House Of War :
The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
by James Carroll

The root cause for so much of what is screwed up in this country, and the world, can be attributed to the 800 pound gorilla that no one sees — the US military. This book can be added to the other two books that are essential reading on this subject: Blowback and Sorrows of Empire, both by Chalmers Johnson. From Amazon:

Carroll was born the same week in January, 1943, that the Pentagon was dedicated, the Manhattan Project got under way, and Roosevelt declared that the goal of the war was the enemy's "unconditional surrender." In this "biography" of the Pentagon, he extends these moments into a fuguelike history of American military power from Hiroshima to Iraq. The dominant theme is personal: growing up, Carroll, whose father, a general, worked in the Pentagon, saw the building both as his "twin" and as "a kind of dark woods." On the practical side, he argues that "in the nuclear age, civilian oversight of American military policy had become largely mythical," that the Pentagon had "Congress in its thrall and presidents at its mercy." And yet his most fascinating stories involve moments—as in the Berlin crisis and the Vietnam War—when civilians successfully opposed the Pentagon's monolithic power.

We have become a military with a country attached. Reading this book will piss you off when you understand how the military essentially manufactured the cold war in order to increase their budgets. And it hasn't slowed down. For some more flavor of James Carrol and the book:

House of War: James Carroll on the Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the history of the building? JAMES CARROLL: I begin this work looking at the week it was dedicated, a week in January 1943. Four things that happened that week generating a momentum that we're still at the mercy of, I argue. One, at Casablanca, Franklin Roosevelt, really against the wishes of his partner, Winston Churchill, announced a new policy of unconditional surrender, the Axis powers had to unconditionally surrender to the Allies, a position that really would have disastrous consequences, especially in Japan in the late months of the war. The second thing that happened that week was Los Alamos really was up and running – began to be up and running. The Manhattan Project had been initiated the previous autumn, but it really began right then. The third thing that happened that week, Churchill and Roosevelt together agreed on a joint bomber offensive between the R.A.F. and the Army air forces of the United States. It was the beginning of the American embrace of strategic bombing as a mode of war. The first bombing attack by the Americans against a German city took place two weeks later. So, strategic bombing, nuclear weapons, a spirit of total war embodied in unconditional surrender, all joined to the other thing that happened that week: the beginning of the building, this mass bureaucracy, which itself then would take on a kind of life that was beyond the ability of any one person or group of persons to check it. And the momentum that began that week really has flowed on essentially unchecked ever since, right through to the present catastrophe in Iraq.

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