Friday, June 13, 2008

Three essays published the last couple days nicely summarize the United States' policy failures under Republican Party government and ideology over the last 30 to 40 years:

Michael Klare, The Pentagon as Energy Insecurity Inc.; Garrisoning the Global Gas Station: Challenging the Militarization of U.S. Energy Policy, TomDispatch.com, 12 June 2008.
(In fairness to the Republicans, one must acknowledge that the Democratic Party is also responsible for the United States' failing energy policies, but the Republicans have been far more eager and overtly militaristic in persuing the policies now failing.)

Glenn Greenwald, Conservatism vs. authoritarianism: The British vs. the U.S. right, Salon.com, 13 June 2008.

Paul Krugman, Bad Cow Disease, The New York Times, 13 June 2008.


Some additional related essays:

Michael Lind, Relax, liberals. You've already won, Salon.com, 10 June 2008.
"No matter who prevails at the ballot box in November, John McCain or Barack Obama, the four-decade-long conservative counterrevolution is over."

Glenn Greenwald, Supreme Court restores habeas corpus, strikes down key part of Military Commissions Act, Salon.com, 12 June 2008.

Corey Robins, Out of Place, The Nation, 23 June 2008.

Eric Alterman, Silence of the (MSM) Lambs, The Nation, 30 June 2008.
Posted by at

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

James Fallows.
Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq.
New York: Vintage, 2006.

Book information: publisher, Amazon.com.

I would include this collection of essays by Fallows, which originally appeared in The Atlantic, in any short list of recommended books on the 2003 U.S. invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, which list would also include Thomas Ricks's Fiasco and George Packer's The Assassin's Gate. (I have omitted naming some books I haven't read yet.)

Essays in the book:
  1. The Fifty-first State?, November 2002

  2. Blind Into Baghdad, January/February 2004

  3. Bush's Lost Year, October 2004

  4. Why Iraq Has No Army, December 2005

  5. Will Iran Be Next?, December 2004

  6. Afterword

James Fallows:
Bibliography:

Fallows mentions several books and other publications in the essays included in Blind Into Baghdad, but the book lacks a formal bibliography. The following is a list of most of the items he mentions. The number before each item indicates the page where the reference occurs.
Posted by at

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Chalmers Johnson.
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.

Book information: The American Empire Project, Google Books, Amazon.com.

I recommend viewing the Conversations with History episodes in which Johnson discusses his books. See the links in the Online Video section below.

Chalmers Johnson:
Online Video:
Miscellaneous Reviews, Essays, etc:
  • Jonathan Freedland, Bush's Amazing Achievement, The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 10, 15 June 2007.
    "One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve."

  • Michael Ignatieff, The Burden, The New York Times Magazine, 05 January 2003.
    A copy of the essay is also available at http://empirelite.ca/ as "Empire Lite."
    A comment on Ignatieff's essay which elegantly reveals Ignatieff's blindness.
    In this essay Ignatieff writes as an explicit advocate of American imperialism, a position he has since renounced. Useful in attempting to understand how and why the U.S. establishment (beyond the Neoconservatives) supported the conquest and occupation of Iraq.

  • Howard Zinn, Empire or Humanity?: What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire, TomDispatch.com, 01 April 2008.
Posted by at

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

John W. Dean.
Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.
New York: Little, Brown and Company / Time Warner Book Group, 2004;
paperback edition with an additional chapter: Warner Books, April 2005;
now published by: Grand Central Publishing / Hachette Book Group USA.

Book information: publisher, Google Books, Amazon.com.

John W. Dean:
  • John Dean, Wikipedia.
    (If you're too young to know who John Dean is, or don't understand why his declaration [that Bush/Cheney's actions are "worse that Watergate"] carries great weight, then you should read something about him.)

  • John Dean archive at FindLaw.com.
    (Dean has a regular column published at FindLaw.com.)

  • John W. Dean. Conservatives Without Conscience. New York: Viking / Penguin Group (USA), 2006.
    (Google Books, Amazon.com)

  • John W. Dean. Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches. New York: Viking / Penguin Group (USA), September 2007.
    (Google Books, Amazon.com)

Other Essays, Websites, Books, etc.:
  • BushSecrecy.org, a project of Public Citizen.
    Documents secrecy efforts (obstruction of public oversight, etc) of the Bush administration.

