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In the sobering aftermath of America's invasion of Iraq, Eugene Jarecki, the creator of the award-winning documentary Why We Fight, launches a penetrating and revelatory inquiry into how forces within the American political, economic, and military systems have come to undermine the carefully crafted structure of our republic -- upsetting its balance of powers, vastly strengthening the hand of the president in taking the nation to war, and imperiling the workings of American democracy. This is a story not of simple corruption but of the unexpected origins of a more subtle and, in many ways, more worrisome disfiguring of our political system and society.
While in no way absolving George W. Bush and his inner circle of their accountability for misguiding the country into a disastrous war -- in fact, Jarecki sheds new light on the deepest underpinnings of how and why they did so -- he reveals that the forty-third president's predisposition toward war and Congress's acquiescence to his wishes must be understood as part of a longer story. This corrupting of our system was predicted by some of America's leading military and political minds.
In his now legendary 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of "the disastrous rise of misplaced power" that could result from the increasing influence of what he called the "military industrial complex." Nearly two centuries earlier, another general turned president, George Washington, had warned that "overgrown military establishments" were antithetical to republican liberties. Today, with an exploding defense budget, millions of Americans employed in the defense sector, and more than eight hundred U.S. military bases in 130 countries, the worst fears of Washington and Eisenhower have come to pass.
Surveying a scorched landscape of America's military adventures and misadventures, Jarecki's groundbreaking account includes interviews with a who's who of leading figures in the Bush administration, Congress, the military, academia, and the defense industry, including Republican presidential nominee John McCain, Colin Powell's former chief of staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and longtime Pentagon reformer Franklin "Chuck" Spinney. Their insights expose the deepest roots of American war making, revealing how the "Arsenal of Democracy" that crucially secured American victory in WWII also unleashed the tangled web of corruption America now faces. From the republic's earliest episodes of war to the use of the atom bomb against Japan to the passage of the 1947 National Security Act to the Cold War's creation of an elaborate system of military-industrial-congressional collusion, American democracy has drifted perilously from the intent of its founders. As Jarecki powerfully argues, only concerted action by the American people can, and must, compel the nation back on course.
The American Way of War is a deeply thoughtprovoking study of how America reached a historic crossroads and of how recent excesses of militarism and executive power may provide an opening for the redirection of national priorities.
- Sales Rank: #1918677 in Books
- Published on: 2010-01-12
- Released on: 2010-01-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x .90" w x 5.50" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
- ISBN13: 9781416544579
- Condition: Used - Very Good
- Notes: 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Publishers Weekly
A scholar and documentary film maker (Why We Fight), Jarecki presents a succinct explanation of why modern presidents can make war whenever they feel like it. Jarecki writes that America's founders worried about presidential belligerence, so the Constitution gave war-making authority to Congress, which declared all our foreign wars through WWII—and none afterward. Drawing on historical research and interviews, he emphasizes that the young America was less isolationist than histories proclaim, invading Canada and Mexico several times and taking great interest in international affairs. But war fever really arose only with the start of the Cold War. Suddenly presidents commanded an enormous peacetime force and wielded the immense powers Roosevelt had acquired in WWII. Since then, Congress has gone along with presidential decisions to make war (then grumble if it doesn't go well). Today President Bush asserts that terrorism requires a perpetual state of emergency and that he will launch a pre-emptive war if he detects a threat to America's security. In this illuminating—and to some, perhaps, discouraging—book, Jarecki says there is only a modest groundswell of opinion to curb presidential powers. (Oct. 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Eugene Jarecki is the acclaimed fimmaker of The Trials of Hnry Kissinger and Why We Fight, winner of the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and a 2006 Peabody Award. He has been a Senior Visiting Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies and is the founder and director of The Eisenhower Project, an academic public policy group dedicated, in the spirit of Dwight D. Eisnehower, to studying U.S. foreign policy.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction: Mission Creep
What are we fighting for? Why do we bury our sons and brothers in lonely graves far from home? For bigger and better business? You know the answer. We're fighting for liberty -- the most expensive luxury known to man. These rights, these privileges, these traditions are precious enough to fight for, precious enough to die for.
Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell Fort Belvoir, Virginia March 9, 1944
First, a confession. This book is not written by a policy scholar, nor a soldier, nor an insider to the workings of America's military establishment. I am first and foremost a filmmaker, whose 2006 documentary Why We Fight sought to make sense of America's seemingly inexorable path to the tragic quagmire in Iraq. Though I lost friends in the attacks of 9/11 and thus understood the public outrage they produced, I was distressed to see a national tragedy converted by the White House into the pretext for a preemptive war. Still, following the attacks, and prior to being drowned out by war drums from the White House, there was a period of soul-searching among many of the people I knew.
