Another Century of War?

With the attacks of September 11 says Kolko, the war has come to American shores, and will remain there. To avoid future similar catastrophes, the US should become realistic in its ambitions, recognize the limitations of military power, and end the folly of thinking it necessary to micromanage the affairs of other countries. Helpful too he says would be eliminating the breeding grounds of "terrorism" by raising the standard of living of the destitute around the world. The prognosis is not good, as the US continues to pursue in spades policies similar to those that have produced catastrophe. In a slim, powerfully written volume of flawless prose, Kolko draws together seamlessly the many divers threads of what he shows to be disastrously misguided continued attempts of the United States to intervene militarily and meddle in the affairs of nations around the globe in a world far more complex than it was even fifty years ago. He covers whole histories of wide and disparate political domains in literally several sentences or paragraphs. His voice is unique in bringing the light of truth and understanding to US foreign affairs and the mess we're in. Kolko's fundamnental thesis, obvious, as it so often is with genius, is that political problems have political and social, not military, solutions. With the notable exceptions of Vietnam and Korea, the US military machine is quite capable of gaining victories in its imperial adventures. Unfortunately, these more often result in concomitant political catastrophe: US "arms have not brought peace to the world even though Communism has virtually disappeared and can no longer explain the behavior of the US and its allies...we now live in an era of growing insecurity that will very probably see more trauma like (September 11) as well as (similar) responses..." writes Kolko. Kolko points out the monstrous irony that the two nemeses the US has most demonized over the last decade, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, it has previously supported with massive military, economic, and diplomatic aid and treated as friends. Because of these and similar Machiavellian intrigues, and despite the fall of the Soviet Union, the world is a far more dangerous place. And what is new, especially for the American people. The examples of military triumphs that have become political calamity is a long list and continues to grow; and will continue to grow under the unilateralist and militarist policies of the Bush administration. Worse, and far more ominous, is Kolko's analysis of Bush foreign policy as being ad hoc, improvised, opportunist, and confused. He documents flip-flops in Bush policy, which show the conservative ideology to be as malleable as conservatives often lament of the liberal. Kolko is very edifyingly in and out of a complex and lucid history of the petrol- and geo- politics of the Middle East like a cold bath. The CIA, for example, sine qua non deposed the moderate but nationalist Iranian President

Few historians understand US foreign policy as well as Gabriel Kolko. Normally, he writes massive books packed with footnotes, drawing information from stacks of declassified government documents. But this time, he's used his decades of research to briefly summarize his thoughts on the post-9/11 world.Fortunately, his opinions are kept to an absolute minimum. This book is full of historical information that backs up his point of view. He covers the US response to 9/11 in Afghanistan, the history of the conflict there with the Soviet Union, and its connections to oil reserves and political influence. Then he describes the connections between the KLA in Kosovo, Osama bin Laden, and Pakistan. It's amazing how he can condense so many facts into so few pages. He makes it easy to understand and impossible to forget.He goes on to describe the failures of US foreign policy. This part of the book will get under the skin of some Americans, as Kolko shows that US plans for stability in the Middle East have failed miserably. He finishes up with a quick look at economic ties to foreign policy, pointing out that the military-industrial complex is unable to promote peace.There is a lot of essential information in this book. Kolko knows what he's talking about. His conclusions are unsettling (to the say the least). He concludes that the world cannot survive another century of war, so the imperial ambitions of the US must change. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what's happening in the world at the beginning of the 21st century.