  • Cheney's Law, PBS Frontline, originally broadcast 16 October 2007.
    "For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review."

  • I posted links to several books on presidential secrecy, the U.S. Constitution, and the national security state here, 11 January 2008.
Posted by at

Friday, January 11, 2008

Peter Dale Scott.
The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America.
University of California Press, September 2007.

Book information: publisher, Google Books, Amazon.com.

Peter Dale Scott:

Notes and Comments:

For me the most insightful feature of this book, and apparently a feature of Scott's political writings generally, is his distinction between the "public state" and the "deep state" (his preferred nomenclature, in place the more common and conspiratorial-sounding "secret government"). While this book is not a work of Constitutional history and analysis (Dale focuses on the people and events related to 9/11) it seem clear to me that the National Security Act of 1947 (which created the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency and reorganized the Department of Defense) has allowed the emergence of an Executive Branch that is fixated on secret decisions and actions which directly contradict the spirit and letter of the Constitution of 1787 in which such government decisions and actions were to be arrived at through public debate in Congress. A symptom of this emerged in 2007 as the public realized that Congressional opposition to the excesses of the Bush administration had been effectively neutralized due to the complicity of the Congressional leadership in Bush and Cheney's excesses from the beginning. That is, Congressional leaders were informed along the way as the Executive Branch engaged in torture, warrantless wiretaps, etc. and yet such excesses continued, Congress failed to stop them, and today Congress as a body does not object to them nor impeach government officials who authorized or engaged in what were previously regarded as obviously illegal and unconstitutional acts and even internationally recognized war crimes. In the last few years, as people realized that Bush et al. have delivered a mortal blow (several mortal blows, actually) to the old republic, many have reflected on where the nation went wrong, what were the turning points. I would argue that the National Security Act of 1947 formalized / ratified the beginning of the Empire phase of American history (ignoring the imperial nature of the U.S. since its inception). By the end of his term in 1961 President Eisenhower recognized that the old republic was threatened (or had ended) and tried to warn the people in his Farewell Address. With the Bush Jr. administration the politicians no longer bother to hide their contempt for the old republic and its Constitution ("just a piece of paper" - Bush Jr.).

These assertions about the U.S. Constitution, turning points, and the National Security Act of 1947 require justifications that I am unable to provide at this time. As a novice to this topic, the following books look to me like good places to start learning more.
  • John W. Dean. Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. Little, Brown & Company, 2004; paperback edition with an additional chapter, New York: Warner Books, 2005; now published by: Grand Central Publishing / Hachette Book Group USA.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • David Cole & James X. Dempsey. Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security, Revised and Updated Edition / third edition. New York: The New Press, January 2006.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Ted Gup. Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life. Doubleday, May 2007.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Harold Koh. The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power after the Iran-Contra Affair. Yale University Press, 1990.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Melvyn P. Leffler. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford University Press, 1992.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Michael J. Hogan. A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Joel D. Aberbach & Mark A. Peterson, editors. Institutions of American Democracy: The Executive Branch. Oxford University Press USA, December 2005.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Robert M. Pallitto and William G. Weaver. Presidential Secrecy and the Law. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)
    [John M. Ackerman, Book Review, Political Science Quarterly, Volume 122, Number 4, Winter 2007-08.]


Scott, as he discusses in the "Conversations with History" interview, considers the Ford administration (1974-1977) a key turning point, with the decline of the Kissinger strategy of living with the Soviet Union (Détente) to a new strategy initiated and implemented by people like Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Casey which sought the destruction of the Soviet Union; this policy produced American provocations in Afghanistan in 1979 before the Soviets invaded that country and American sponsorship of the "Arab-Afghans" in the 1980s, which we now know resulted in the emergence of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban as organized forces in the 1990s. The Ford administration was also the time when Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defense) and Dick Cheney (White House Chief of Staff) first attained high executive branch positions. Note that John Dean's book Worse Than Watergate discusses the secrecy and foreign policy orientations that we think of as characteristic of the Bush Jr. administration were first practiced by Dick Cheney as Secretary of Defense (1989-1993) during the Bush Sr. administration.

