While war is most effectively waged as a united effort, the United States has consistently waged military conflict without firm central direction. Throughout our history, observes Michael Pearlman, the waging of war has been subject to continuous bargaining and compromise among competing governments and military factions. What passes for strategy emerged from this process.
Introduction : war, politics, democracy -- Democratic security -- Citizens and soldiers : the difference uniforms make -- A modest case for symmetry : are soldiers morally equal? -- Leaders and the gambles of war : against political luck -- War, democracy, and Secrecy : secret law -- Must a democracy be ruthless? : torture and existential politics -- Humanitarian intervention and the new democratic holy wars -- Drones and democracy -- Democracy and the death of norms -- Democratic states in victory : vae victis? -- Looking backward : democratic transitions and the choice of justice.
Chronicles Detroit's dramatic transition from an automobile manufacturing center to a highly efficient producer of World War II airplanes, citing the essential role of Edsel Ford's rebellion against his father, Henry Ford.
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.
Asserts that America is straying from its democratic ideals and faltering in a rapidly globalized world community, and challenges policies that are based on a priority of making America "number one" in the world while examining the economic and politicalforces that have brought about contemporary problems.
This book explores the cultural history and future prospects of the so-callednew American way of war. In recent decades, American military culture has become increasingly dominated by a vision ofimmaculate destruction which reached its apogee with the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Operation Iraqi Freedom was hailed as the triumphant validati
How ideas, individuals, and political traditions from Weimar Germany molded the global postwar order The Weimar Century reveals the origins of two dramatic events: Germany's post–World War II transformation from a racist dictatorship to a liberal democracy, and the ideological genesis of the Cold War. Blending intellectual, political, and international histories, Udi Greenberg shows that the foundations of Germany’s reconstruction lay in the country’s first democratic experiment, the Weimar Republic (1918–33). He traces the paths of five crucial German émigrés who participated in Weimar’s intense political debates, spent the Nazi era in the United States, and then rebuilt Europe after a devastating war. Examining the unexpected stories of these diverse individuals—Protestant political thinker Carl J. Friedrich, Socialist theorist Ernst Fraenkel, Catholic publicist Waldemar Gurian, liberal lawyer Karl Loewenstein, and international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau—Greenberg uncovers the intellectual and political forces that forged Germany’s democracy after dictatorship, war, and occupation. In restructuring German thought and politics, these émigrés also shaped the currents of the early Cold War. Having borne witness to Weimar’s political clashes and violent upheavals, they called on democratic regimes to permanently mobilize their citizens and resources in global struggle against their Communist enemies. In the process, they gained entry to the highest levels of American power, serving as top-level advisors to American occupation authorities in Germany and Korea, consultants for the State Department in Latin America, and leaders in universities and philanthropic foundations across Europe and the United States. Their ideas became integral to American global hegemony. From interwar Germany to the dawn of the American century, The Weimar Century sheds light on the crucial ideas, individuals, and politics that made the trans-Atlantic postwar order.
Drawing on war propaganda, popular advertising, voluminous government records, and hundreds of letters and other accounts written by women in the 1940s, Melissa A. McEuen examines how extensively women's bodies and minds became "battlegrounds" in the U.S. fight for victory in World War II. Women were led to believe that the nation's success depended on their efforts--not just on factory floors, but at their dressing tables, bathroom sinks, and laundry rooms. They were to fill their arsenals with lipstick, nail polish, creams, and cleansers in their battles to meet the standards of ideal womanhood touted in magazines, newspapers, billboards, posters, pamphlets and in the rapidly expanding pinup genre. Scrutinized and sexualized in new ways, women understood that their faces, clothes, and comportment would indicate how seriously they took their responsibilities as citizens. McEuen also shows that the wartime rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and postwar opportunity coexisted uneasily with the realities of a racially stratified society. The context of war created and reinforced whiteness, and McEuen explores how African Americans grappled with whiteness as representing the true American identity. Using perspectives of cultural studies and feminist theory, Making War, Making Women offers a broad look at how women on the American home front grappled with a political culture that used their bodies in service of the war effort.
The #1 New York Times bestseller that charts America’s dangerous drift into a state of perpetual war. Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring Reagan's radical presidency, the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the scope of American military power to overpower our political discourse. Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seriously funny, Drift reinvigorates a "loud and jangly" political debate about our vast and confounding national security state.
Essays explore the social impact of Americas global network of military bases by examining interactions between U.S. soldiers and members of host communities in South Korea, Japan/Okinawa, and West Germany.