This spirit was briefly magnified by the mainstream media into the inflammatory query, "Why do they hate us?" -- a question that exaggerated the issue, equating any effort simply to understand the roots of the crisis with blaming America for the attacks committed against it. "Why do they hate us?" also did more to forge a gulf between "them" and "us" than to address the deeper questions on people's minds: questions about the state of the world and America's role in it, such as "How did we get to this point?", and "where are we going?"
Before long, as war became inevitable, attention to these questions faded, and public discourse turned predictably partisan. As pro- and antiwar camps hardened, I sought to examine the forces that had so quickly plunged the nation into conflict on several fronts -- from the unlimited battle space of the so-called war on terror to the front lines of Iraq. During the earliest days of World War II, the legendary Hollywood director Frank Capra had made his Why We Fight films for the U.S. military, examining America's reasons for entering that war. At a new time of war, Capra's driving questions take on renewed resonance: "Why are we Americans on the march? What turned our resources, our machines, our whole nation into one vast arsenal, producing more and more weapons of war instead of the old materials of peace?"
A half century since Capra posed these questions, the answers seemed less clear than ever. In order first to research my film and then, upon its release, to show it to audiences, I traveled to the farthest reaches of America's military and civilian landscapes, to military bases and defense plants, to small towns and large towns from the Beltway to the heartland. Among the many things I learned on my travels is that neither supporters nor critics of the Bush administration seemed to understand how its warmaking and sweeping assertions of executive power fit into the long history of the American Republic. Instead, for the most part, critics and supporters were locked in a shallower debate,with one side citing 9/11 as grounds for the administration's radical doctrine of preemption, and the other side vilifying George W. Bush and his team as an overwhelming threat to all that is great and good about America. Lost in this shouting match was any real understanding of what Bush and his wars represent in the larger story of what a thoughtful Air Force colonel described to me as "the American way of war."
Along my journey, I met the characters who appear in these pages. Whether civilian or military, each has been touched by the Iraq War and past American wars in one way or another. And each has a story to tell that sheds light on war's larger political, economic, and spiritual implications for American life. While this book is principally a survey of the evolution of the American system from its birth in a war of revolution to its contemporary reality as the world's sole superpower, it is ultimately a human system -- composed of humans and guided by the ideas, aspirations, and contradictions of humans. As such, the characters in this book lend humanity to its analysis, reminding us that the faceless forces examined here have been set in motion by humans and can thus be redirected by them.
Many of the people portrayed in this book are themselves selfacknowledged works-in-progress. What I came to admire about many of them is their courage in having traveled great personal distance in their understanding of the system in which they have operated, and in many cases continue to operate. Their stories not only illuminate their particular areas of expertise but, by demonstrating their personal capacity to change and grow, remind us of that prospect for ourselves, and for the system of which we are all a part.
As America now hopes to leave the traumatic first years of the twentyfirst century behind and move into a period of loftier ambitions, the nation remains embroiled in a tragic conflict with no clear objective or foreseeable exit. Given all that has come to light about the errors and misdeeds of the Bush years, there is an understandable temptation to dwell on how George W. Bush and those around him could have so misguided the nation, destabilized the world, and compromised America's position in it. Yet, while accountability for these actions is vital, it must be accompanied by rigorous efforts to understand the historical forces that brought America to a place from which Bush's radicalization of policy was possible. Without such vigilance by what Eisenhower called "an alert and knowledgeable citizenry," the system is prone to repeat and, worse, to build on the regrettable patterns of recent years.
From her birth, America was shaped by a contradiction of impulses among the founders. On the one hand, given their difficult experience as colonists under British rule, these men sought to design a republic that would avoid the errors of past major powers. On the other hand, they saw the nation's vast potential and recognized that, no matter how well intended, its government could one day face the dilemmas encountered by its imperialist precursors. The Roman Republic had been overwhelmed by Caesar's imperial ambitions, and the framers recognized that the American system would need to keep the power of its leaders in check. "If men were angels," James Madison noted, "no government would be necessary."
From this insight followed the brilliant concept of the separation of powers, with checks and balances between them; and among these, none was more important to the framers than the constraints placed on the power of any individual to take the country to war. They thus intentionally entangled the authority to declare and prosecute war in a complex web of interlocking responsibilities between the branches.