One cannot discuss this book without observing that Scott has been very active in the 9/11 Truth Movement. However there is nothing in this book that I would describe as speculative nor what some would describe as conspiracy theories. The only issue Scott addresses that is anywhere near those topics around which speculation swirls is his careful consideration of what George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were doing between about 9:15am and 10:00am on 11 September 2001 when they very likely participated in a secret telephone call to discuss Continuity of Government (COG) but which has not yet been documented in the public record. The absence of any mention of COG by the 9/11 Commission and its Report is regarded by many as one of the indicators that the 9/11 Commission and its Report were a cover-up.
Posted by at

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Glenn Greenwald, Oligarchical decay, Salon.com, 30 December 2007.

An outstanding analysis of the current condition of the American establishment in government, politics, media, and business.
Posted by at

Monday, December 03, 2007

Three small collections of essays by Gore Vidal (Vidal calls these books pamphlets):
  • Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated.
    New York: Thunder's Mouth Press / Nation Books, May 2002.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta.
    New York: Thunder's Mouth Press / Nation Books, December 2002.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia.
    New York: Nation Books, June 2004.
    (publisher, Amazon.com)


Gore Vidal page, Third World Traveler.
(Excerpts from the above listed books.)
Posted by at

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Chalmers Johnson.
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic.
New York: Metropolitan / Owl Book, Henry Holt and Co., 2005.
(Originally published: New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.)

Book information: publisher, Amazon.com.

Militarism and the American Empire, Conversations with History, 29 January 2004.
Johnson discusses The Sorrows of Empire; an excellent introduction to the book.

The Last Days of the American Republic: A Conversation with Chalmers Johnson, Conversations with History, 07 March 2007.
Johnson discusses his most recent book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.

I provided additional links regarding Chalmers Johnson and The Sorrows of Empire here, 17 April 2007.
Posted by at

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Andrew J. Bacevich.
The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.
Oxford University Press, August 2006 (paperback edition with a new Afterward).
(Originally published in March 2005.)

Book information: publisher, Amazon.com.

You can get a very good introduction to this book from Bacevich's appearance in the excellent "Conversations with History" series (Google Video link).

Andrew Bacevich:
  • Andrew Bacevich, Wikipedia.

  • Andrew J. Bacevich, Department of International Relations, Boston University.

  • Andrew J. Bacevich. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Harvard University Press, March 2004. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Andrew J. Bacevich, The Real World War IV, The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2005.

  • Chester, Blog Interview with Dr. Andrew Bacevich, The Adventures of Chester: War and Foreign Policy, 09 May 2005.

  • Tom Engelhardt, "Tomdispatch Interview: Bacevich on the Limits of Imperial Power and the Arrogance of American Power"
    Part 1: The Delusions of Global Hegemony, TomDispatch.com, 23 May 2006;
    Part 2: Drifting Down the Path to Perdition, TomDispatch.com, 25 May 2006.

    This interview also appears in the book:
    Tom Engelhardt. Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts & Dissenters.
    New York: Nation Books, 2006. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Andrew J. Bacevich, Warrior Politics, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2007.
    "The U.S. military is becoming more politically assertive. This is not a welcome development."

    Justine Isola, The Activist Soldier, TheAtlantic.com, 28 March 2007.
    "Andrew J. Bacevich, author of 'Warrior Politics,' talks about the increased politicization of the American military and its troubling potential consequences."

  • Tragically, Bacevich's son, Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, was killed in Iraq 13 May 2007.

    Andrew J. Bacevich, I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty., The Washington Post, B01, 27 May 2007.

    Excerpt:

    The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of the people."

    To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.

    To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

    Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

    Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month     [$100,000; Death Gratuity, About.com].

    Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

    This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.

    Webchat with Andrew Bacevich, WashingtonPost.com, 29 May 2007.
    Bacevich answers various questions, including this reply on the inefficacy of U.S. elections in ending the Iraq war:
    "I don't have any easy answers on this. But it does seem to me that we should no longer assume that 'democracy' provides the best one-word descriptor of our political system. In a superficial sense, we remain a democratic nation. But peer beneath the surface and the reality is something else again."

    David F. Burrelli & Jennifer R. Corwell, Military Death Benefits: Status and Proposals [PDF], 23 June 2005.

    Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, A failure in generalship, Armed Forces Journal, May 2007.

