warring america. business as usual

War is the American Way. Of Life. Of dealing Death  -especially to those who would disobey the diktats of  American "Democracy". 

Throughout American history we see many precursors for U.S. warmaking. Ever since World War I, the United States has maintained an active role in global affairs, at the cost of many thousands of American lives and many domestic freedoms. Two decades earlier, the United States was internationally belligerent in the 1898 war with Spain. Long before that, American warmaking had plenty of opportunities to show itself in the century between the Constitution’s adoption and the dawn of the Progressive Era — an invasion of Canada, war with Mexico, and Abraham Lincoln’s war against the South drenched the nineteenth century in statism and blood.

Executive secrets and conspiracy in World War II

Yet much more recently than any of those antecedents to the modern war machine, a major shift took place. And that was World War II, the “Good War,” the last clear-cut and most widely celebrated military victory enjoyed by the United States, the one to which liberals unfavorably compare Bush’s adventures and conservatives invoke as precedents for their own preferred war policies. It was in World War II that the U.S. warfare state blossomed into its modern form.

How fitting, then, that it is the event that marks the chronological beginning of Eugene Jarecki’s narrative in his exciting and compelling book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril. He sets up the story appropriately:

At first glance, George W. Bush, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the wars each presided over might seem to have little in common. Roosevelt is widely seen as a national hero who oversaw a military, moral, and leadership triumph; Bush is the reverse on all counts. Yet there are parallels to how each president guided America into conflict and transformed the country’s foreign policy profile. Before there was “a new Pearl Harbor,” there was the original.

The immediate effect of the Pearl Harbor attack was U.S. entry into World War II, which introduced “increasing militarism into the nation’s daily life.” That cultural shift was actively advanced by Washington, which colluded with Hollywood and others to disseminate pro-war propaganda. The military encouraged Frank Capra to produce his Why We Fight series of films, which “cast America’s role in World War II in terms of the larger global conflict between freedom and slavery, light and dark, good and evil.”

While the neocons were champions of the somewhat novel foreign-policy philosophy behind Iraqi regime change, the operation represented militarily something more in line with establishment designs. Even the military tactics of the Bush years demonstrate both the continuity with and retreat from the past. Shock and Awe, the opening bombing campaign in Iraq in 2003, signaled the beginning of

a fulfillment of Eisenhower’s fears of runaway American militarism. Yet, to its planners, the opening strike seemed a natural extension of America’s expanding foreign policy role since World War II and of the technological advances made possible by the American way of war…. Despite the defense secretary’s apparent collaboration … there is no evidence from Rumsfeld’s history that he was inclined toward the kind of Pax Americana the neocons advocate. To him, [Shock and Awe] more narrowly represented the fulfillment of a technological military ideal, one that had emerged over the decades of his military-industrial career.

The very doctrine of preemptive war was not completely new, except in the overtness of it all, which “departed from [American] traditions so brazenly [and] makes yesterday’s aberration today’s standard operating procedure.” This tendency was further seen in the administration’s flouting of “vital checks on its conduct of office” in handling intelligence running up to the Iraq war, and in its gross attacks on the separation of powers and civil liberties, in each case building on past precedents to break new ground in presidential prerogative.

Bush’s NSA wiretapping program was “a far-reaching attack” on both congressional and judicial authority with only a few parallels in the past, and although “past administrations have asserted [executive privilege] from time to time, the Bush administration has done so with unprecedented vigor.” Bush’s “firing of eight U.S. attorneys” in 2006 “represented both a politically motivated purge [and] a preemptive attack on the judicial system” — and although the administration’s “scorn for certain judges is not an altogether new phenomenon,” wrote former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’ Connor, “the breadth and intensity of rage currently being leveled at the judiciary may be unmatched in American history.”

The Bush stance on national security — largely adopted by the Obama administration — raises two points that do not contradict one another but require nuance and balance to be understood in concert. First are the many ways the Bush years were not a retreat from past U.S. experience, the many ways that expansions of presidential power, deception, imperial muscle flexing, and a permanently influential defense establishment were entrenched American traditions for three generations before the planes hit the World Trade Center.

The second point is the key ways in which the Bush years built and expanded on past precedents and broke new ground. Although Bush was not the first imperial president, he was an important one in the history of the U.S. warfare state’s development. Jarecki tells this story very well, in exciting prose and with something of a fair mind given to both revisionist and official versions of U.S. diplomatic history. The American Way of War is a solid addition to the critical literature about U.S. wars and foreign policy since the 1940s.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/book-review-the-u-s-war-machine/