House of War--The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power

Pentagon paranoia -- a vicious cycle
General's son describes a self-perpetuating mind-set
Reviewed by Chuck Leddy
Sunday, May 21, 2006

House of War
The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power

By James Carroll

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN; 658 PAGES; $30

Conventional wisdom holds that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, forever changed the way the United States relates to the rest of the world. Not so, says James Carroll, who has written a book that is among the most important works of history produced in the past few years. Carroll offers an exhaustively researched chronicling of the Pentagon's continuity over the past six decades, and also describes how the Pentagon has profoundly influenced his own life (Carroll's father was a general who worked in the building).

What distinguishes Carroll's book is not just this blending of the personal and the institutional -- a blending that brilliantly illuminates his thesis that the Pentagon's growth has been fueled by a bipolar view of the world that depends on paranoia and deceit -- but also Carroll's willingness to ask basic moral questions that almost never get asked amid the Pentagon's Orwellian language of "collateral damage" and "asymmetric warfare." Carroll wants to understand the psychological and institutional underpinnings that have motivated those who've shaped the Pentagon, people like his father. More frighteningly, Carroll also believes the building has developed a life of its own, one dedicated to a self-perpetuating ideology that is often inimical to the civilian authorities it "serves."

It all started during World War II, when President Roosevelt needed more space to house the burgeoning military bureaucracy. He intended the Pentagon as temporary. Carroll discusses the man who supervised construction, Gen. Leslie Groves, who afterward oversaw the Manhattan Project. Carroll then offers us a fascinating examination of President Truman's fateful decision to drop the atomic bomb, a decision, he says, that was made in the context of horrific Allied firebombing of civilian populations in Dresden, Tokyo and other cities. Carroll points out that the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed perhaps 100,000 civilians, was a precursor to the more destructive raid on Hiroshima. Carroll notes that humanitarian concerns were brushed aside by those obsessed with the impersonal metrics of destruction.

Carroll shows that the dropping of the atomic bomb was also meant to send a message to Moscow, carving out more power for the United States in the postwar world. With the Cold War, the Pentagon adopted a bipolar mind-set that continues to this day -- the enemy is totally evil, while we represent all that's good in the world. There can thus be no other course but total war and absolute victory. Those who dare ask questions are disloyal, unpatriotic and subversive.

Carroll details the development of a paranoid line of reasoning whose "intellectual" groundwork was laid by George Kennan, James Forrestal and Paul Nitze. This view had a very practical effect -- the skyrocketing of Pentagon budgets. In his final speech as president, Dwight Eisenhower warned against the growing power of the military-industrial complex, but his complaint was made when the onetime military leader of World War II was already exiting the scene.

When Nixon became president, his secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, warned Congress about the Soviets' ability to launch a nuclear first strike against the United States. What Nixon and Laird wanted was congressional funding for a hyper-expensive anti-ballistic missile system (ABM) to shoot down Soviet missiles. Unfortunately, Laird's testimony about Soviet first-strike capability was directly contradicted by existing U.S. intelligence, intelligence gathered by Carroll's father. Carroll surmises that Laird went to his father and requested a re-evaluation of his findings. Shortly after Carroll's father refused to fudge this intelligence, he was out of a job. Later, the intelligence was indeed altered.

Carroll meticulously analyzes the cycle of fear that led to the growth of Pentagon power during the Cold War and beyond. This fear-based worldview is bolstered by intelligence that supports the initial premise. Such intelligence spurs more funding that increases our military arsenals. Increased arsenals on our side lead to countermoves by the enemy. Those countermoves help make the case for still more Pentagon spending. The cycle perpetuates.

Carroll does not believe the myth that President Reagan's toughness finally ended the Cold War. Again and again, it was Soviet Premier Gorbachev who unilaterally took the initiative to dismantle his nuclear arsenals. Reagan's crucial role was in not opposing these moves, a role Reagan assumed, Carroll says, because he needed political cover from the disgrace of the Iran-Contra scandal. With the Soviet enemy gone, the United States could have begun demilitarizing. But the Pentagon's bipolar mind-set never disappeared, and two factors helped re-energize it: Saddam Hussein and the terrorists of Sept. 11. Now, we're fighting an open-ended war against "evil-doers" across the globe.

The way to break this paranoid cycle, Carroll says, is to face the fear, bring it to the surface and name it. And to oppose the lies and embrace hope. For in a democracy, even one burdened with a massive military-industrial complex embodied by the Pentagon, people retain the power to choose their future, whether they decide to exercise it or not.

Chuck Leddy, a writer and book reviewer from Massachusetts, is a frequent contributor to The Chronicle.