  • Adam Reilly, Bacevich’s war: The politics of personal tragedy, The Phoenix (Boston), 02 July 2007.

  • Andrew J. Bacevich, Vietnam's real lessons: The war is indeed relevant to Iraq -- but not the way Bush thinks, Los Angeles Times, 25 August 2007.

  • Andrew J. Bacevich, Sycophant Savior: General Petraeus wins a battle in Washington — if not in Baghdad, The American Conservative, 08 October 2007.

  • You can find articles by Andrew Bacevich at The Nation; The American Conservative; The New Republic; London Review of Books; Commonweal; The Los Angeles Times; The Washington Post; and elsewhere.


Online Video (Bacevich discussing The New American Militarism and U.S. Foreign Policy):
  • The Military and U.S. Foreign Policy, A Conversation with Andrew J. Bacevich, Conversations with History, Series Host Harry Kreisler, The Institute of International Studies, The University of California at Berkeley, 09 May 2005.
    Transcript here.
    Another link to the video is on this page.

  • The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, World Affairs Council of Northern California, May 2005.

  • The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, Books Of Our Times - Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, October 2005.

  • The Last Days of the American Republic: A Conversation with Chalmers Johnson, Conversations with History, 07 March 2007.

    Bacevich echoes the ideas of Chalmers Johnson (and others). One observation they share is that throughout the course of American history when a major conflict ended the armed forces were significantly cut back (e.g., Civil War, World War I, World War II). However with the end of the Cold War the United States continued to maintain a massive military force deployed around the world. Why? It has become clear that the purpose of this world-wide force is not a matter of self-defense but something else: the preservation of a distinct kind of overseas empire which the United States began acquiring in the late nineteenth century (for example: Hawaii; the territories acquired through the Spanish-American war - Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines; Panama) and expanding more vigorously after World War II under the guise of resisting communism, and with the decolonization movement as European nations dissolved their overseas empires. Maintaining an empire fundamentally contradicts the principles and traditions of the United States' domestic republican government and democracy, and perhaps threatens their continued existence.


Some Book Reviews:


Other Essays, etc.:

Some Related Books (most of which I have not yet read):
  • Note: The topic of American Militarism is of course inextricably inter-related with the topic of American Empire and Imperialism; the following list focuses on Militarism and excludes books mainly about Empire and Imperialism.

  • Alfred Vagts. A History of Militarism: Civilian and Military. Meridian Books, 1959; Free Press, 1967; Greenwood Press, 1981.

  • Joseph Gerson & Bruce Birchard, editors. The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases. Boston: South End Press, An American Friends Service Committee Book, April 1991. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • William Greider. Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace. PublicAffairs, December 1999. (Amazon.com)

  • Chris Hedges. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. PublicAffairs, September 2002. (publisher, Amazon.com)

    Chris Hedges writes frequently on the topic of American militarism. See his articles at (the following links give the author's archive at the respective publications): The Nation; TruthDig.com; AlterNet.org.

  • Carl Boggs, editor. Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire. Routledge, 2003. (publisher, Amazon.com)

    Carl Boggs. Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., January 2005. (publisher, Amazon.com)

    Carl Boggs & Tom Pollard. The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture. Paradigm Publishers, September 2006. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Robert Higgs. Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11. Oakland, California: The Independent Institute, October 2005. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. Holt Paperbacks, December 2004. (publisher, Amazon.com)
    Bacevich's book prompted me to re-read Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire and I'm glad I'm doing so; Johnson very insightfully supplements and complements Bacevich.

    Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. Metropolitan Books, February 2007. (publisher, Amazon.com)

    See also the other books in the series The American Empire Project.

  • James Carroll. House of War: The Pentagon and the Disasterous Rise of American Power. Houghton Mifflin, May 2006. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Norman Solomon. War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. John Wiley & Sons, June 2006. (book website, Amazon.com)

    Norman Solomon. Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State. Polipoint Press, October 2007. (book website, Amazon.com)

  • Ismael Hossein-zadeh. The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism. Palgrave Macmillan, June 2007. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Nick Turse. The Complex: Mapping America's Military-Industrial-Technological-Entertainment-Academic-Media-Corporate Matrix. New York: Metropolitan Books, March 2008. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Preston C. Enright, Veterans for peace, Listmania, Amazon.com, 25 October 2007 (date as of the last time I saw that web page).


