nation-building and other troubling foreign policy views of President Bush’s neocon-dominated inner circle.

But Carroll places Scowcroft, who had served as President Ford’s national security adviser, into the same dangerous category as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz.

Scowcroft “embodied this Cold War habit of mind. … Scowcroft had then been a vociferous critic of Ronald Reagan’s apparent readiness to bargain away America’s nuclear arsenal at Reykjavik,” Carroll says. “That Bush [I] appointed him as his own national security adviser was a sure signal that such large reaches toward disarmament were over. Scowcroft put the new administration’s attitude on display on its second day, telling an interviewer on January 22, 1989, that ‘the Cold war is not over … The light at the end of the tunnel [may be] an oncoming locomotive,’” he adds.

Carroll also notes that Baker, who Bush I tapped as his secretary of state, had been one of President Regan’s “most militant advisers” when he served early in that administration as chief of staff.

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