Looking back from a contemporary vantage point -- at a time of great friction among the branches over the separation of powers -- it's remarkable both how prescient the framers were and yet how much, despite their efforts, events have come to fulfill their worst fears.
In his 1796 Farewell Address, George Washington provided several pieces of indispensable guidance for the generations that would follow. Warning against "permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world," he declared that "overgrown military establishments" were antithetical to republican liberties. Washington's idea was simple. If America stayed clear of the infighting that had historically gone on between European nations, it would much less often face the pressure to go to war and incur its attendant political, economic, and spiritual costs.
Almost two centuries later, on January 17, 1961, another generalturned-president would echo Washington in his own Farewell Address. "We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions," declared Dwight D. Eisenhower, warning famously that America must "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence...by the military-industrial complex." Eisenhower's warning against the "MIC," as it has come to be known, was a milestone in American history. From his firsthand experience, Eisenhower felt compelled to warn the nation that in the wake of World War II and amid its efforts to fight the Cold War, military, industrial, and political interests were forming an "unholy alliance" that was distorting America's national priorities.
As the chapters of this book explore, between Washington's time and Eisenhower's, and in turn between Eisenhower's and today, with each of the wars America has fought, she has drifted ever further from the framers' desired balance between a certain measure of isolationism and the necessity to defend the country. With each war, too, the separation of powers has suffered, with the executive branch coming to far outweigh the others in influence, agency, and power.
Examining the history of how this came to pass is in no way intended to minimize the errors, moral compromises, and outright offenses perpetrated by George W. Bush and his administration. Yet it does offer a deeper explanation of how such a radical chapter in the history of American policy was made possible by what preceded it. Only by getting at these roots of the American way of war can we begin to develop a realistic prescription for the nation's repair.
At the heart of this analysis is a military concept known as "mission creep." This term could have been used to describe any number of American wars from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq. But it first appeared in 1993 in articles on the UN peacekeeping mission in Somalia. Since then, it has swept into the parlance of Pentagon planners and, like so many terms that start in the military, spread into other fields. It means simply "the gradual process by which a campaign or mission's objectives change over time, especially with undesirable consequences."1
Not since John F. Kenne...
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77 of 95 people found the following review helpful.
Booking the Empire: Eugene Jarecki's AMERICAN WAY OF WAR
By R. C. Williams
Booking the Empire: "Why We Fight" Filmmaker Makes His Case In Print
by Rob Williams; editor, Vermont Commons newspaper
What happens when an award-winning documentary film producer turns to a print monograph to make his case?
If you are Eugene Jarecki, the answer (to borrow a baseball metaphor) is: you hit a solid triple, with an eye towards home plate.
Jarecki's new book - The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men and a Republic in Peril (Simon and Schuster, 2008; 324 pages) - is a provocative and personal exploration of the same crucial themes he explored in his Sundance Film Festival 2005 Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary "Why We Fight." Ignore Jarecki's "confession" to being "first and foremost a filmmaker" on page 1, rather than a "policy scholar, a soldier" or an "insider to the workings of America's military establishment."
Pay his humility no mind. Jarecki possesses a keen eye for detail, an ability to listen closely to his subject's personal and professional motivations (and the often-felt tension between the two), and a knack for speaking synechdocally - that is, using individuals and moments to illustrate larger systemic and historical truths, and the reader is the better for it.
The book begins, as his film does, with President Dwight David Eisenhower's 1961 "Farewell Address," in which the prescient Ike warns Americans to guard against the dangers of the "military-industrial complex," that potent and profit-seeking combination of special interests that might spell the death of the U.S. republic. Jarecki then takes us on a historical and global tour of the United States, from its early 20th century emergence as a global imperial force to the present moment, with some remarkable stops along the way, from interviews with air force pilots and West Point cadets to conversations with those in the highest levels of government, including Richard Perle and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who proclaims the United States to be "the greatest force for good in the world today."
How McCain measures this goodness is, of course, a matter for readers to ponder, given the economic and political realities of our current moment, and Jarecki's book, while wisely steering clear of an attempt to exhaustively chronicle America's empire-building abroad, explores the historical tension between America's desire to remain a neutral, even isolationist player on the world stage, and its desire to build an Empire. Eisenhower, for whom Jarecki has deep admiration (as have I, even more so after reading Jarecki's book) remains the central figure here, walking a remarkable line between competing pulls on his loyalty as a military man, a policymaker, and a compassionate human being in a tough position of leadership.