Additional Comments and Notes:

Bacevich's thesis is that the increased militarism of the United States, especially since the end of the Cold War, is not attributable to a single faction, political party, or President, but rather the confluence of many factors present in American society since the end of the Vietnam War, with support from all sides of mainstream politics regardless of political party. (Personally I think the key turing point(s) occurred much earlier, including World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, and the United States' filling the void left by the decline of the British Empire, but Bacevich focuses on events and trends since the Vietnam War. I also agree with Chalmers Johnson's analysis in The Sorrows of Empire that identifies events in the 1890s that led to the creation of an Army general staff after the Spanish-American War.)
Those factors include:
the U.S. Army's reforms in the 1970s and 1980s following its mistreatment by the civilian leadership during the Vietnam War;
the All-Volunteer Force (and the decline of the citizen-soldier);
the Neoconservative movement;
the military buildup of the Reagan administration;
popular culture in the Reagan years including, for example: Reagan's praise of individual service men and women in his speeches; films such as An Officer and a Gentleman, the Rambo series, and Top Gun; and techno-thriller novels such as those by Tom Clancey;
the rise of the Religious Right;
the theorizing of "defense intellectuals" beginning after World War II with the strategic problems of nuclear war, continuing with the advent of precision guided munitions in the last days of the Vietnam War, and several other developments in military technology since then, the 1990s discussion of a "Revolution in Military Affairs" prompted by developments in information technology, all of which acted to lower policymakers' threshold for using military force.

Bacevich refers to militarism in several meanings, not just the propensity of the U.S. government to approach its foreign policy problems with military force rather than other means.

In the first chapter Bacevich discusses four manifestations of increasing American militarism:
1. "the scope, cost, and configuration of America's present-day military establishment" (page 15);
2. "an increased propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the normalization of war" (page 18);
3. "the appearance in recent years of a new aesthetic of war" (page 20);
4. "an appreciable boost in the status of military institutions and soldiers themselves" (page 25).

Bacevich discusses his concept of the new American Militarism in the "Conversations with History" interview as a particularly American form of militarism, not the militarism of Japan or Germany of the World War I and World War II eras. Bacevich highlights:
1. "a greatly overstated confidence in the efficacy of force; that force is an eminently useful tool in American hands; and that therefore military power is an opportunity to be exploited, rather than something to be viewed skeptically";
2. "a conviction that military power has come to be the chief emblem of national greatness; its not the productivity of our factories or the quality of our education system, it's by golly that we've got twelve carrier battle groups and that's what makes America stand apart from other nations of the world;"
3. "a romanticization of soldiers; an inclination to at least give lip service to the notion of soldiers being America's best and brightest and a group of people morally, not simply set apart, but morally superior to the average citizen."

Lest we forget how busy the U.S. military has become, consider this paragraph from pages 18-19:
"The new American militarism also manifests itself through an increased propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the normalization of war. There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. troops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, however, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared. During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totaled a scant six. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events. [endnote 23: Cold War episodes included Korea, Lebanon (twice), Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and Grenada. By some calculations, the U.S. confrontation with Libya culminating in the bombing of Tripoli in 1986 might also qualify.] The brief period extending from 1989's Operation Just Cause (the overthrow of Manuel Noriega) to 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom (the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) featured nine major military interventions. [endnote 24: Panama, the Persian Gulf (twice), Kurdistan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.] And that count does not include innumerable lesser actions such as Bill Clinton's signature cruise missile attacks against obscure targets in obscure places, the almost daily bombing of Iraq throughout the late 1990s, or the quasi-combat missions that have seen GIs dispatched to Rwanda, Colombia, East Timor, and the Philippines. Altogether, tempo of U.S. military interventionism has become nothing short of frenetic."

The "Albright Question": Madeline Albright asked General Colin Powell in the early 1990s "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

In Chapter Seven "Blood for Oil" Bacevich discusses the Carter Doctrine originating in President Carter's January 1980 State of the Union address: "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." See also Carter's Presidential Directive/NSC-63 [PDF], 15 January 1981. Bacevich goes so far as to characterize this as World War IV which began in 1980 ("World War III" was the Cold War, 1947-1989) and has seen a steady increase of American attention and overt military force in that region, culminating (so far) in the current occupation of Iraq and the building of several permanent U.S. military bases there (Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, A Nation At War: Strategic Shift; Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access To Key Iraq Bases, The New York Times, 20 April 2003; Tom Englehardt, Can You Say "Permanent Bases"? The American Press Can't, TomDispatch.com, 14 February 2006).

