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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... question may reflect nothing more than a pervasive difference between the New World and the Old, but even in America the tradition was less than absolute. Grant had not insisted on unconditional surrender with Robert E. Lee at ...
... question: Should the violence of warfare be restricted to military forces, or can it extend to civilian populations? The time was long past when war was an enterprise of feudal elites, monarchs or mercenaries, exempting the peasantry ...
... question of unconditional surrender. This is so because a strategy of air bombardment aimed at a nation's warmaking capacity raised the question of the distinction between combatant and noncombatant. When the war had first broken out ...
... question of targeting civilians from the air, but on a far deadlier scale — an experience that made him one of the Cold War's most important arms control advocates. That first Casablanca debate between the RAF and the AAF was, in effect ...
... question of area bombing versus precision bombing — embedded in day versus night bombing and the true separation between the AAF and the RAF — was not the point of McNamara's inquiry. He was looking at what could be measured, counted ...
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 |