Not surprisingly, as Eisenhower himself warned, the war-making and profit-taking interests have dominated this debate during the past sixty years, and Jarecki takes pains to explain the nuances that undergird the building of the most powerful (and expensive) Empire in world history. His final chapter - "Shock and Awe at Home" - is a referendum on the past eight years of King George's administration. For anyone who is unfamiliar with or has forgotten how the USA PATRIOT Act, or John Yoo's new and novel legal theory of "the unitary executive," or the John Warner and Military Commissions Acts, or the FISA nonsense, or dozens of other presidential abuses of power have reshaped the federal government's very essence over the past eight years, a close reading of this chapter alone is worth the price of the book. And I am not comforted by the conclusion most observers make here - that, once Mr. Bush exits office stage right, somehow everything will "return to normal." Sunset clauses somehow provide little comfort here.
Speaking critically, as a U.S. historian and secessionist/ decentralist, my arguments with Jarecki's book are not insignificant. I find troubling his refusal to touch the mountain of evidence - the scholarly and well-researched work of David Ray Griffin or Michael Ruppert, for example - that suggests that the 9/11 attacks served as a "false flag" operation engineered by elements within the U.S. government to advance a "new Pearl Harbor." This is an odd omission, since this phrase is one he uses repeatedly in the book, quoting the Project For A New American Century's statement calling for a new "defensive" posture - one that essential advocates a policy of "full spectrum dominance" in which the U.S. militarizes the entire globe and outer space. (Orwell would be nodding knowingly right now.)
Jarecki's otherwise spot on "iron triangle" analysis - in which he masterfully considers the intricate interconnections among the U.S. military, profit (and war) seeking global corporations, and both the legislative and executive branches - largely leaves out the vital role of U.S. media and "news" outlets as propaganda arms for war-making (General Electric manufactures weapons systems for the Pentagon AND owns NBC, which hypes war 24/7. This is not a coincidence).
And, perhaps most importantly, Jarecki chooses to downplay the tremendous amount of money U.S.-based multinational corporations (and the politicians who front for and work with them - Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and the current occupant of the White House, He Who Must Not Be Named) have made supporting what former Bush I insider-turned whistleblower Catherine Austin Fitts calls "the tapeworm economy."
The country of Iraq is a perfect example here. Let's connect the dots: the U.S. military-industrial-media-energy-complex makes money bombing and destroying Iraq (Ka-ching!), "rebuilding" Iraq, often badly and/or corruptedly (Ka-ching!, Part 2), while privatizing all of its assets (Ka-ching! Part 3). Oil, black gold, is the bloody tip of the spear point here, as 1 million Iraqis have died since the U.S. 2003 invasion, 2 million more have been displaced, and the U.S. taxpayers have been left footing what Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stieglitz has estimated to be a $3 trillion dollar war ("on terror, that "will not end in our lifetimes," according to Mr. Cheney.)
If I sound outraged, I am - and, while I deeply appreciate Jarecki's willingness to listen to all sides, I found myself wishing he'd take off the gloves, at times. But I am also willing to own my own sense of outrage, and laud Jarecki for his vital contribution to this important and unfolding conversation about the future of the United States under the regime that is the "military-industrial complex." In turning to typography, filmmaker Jarecki has produced what many will see as a minor tour de force, an important book at a pivotal moment in the history of the United States republic-turned-empire.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Understanding the Military Industrial Complex and NeoCons
By Joseph J. Slevin
I have to admit, I am a bit of a centrist in many things and a conservative in others, yet this book took me out of my comfort zone and challenged my thinking, or should I say, propagandized mind.
Jarecki, the filmmaker of "Why We Fight," goes to the next level to delve into the history and development of America's way of war, particular since the end of the WWII and the beginning of the cold war. Jarecki starts with the present, flashes back to the times of Truman and Eisenhower and then back to the present again in reviewing how we got to where we are. He also goes into our going to war in WWII and how that influence the very important National Security Act of 1947 that eventually lead to the MIC (the Military Industrial Complex).
What fascinate me in all this is when he shows that Truman and the Dems of his time and for sometime there after were the ones engaging in developing our military capacity after WWII and the Republicans wanted to get back to isolationism. One area I wished he had spent a little time on would have been how did we get from that to the why, when and how the transition took place.