It's easy to dismiss this book as a "military history." That view is too limited in scope. What Kolko describes is the American propensity use military thinking in the development of that nation's foreign policies. In a tightly written analysis, he shows how the United States is confronting a vast arc - reaching from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia. The inhabitants of that extensive area have been watching the world's sole superpower stumbling about ineptly. He declares American foreign policies in this critical area confused and self-contradictory, based on superficial morality and military adventurism. The roots of their thinking, he contends, is the uneradicable notion held by the American military that technology reduces the duration of wars. No amount of practical experience has been able to dispel that faith.In Kolko's view, the worst event in American foreign policy history was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the elimination of communism. No matter how badly the United States dealt with the misconceived idea that Moscow dominated the politics of discontent, it was at least a point of focus. With the Cold War over, America is floundering about seeking ways to assert its unilateral power over the same group of nations. After spending enormous sums to shore up Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union, America launched a war to demolish its government. Right next door, Pakistan's resentment of American restoration of the Afghan Alliance and warlord governments is palpable, leaving the current government teetering.Nor is Pakistan the only internally threatened state in the "arc." Thousands of American troops reside in Saudi Arabia. That nation's internal "containment" policy led it to send hordes of disaffected young men to Afghanistan and funded the Al Queda movement. Now, many of those young men, militarily experienced, have returned or are secluded and training others. Kolko argues this situation has rendered Saudi Arabia vulnerable to an Islamic uprising. Such an event would spread to many places, leaving American military forces isolated and surrounded.America's interventions in foreign countries, ranging from supplying and training police forces to outright occupations, have been based on the belief that military solutions are quick and final. Kolko demonstrates that fifty years of adventurism have shown they are neither. The wars, such as Viet Nam and Kosovo, have shown them to be neither. The human costs are simply ignored or dismissed by American policy makers. The result is that now the United States has been directly assaulted and will remain a combat zone for years. Clearly, his purpose in writing this book is to alert Americans to their danger. Even if the American voting public forces administrations to abstain from ad hoc interventions in other nations, the time it will take for foreign resentments to subside will be a duration of generations. However, the start must be made, and made now. [stephen a.

In these days of flag-waving incoherence and jingoism, it's nice to see a new book from Kolko, especially one written in a succinct style highly-accessible to all. Mr. Quinn's review really covers the work well so I don't have a lot of additional information to add. Kolko's seminal CENTURY OF WAR will offer a great deal of background information, and anyone who thinks Kolko is out of his mind with the assertions he makes in this book should check it out, along with his finest work, POLITICS OF WAR. The latter is by far the best work I have ever read on the formation of postwar U.S. foreign policy, all the more so due to its almost total reliance on primary documents instead of secondary sources, which were practically non-existent at the time (mid 1960's). What's refreshing about ANOTHER CENTURY OF WAR? is its reluctance to pull any punches in the face of 9-11, its refusal to perhaps go a little easy on the architects of U.S. foreign policy and recite the childish idiotic sentiment that those responsible for the tragedy are just "jealous" of the United States. Instead, Kolko pinpoints the active role of the post-WWII West in fostering an atmosphere of instability in the Middle East and its justifications for doing so, not all of which are oil related. The examples are plentiful and the research meticulous. After reading his work, it's a mystery to me why Kolko isn't better known in this country, even among the Left. Perhaps it's because he keeps a relatively low profile and focuses mainly upon war and its impact upon social dynamics.

Gabriel Kolko is America's greatest living historian. Beginning with Wealth and Power in America at the beginning of the 1960's(the "hard data" version of Michael Harrington's Other America), continuing through his pioneering work on the Progressive Era (in the specialized literature called the "Kolko Thesis," beloved by Ayn Rand and inspirational to New Left historians), through to the central and most thorough works of the "revisionist" school of Cold War historians (The Politics of War and (w/Joyce Kolko) The Limits of Power), Kolko combines original research and laser-like insight. His Politics of War, in particular, virtually rearranged the way the politics of World War II was viewed by historians(this according to Hans Morgenthau - one of Henry Kissinger's teachers - in his review in the New York Review of Books in 1968). Noam Chomsky used to cite Kolko frequently as the best source on American foreign policy, and still writes the dust-jacket blurbs for his books, including this new one. Yet Kolko is too little known in his native country (he migrated to York University in Toronto in the 1960's), but many of his books sell and stay in print. The Kolko's were at Harvard in the late-'50's and early 60's, where they were intellectual partners with the great Barrington Moore, Jr., who wrote a whole book in friendly response to their discussions. Another Century of War is brisk and to the point, written in response to 9/11. For the prequel, get the far more thorough Century of War (1994). There you will find an analysis of the troubles with America's intelligence establishment, for example, that seems to have been cribbed by the experts working for the Congressional committees looking into the intelligence failures around 9/11. One of Kolko's thesis, frequently "discovered" by the punditry, is that the US is militarily strong overseas, but politically weak. This insight is fundamental, and its consequence, without correction, cannot but be dire. Following 9/11, he writes in Another Century of War, the U.S. "has not embarked on a new policy. Instead, it is trying to put other labels on its actions while relying on the remnants of its traditional approaches and ideas, of which the massive reliance on technology and firepower is the single most important. The Bush Administration does not have a coherent foreign policy strategy." You will find in Kolko a mastery of military and political issues rare among historians, combined with a humane and elemental acknowledgement of the devastation of war and the hubris of national leaders who believe they can control it for their purposes.