America's War Machine
Vested Interests, Endless Conflicts
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Descripción editorial
A veteran Washington reporter reveals how years of military-slanted domestic and foreign policy have turned the U.S. into a perpetual war machine.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower prepared to leave the White House in 1961, he did so with an ominous message for the American people about the "disastrous rise" of the military-industrial complex. Fifty years later, the complex has morphed into a virtually unstoppable war machine, one that dictates U.S. economic and foreign policy in a direct and substantial way.
Based on his experiences as an award-winning Washington-based reporter covering national security, James McCartney presents a compelling history, from the Cold War to present day that shows that the problem is far worse and far more wide-reaching than anything Eisenhower could have imagined. Big Military has become "too big to fail" and has grown to envelope the nation's political, cultural and intellectual institutions. These centers of power and influence, including the now-complicit White House and Congress, have a vested interest in preparing and waging unnecessary wars. The authors persuasively argue that not one foreign intervention in the past 50 years has made us or the world safer.
With additions by Molly Sinclair McCartney, a fellow journalist with 30 years of experience, America's War Machine provides the context for today's national security state and explains what can be done about it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National-security journalist McCartney had mostly finished this ponderous attempt to explain the problems with the American military when he died in 2011. Though McCartney's career spanned 50 years of changes in the military, beginning with Eisenhower's 1961 "military-industrial complex" speech, his manuscript which his widow lovingly completed nebulously ascribes everything in the so-called Washington game to a tug over money. With industry at the wheel and an appetite for oil still driving conflicts in the Middle East as if nothing has changed in 50 years, Congress gorges on pork while think tanks and the news media agitate for war. The "time for a reckoning has come," McCartney asserts, but he never delivers on the promise to elucidate how let alone why America is unable to get off a "permanent war footing." The prescriptions for change are familiar and warmed over, but the truth of what McCartney learned about American militarism in his long career never gels. America's "vested interests in war" remain elusive to the end; McCartney's book closes, as it begins, with a personal tale of pain and remembrance, an old soldier lost in battle.