His approach to the NeoConservatives (fake conservatives) was really enlightening. So, really, we have a group of individuals who write a blueprint for the USA and it is followed almost to the letter after 9-11. He is really so very well researched and rarely allows himself to show any narrow mindedness in political discussion. However, there are times where he seems to contradict himself. Ike was warning that there was less need for nukes and Kennedy was for them, then a little later, Kennedy said Ike was all for nukes and not for conventional war making as much. He could have clarified his thoughts on things like this.
His book is also written with the framework of what the founders and framers of our nation and approach to our republic had written about foriegn entanglements. But, what is relatively glossed over is what do we do when the USA is really the only nation left standing intact after a great and terrible war? He does not weigh the difference with responsibility and meddling in the affairs of other countries.
Jarecki writes as if there are not even potential enemies. Although there was a lot of fearmongering during the cold war, was there relatively little threat during that time. He writes about specific programs that were wasteful, the exposing of corruption in Defense spending and related issues, but sometimes he asks if we really needed certain weapons. For instance the F22 fighter. The author mentions we have no enemies with an airforce, so why do we need fighter planes? Well, he is not asking this rhetorically, he means it and yes we did spend way to much on implements of war at times, but a reality check would say we have potential enemies, and there are other uses for fighter planes instead of dog fights.
As I write this, Venezuela is inviting Russian Naval warships to its ports. So close to us and the leader of Venezuela has let us know what he feels about us. So I ask the author and the readers of this very informative book, do we have potential enemies?
He asks or repeats the question "why do they hate us?" throughout the time frame of our present day. But do we ever ask the question has anyone really ever liked us? I had just ended reading Old World New World where the British and USA are featured as the leaders of the world for trade, finance and yes war making capacity and control. The world that was prior to WWII was not a pleasant place and has always been cursed with wars, skirmishes, persecutions and factionism.
Whether US should or not follow the Truman Doctrine, policing the free world, is another topic for another author. But, the issue he focuses on is not just the USA's war making capacity, it is the greed and corrupt way we go about the acquisition and procuring war making implements.
Telling in the book is his adding another C, congressional, to the letters MIC. He feels that Congress has become a unified whole, both sides of the aisle, in its support of the MIC and he gives reasons why.
I have to say, I was a little sceptical when I began reading this as maybe, he was going to rant. But I was looking particularly for one fact to be addressed to see if he completed his thought on the subject of US warmaking. Smedly Butler is the subject I looked for and because he mentions Butler, I continued this book until its end. You will have to read the book to really understand what I mean.
In our time, this is a must read. Although discussions should ensue surrounding what he says, especially poinant is the discussion of the NeoCons. This book can help our country look at itself and do what it can to get away from cronyism and corruption at the highest levels of our society. I guess, only time will tell.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating and important, even if one disagrees with its assumptions and conclusions
By Aaron Silverman
Regardless of one's political leanings, there's no denying that the United States has steadily increased its involvement in the affairs of other nations (and vice versa) over the past two centuries, or that the development of agencies like the CIA and NSA have granted significant new powers to the Executive branch of its government. (Of course, the rest of the world hasn't exactly been static over that time.) Eugene Jarecki's new book follows the changing nature of US foreign policy to try and put the events of the past eight years into historical context. While the author's anti-Bush agenda is clear and colors most of the work, the context he develops is fascinating and important to understand in its own right.
The writing is entertaining, although the author's point of view can sometimes be grating for those who don't share it (or who might grow tired of its somewhat outdated views on Iraq, which at times read as though they were written in 2005, not 2008). For example, after quoting Susan Eisenhower on her grandfather making sure to personally write letters to the families of soldiers killed in the Second World War, Jarecki writes: "Speaking at a time when sitting president George W. Bush shows little desire to recognize U.S. military losses, let alone attend military funerals or communicate with grieving families, Susan pauses to let the pregnant contrast speak for itself." Maybe she explained the meaning behind her "pause," or maybe it was obvious, but it's also quite possible that the author is simply projecting his own attitude onto his subject. On the other hand, the opinionated commentary should not dissuade anyone from reading the book, which is chock-full of anecdotes and quotes that are well worth reading.
The book is a good companion piece to Jarecki's documentary film Why We Fight, which covered essentially the same material. However, the film was less focused on the Bush administration and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and thus came across as more even-handed. (The hyperbolic litany of Bush's Crimes Against God, Nature and Humanity in the book's "Shock and Awe at Home" chapter often reads more like a blogger's rant than a serious work of nonfiction.) Even if one doesn't take the time to read the book, the film is a must-see. Both present facts and ideas that every American, and anyone who wants to understand how and why the the U.S. behaves as it does on the world stage, should consider.
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