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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... strategic reasoning was even more important. Bombing raids, in the American view, should directly and quickly affect the battlefield. Thus, as one former AAF targeting officer told me in an interview, there was little point in taking ...
... Strategic Bombing Survey observed, “was not necessarily to hit it. Nothing in World War II air operations was subject to such assault as open agricultural land.”55 The weather patterns over northern Europe, for one thing, guaranteed ...
... strategic thinking of both the war-weary British Bomber Command and the upstart Eighth Air Force. Statistical analysis — “stat control” — would be key to the Eighth Air Force's ability not only to track inventories of materiel and ...
... strategic bombing's condition of drift and purposelessness changed instantly when a transcendent explosive device, a product worthy of the AAF delivery system, came surprisingly into being on August 6, 1945. Not until Hiroshima did the ...
... strategic requirements of the present. At stake in the debate was public acceptance of nuclear weapons as the normal and moral basis of deterrence. If Americans rejected the legitimacy of past nuclear use, the ability to keep the Soviet ...
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 |