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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... matter of management, and Groves proved himself again and again. By the time he was put in charge of Pentagon construction, his most notable prior service had been in Nicaragua, developing plans for a second (never undertaken) canal ...
... matter of chance, and even things that seem unrelated are tied together, if not by links of causality, then by meaning. Perhaps instead of coincidence, what we are talking about is convergence, which implies more than the bumping ...
... matter of when rather than if. Roosevelt reflected this assurance at Casablanca when, overriding the instincts of Churchill, he insisted on defining the Allied war aim for the first time as the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis. The ...
... , were impatient. For Churchill, whose nightmare would be a repetition of the static trench-line stalemate of World War I, postponement was a simple matter of waiting until an overwhelmingly unstoppable 12 house of war.
... matter of waiting until an overwhelmingly unstoppable Allied force could be assembled, and that logistical sine qua non was at least a year away. In the near term, British and American ground forces would begin their assault against the ...
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 |