Addicted to war

"House of War" author James Carroll says the Pentagon is out of control, the Cold War was unnecessary -- and it's good that we're failing in Iraq.

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Books, Cold War, Pentagon, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews, Farhad Manjoo, Iraq War

May 3, 2006 | James Carroll's "House of War" is ostensibly a history of a single American government building, that five-sided behemoth that sits across the river from Washington and is instantly recognizable to just about anyone in the world as the headquarters of the United States military. But if Carroll's book actually reads like something much bigger than that, like a story not just of the Pentagon but of the last half-century of American foreign policy, well, that's the point. "The Pentagon has been so much at the center of national life that one could write an entire history of the contemporary United States in its terms," Carroll argues in his prologue. That's just about what he does.

Carroll is a novelist, but he's best known for two massive works of nonfiction -- "Constantine's Sword," which examined the Catholic Church's troubled history with Jews, and "American Requiem," a memoir about how the Vietnam War ruined Carroll's relationship with his father. Carroll, who is a former Catholic priest, and whose father was an Air Force general who worked in the Pentagon, is thus fond of personalizing history, and "House of War" runs along the same lines. As a kid, Carroll would slide down the Pentagon's slick floors in his socks while his dad worked late in a coveted E-ring office. As an adult, he sees that something much less fun occurred in those halls -- the Pentagon's militaristic, coolly efficient bureaucracy swallowed up the American government and its people, he says, making war the constant order of our lives.

Carroll's specific complaints will ring familiar to any peacenik: He argues that since Sept. 11, 1941, when ground was broken at the building's site -- Carroll makes much of this date, exactly 60 years before United flight 77 crashed into the building's side -- the U.S. has embarked on a series of foreign policy disasters. Among other things, he believes that dropping nuclear weapons on Japan was a mistake; that we should not have developed, and then shouldn't have tested, the H-bomb; that we should have shared our nuclear knowledge with the Soviets and instituted an international framework to abolish nuclear weapons; that we were mistaken to think of the Soviets as our mortal enemies, and thus mistaken to have turned political differences into a near world-ending Cold War; that we missed many opportunities to end the nuclear arms race during that war, and that we were far more belligerent than the Soviet Union in how we conducted ourselves with those weapons; and that, finally, even today, though we no longer face an enemy that poses an existential threat to the nation, we're needlessly maintaining a military force that is more dangerous than any other force in the world, capable of instantly destroying all life on the planet.

What's interesting about this catalog, as Carroll points out, is that at various points in the nation's history, many men in government made similar arguments. Their cries were drowned out, though, by the culture of the Pentagon, which always wanted more -- more bombs, more planes, more ships, more war. It's this thesis, as well as Carroll's unquestionably solid research, that makes his story much more than a standard antiwar rant. Other than a few stock villains -- notably the mad bomber Curtis LeMay, the Air Force general who controlled the American nuclear arsenal for more than two decades -- Carroll doesn't characterize the folks who worked in the building as evil. "The Pentagon's is a story of ordinary people who acted with good intentions, faced tragic dilemmas, and resisted what they saw happening right in front of them," he writes. They didn't set out to make the mistakes they did; rather, institutional momentum led them astray.

Carroll spoke to Salon from his home in Boston.

What I liked about your story is this idea that the Pentagon created a kind of bureaucracy of warfare -- you're saying that the Pentagon as an institution forms American policy, rather than individual leaders making decisions. Can you explain how that works?

Well, I'm no social scientist, but it's clear bureaucracies generally have a life of their own, and the challenge always in a bureaucracy is to balance the momentum of the impersonal with the moral agency of the human beings involved. The Pentagon is the avatar, the ultimate example of that, not just for the size of it but because of some of the aspects of military culture that took hold after World War II, when technology became such a dominant part of military life. There's an impersonality in the technology itself -- you see this especially when nuclear weapons come to dominate the strategic position of the United States after World War II.

So the reason I begin this book the way I do is to argue that really four things happen at once -- I'm locating them as happening in one week [in January 1943, the week the Pentagon was opened]. Number one, the decision by Roosevelt and Churchill to define Allied war aims as the "unconditional surrender" of Japan and Germany, imbuing the martial purpose of World War II with a kind of spirit of totality that it did not have until then. The second thing that happened was the initiation of the combined bombing offensive against the German homeland. The third thing that happens is the commission to build the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos. So unconditional surrender, warfare fought from the air, nuclear weapons, all three innovations come at the moment of the dedication of the Pentagon.

The four developments combined in an unprecedented and unpredictable way -- if any of the people present in the government could have imagined what they were creating, I seriously doubt they would have wanted to go forward with it. A momentum is generated right there at the beginning that undercuts traditional notions of American morality. We've never reckoned with the civilian carnage wreaked by the United States Air Force in the last six months of World War II. More than a million civilians killed after the war was already won. The bombing of Japanese cities in March of 1945 killed more civilians than Japanese military people were killed in the entire war. The bombing of German cities in the same period killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Your main example of this bureaucracy taking over the decision-making was Truman's "decision" to use nuclear weapons, which you say was not a decision at all.

Well, someone I cite compared Truman to a surgeon coming into an operating room after the patient was already cut open and having to decide whether to remove the diseased organ then.

Well, and then they justified it after the fact by arguing -- and this has become the main way we remember the decision to use the bomb -- that it saved us from invading Japan and consequently saved many lives.

Yes, George H.W. Bush was the last to say that the atomic bomb saved us a couple million casualties. I lay out how the numbers of casualties became part of the myth.

One of the things that revisionist historians have pointed out with some convincing detail is that the Japanese were ready to surrender by the summer of 1945, and there was ambivalence, especially on the part of those in the defense establishment who wanted to see the atomic bomb used, about receiving the Japanese surrender signals. One of the great questions raised by revisionist historians is whether America's intentions in the summer of 1945 had shifted from Japan to Russia. We wanted to use the bomb to intimidate Moscow, to make sure that Moscow understood that we were to be reckoned with.

I take some pains to play out the complicated historical debate on both sides, and I reach my own conclusion, which was that the bomb was unnecessary. It's a pointed debate that is unknown to most Americans. Most Americans don't know, for example, that General Eisenhower opposed the use of the atomic bomb.

Next page: "We responded to 9/11 as though we were in the thick of the Cold War"