House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American PowerHarperCollins, 4 juni 2007 - 1073 sidor "A masterful achievement...[Carroll's] prose is elegant, his viewpoint bold." —Howard Zinn, author of The People's History of the United States "One cannot understand the impact of the Pentagon on US foreign policy. . . without reading James Carroll's House of War." —Lawrence Korb, former Undersecretary of Defence under Ronald Reagan From the National Book Award–winning author of An American Requiem and Constantine's Sword comes a sweeping yet intimate look at the Pentagon and its vast—often hidden—impact on America. This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. James Carroll proves a controversial thesis: the Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more. To argue his case, he marshals a trove of often chilling evidence. He recounts how "the Building" and its denizens achieved what Eisenhower called "a disastrous rise of misplaced power"—from the unprecedented aerial bombing of Germany and Japan during World War II to the "shock and awe" of Iraq. He charts the colossal U.S. nuclear buildup, which far outpaced that of the USSR, and has outlived it. He reveals how consistently the Building has found new enemies just as old threats—and funding—evaporate. He demonstrates how Pentagon policy brought about U.S. indifference to an epidemic of genocide during the 1990s. And he shows how the forces that attacked the Pentagon on 9/11 were set in motion exactly sixty years earlier, on September 11, 1941, when ground was broken for the house of war. Carroll draws on rich personal experience (his father was a top Pentagon official for more than twenty years) as well as exhaustive research and dozens of extensive interviews with Washington insiders. The result is a grand yet intimate work of history, unashamedly polemical and personal but unerringly factual. With a breadth and focus that no other book could muster, it explains what America has become over the past sixty years. |
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... death — or, as Churchill had put it about his own people earlier in the war, when they faced the prospect of conquest by an ascendant Germany, a fight “on the beaches.” Knowing of his own ferocious readiness to resist to the last breath ...
... death machine to do its worst. The policy of unconditional surrender, that is, guaranteed that the war would last long enough for the genocide nearly to succeed. The last savage months of war in Europe saw the deaths of millions of ...
... death struggle, winners and losers together enter a realm defined precisely by “pain and shock, loss and grief, privation and horror” as main objects, instead of as incidentals. This explains the “shrieking public enthusiasm”33 with ...
... death coinciding exactly with the start of the Gulf War. (In another of those coincidences, the 2003 Iraq War had begun on March 19, my late father's birthday.) Instead of asking first about the time my father worked for McNamara in the ...
... death,” as one American investigator wrote from the city a month later, “in the sense of finality without hope of resurrection.”104 The psychological impact on slayer and slain alike is what made the weapon absolute. Its use eventually ...
Innehåll
1 | |
40 | |
3 The Cold War Begins | 103 |
4 SelfFulfilling Paranoia | 161 |
5 The Turning Point | 227 |
6 The Exorcism | 293 |
7 Upstream | 345 |
8 Unending War | 418 |
Acknowledgments | 515 |
Notes | 517 |
Bibliography | 609 |
Index | 624 |
Photo Credits | 658 |
Back Flap | 659 |
Back Cover | 660 |
Spine | 661 |
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House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power James Carroll Begränsad förhandsgranskning - 2007 |
House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power James Carroll Fragmentarisk förhandsgranskning - 2006 |
House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power James Carroll Ingen förhandsgranskning - 2006 |