Floyd/Moscow Times on 'A House of War'

[Guest guest]

" MARI ANDERSON " <itisimari

Sun, 28 May 2006 23:08:34 -0400

Floyd/Moscow Times on 'A House of War'

 

 

 

James Carroll was on c-span today speaking about his book " House of

War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power " . Before

the program was over I got online and ordered a copy! He talked about

the SOA and other interesting stuff. According to the c-span 2

schedule this program will air again Monday at 4 PM. Don't miss it!

 

 

 

 

 

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/05/26/120.html

 

 

Global Eye

 

Bleak House

 

By Chris Floyd

Published: May 26, 2006

 

It's a familiar image: the U.S. president followed by an aide with the

" football, " the ever-present attache case that holds the codes for

launching a nuclear attack. But for years, these supposedly supreme

commanders-in-chief did not have the slightest idea which targets

would actually be hit at their order. This occult knowledge was

reserved for a small circle of Pentagon officers who called themselves

the " guardians of the arsenal " and kept the true attack plans secret

from the civilian leadership.

 

The first civilian to see the plans, during the Kennedy

administration, was, ironically enough, Daniel Ellsberg -- the

Pentagon consultant who later leaked the " Pentagon Papers, " revealing

the disastrous lies behind America's war in Vietnam. What Ellsberg

found was moral insanity almost beyond imagining. The only plan

proposed by the " guardians " was an all-out nuclear strike on every

city in the Soviet Union, as well as on China and the Warsaw Pact

nations, with a deliberately low-balled estimate of 400 million people

killed immediately. There were " no intermediate steps, no flexibility

and no warnings " incorporated in the plan, which could be triggered by

a range of non-nuclear provocations, some posing no direct threat to

the United States at all. What's more, the high priest of the nuclear

cult, General Curtis LeMay, reserved the right to launch this

genocidal fury on his own, as a first strike, if he suspected the

Soviets were preparing to attack.

 

 

Civilian control of the military was thus exposed as an empty myth;

the center of power in the U.S. government had shifted from the

decisions of democratically elected leaders to the imperatives of

procurement and militarist paranoia emanating from the five-sided

fortress raised up in a Virginia wasteland known as Hell's Bottom.

 

This is just one of the many chilling stories recounted in James

Carroll's important new book, " House of War: The Pentagon and the

Disastrous Rise of American Power. " Carroll, an acclaimed novelist --

and son of a top Pentagon official -- provides a devastating inside

history of the military state-within-a-state that usurped the Republic

and now reigns unchallenged in Washington.

 

It is a grim and dispiriting tale indeed. For more than 60 years, the

vast, institutional engines of the Pentagon have permeated and skewed

U.S. society toward a harsh, fearful and fearsome militarism. In

almost every case, the inhuman scale of this gargantuan war machine

has infected those who sought to master it. Even the officers and

officials who entered its service with the best intentions -- and

Carroll provides many such instances -- were inexorably driven toward

the worst instincts of our human nature by the blood-and-iron logic of

a system based ultimately on violence, terror and the world-murdering

power of nuclear weapons.

 

Opened in January 1943 as a supposedly temporary concentration of

military bureaucracies, the Pentagon quickly became the locus of the

inevitably brutalizing effect of war, now magnified a thousandfold by

the new technologies of mass destruction, especially air power.

Although U.S. commanders at first denounced the British practice of

" terror bombing " civilians in enemy countries, by 1945 they had

embraced it with a vengeance. LeMay, with his young, number-crunching

assistant, Robert McNamara, directed a firebombing campaign against

Japanese cities that killed 900,000 civilians in just a few weeks.

With this level of civilian slaughter already accepted as deliberate

policy, it was hardly a great moral leap to cross the nuclear

threshold against Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- or, later, to plan for

killing 400 million people at a single stroke.

 

This savage ethos, forged in the dehumanizing crucible of total war,

has prevailed against all the many attempts to change it. Even

Ellsberg's discovery did little to return the Pentagon, and the

nuclear arsenal, to civilian control. The " whiz kid " McNamara, who by

then had become Pentagon chief, demanded a more " humane " attack

strategy. But his call for greater precision in targeting required a

whole new generation of deadlier, more sophisticated weapons. The

Soviets, who had only four -- four! -- intercontinental missiles when

Kennedy took office, felt pressured to respond in kind to the sudden

U.S. buildup. This in turn fueled more " countermeasures " by the

Pentagon and its procurement partners. Far from easing tensions, the

world moved even closer to nuclear conflagration.

 

The end of the Cold War made no difference to the Pentagon's

corrupting dominance of U.S. policy. The expected " peace dividend "

following the Soviet collapse never materialized; the Pentagon simply

found new enemies to stir the same public fears and feed its own

paranoia: Saddam Hussein, " rogue states, " Islamic extremism. Today,

with the never-ending " war on terror, " the Pentagon has completely

devoured the state, bending the entire government to its will and

commanding limitless sources of corporate patronage and political

muscle. The Bush regime has unleashed the " nuclear priesthood, "

discarding arms-control treaties, building a new generation of

deadlier nukes and once more pressuring Russia, still in the

crosshairs of thousands of U.S. warheads, to respond with a new arms race.

 

Thus we come to the bitter irony at the heart of the story: the

Pentagon ethos -- which enthrones " national security " as a supreme

value for which the " guardians " are willing to sacrifice millions of

innocent lives, the nation's civil liberties, even the planet itself

-- has, at every turn, only made America less secure.

 

This brief look at Carroll's masterful, multilayered history hardly

does the book justice. It should be read in full by anyone who wants

to understand how America has reached its present degraded condition

-- and how daunting the prospects are for real change in the crippling

militarism that holds the nation in thrall.