PENTAGON PARANOIA
General's son describes a self-perpetuating mind-set
by BOOK REVIEW: House of War/The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power by James Carroll (Reviewed by Chuck Leddy, SF Chronicle)

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."

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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.

Full story here.