America’s War Machine: Vested Interests, Endless Conflicts

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. [em]Agent: Ronald Goldfarb, Goldfarb & Associates. (Nov.) [/em]