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Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril
Free Press
October 2008
On Sale: October 14, 2008
336 pages
ISBN: 1416544569
EAN: 9781416544562
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
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.
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