the serious costs of war.

Great review of a what seems to be an interesting book about an interesting way to look at war. The Wars of the Warhogs. The pork  game of the Miltary Industrial complex in the country that is the biggest war profiteer in the world -by  a long, long shot.

why another book? Because, writes Nester, his is the first that "comprehensively unveils the moral dilemmas that entangled the Bush administration and the American public through each stage of planning, selling, fighting, and ending the war" (xiii). What it explicitly unveils, however, are not moral dilemmas but disagreements over marketing and management strategy between true believers and doubting non-believers both inside and outside the White House. Haunted Victory is a well written account of this aspect of the war: though neither definitive nor exhaustive, it resolutely focuses on the wheeling and dealing whereby the George W. Bush administration secured and disbursed practically unlimited funding for its war of choice.


The principals themselves had no qualms about their overarching goals, only about how to attain them and to proceed from one phase to the next in doing so. Cheney, Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, even Colin Powell were intellectually ill-equipped to think in terms of ethical questions. For decades in earlier administrations, they had espoused their objectives in a moral vacuum, based on their concept of an unbounded commander in chief. They assessed any expert opinion only in terms of a cost-benefit ratio determined unilaterally by their own selective calculus. Thus, for example, they construed US war casualties only as a public relations problem to be solved by banning photographs of killed combatants' homeward bound caskets.

http://www.miwsr.com/2012-048.aspx