I found this chapter especially insightful. President Carter enunciated that Doctrine after the failure of his policy that encouraged the U.S. to conserve energy and seek alternatives to imported oil. It seems clear that U.S. efforts to maintain access to relatively cheap oil through military means will not end soon; that this policy is supported by the party establishments of both the Democrats and Republicans - I think the huge capital investment in the current petroleum economy explains much of this policy inertia; and this policy will be prolonged by the U.S.' continuing failure to develop and implement alternative energy sources and, as Bacevich describes, while the U.S. continues to define freedom as affluence based on cheap oil. This chapter also appears as: The Real World War IV, The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2005.

Bacevich describes World War IV as the implementation of the Carter Doctrine since 1980 in rebuttal to the Bush administration's "global war on terror" neologism and in particular against neoconservative Norman Podhoretz's concept of World War IV as a struggle against "Islamofascism" [How to Win World War IV, Commentary, February 2002; World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win, Commentary, September 2004; The War Against World War IV, Commentary, February 2005; World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Doubleday, September 2007 (publisher, Amazon.com)].

For additional rebuttals of Podhoretz see:

John Brown, The Return Of The World Warriors, TomPaine.com, 07 October 2004.

Tom Englehardt, Are We in World War IV?, TomDispatch.com, 10 March 2005.

John Brown and Tom Englehardt, Why World War IV Can't Sell, TomDispatch.com, 30 March 2005.

The publication of Podhoretz's 2007 "Islamofascism" book has probably prompted many more rebuttals in book reviews.

If the U.S. continues to follow the Bush policy of using military force to seek control over natural resources, then it would not surprise me to see additional U.S. attempts to militarily dominate other oil and gas exporting regions, especially in Africa (i.e., Nigeria) and South America (i.e. Venezuela), over the next ten to twenty years; currently the nations of Central Asia are too close geographically / culturally / diplomatically to Russia and China. Southeast Asian oil & gas production would probably be marketed mainly to industrial nations closer to that region (i.e., India, China, Japan, South Korea) and the U.S. seems to have that region well enough covered by bases. However the U.S. government clearly needs to reorient its policy back to the natural American focus on innovation in science and technology in order to satisfy its energy and other natural resource needs.

Digression on Central Asia:

(Note: Kazakhstan has significant oil & gas reserves; NYT 06 May 2006.)

The U.S. has been attempting to establish itself in Central Asia; for much of the first 4 years of the Afghanistan war the U.S. had access to air bases in both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, but there was/is strong and continuing diplomatic pressure from China, Russia and other Central Asian nations to evict the Americans (NYT 05 Nov 2001; NYT 09 Jan 2002; NYT 20 Apr 2003; NYT 23 Sept 2003; NYT 28 Mar 2004; NYT 06 July 2005; NYT 08 July 2005; NYT 14 July 2005; NYT 21 Oct 2005; NYT 15 July 2006; NYT 10 Sept 2006; NYT 17 Oct 2007).

Uzbekistan finally ordered the U.S. to leave in July 2005 (NYT 27 July 2005; NYT 31 July 2005; NYT 01 Aug 2005).

The U.S. has retained Manas Air Base (U.S. Air Force, Manas Air Base; Wikipedia; GlobalSecurity.org) in Kyrgyzstan (NYT 12 Oct 2005; NYT 15 July 2006; NYT 17 Oct 2007) in the face of continuing pressure against it especially from Russia.

Tajikistan allows NATO to refuel airplanes on Afghanistan-related missions in its territory but there is no NATO or American base (NYT 01 Aug 2005; NYT 14 Nov 2006).

Details on U.S. bases in Iraq:

The U.S. "super-bases" / "mega-bases" in Iraq may include:
Posted by at

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Noam Chomsky.
Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post 9/11 World.
Interviews with David Barsamian.
New York: Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Company, September 2005.
Book series: The American Empire Project.

Book information: publisher, Amazon.com.
Posted by at
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)