Snarky warning about war
By Scott Shane |
April 20, 2012, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
SOME readers will come to Rachel Maddow's first book "Drift" expecting an entertaining left-wing screed against the military. They may be surprised to discover instead a lively but serious argument about American history.
Like the Tea Partiers, she believes the United States must return to the lost principles of the nation's founders - a suspicion of standing armies and a deep reluctance to go to war. "America's structural disinclination toward war is not a sign that something's gone wrong," she declares. "It's the way the founders set us up."
It's a compelling narrative and Maddow's cheerful, snarky voice is recognizable from late night American TV. And there are inaccuracies and generalities.
Yet as the US extracts itself from two wars of uncertain achievement - and with politicians, not generals, threatening military action against Iran - "Drift" is a thought-provoking and timely book.
And many readers, conservative and liberal alike, will embrace one of Maddow's practical prescriptions: that taxes should be raised or war bonds sold to pay for any conflict, since "going to war, being at war, should be painful for the entire country, from the start."
Maddow, a former Rhodes Scholar, cites Thomas Jefferson telling Congress: "Were armies to be raised whenever a speck of war is visible in our horizon, we never should have been without them."
She quotes James Madison saying that "the Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature."
But especially in the last half-century, Maddow argues, the decision to go to war has become too easy. Congress' constitutional prerogative to declare war has routinely been ignored. Only a tiny fraction of the US population serves or sends a family member to war, allowing a majority to remain oblivious to its grisly human price.
Contractors supply the battlefield support that once was the work of soldiers. A bloated security industry profits from the near-permanent state of conflict, sharing proceeds with pliable members of Congress. And now robotic drones carry out combat from an antiseptic distance.
Like the Tea Partiers, she believes the United States must return to the lost principles of the nation's founders - a suspicion of standing armies and a deep reluctance to go to war. "America's structural disinclination toward war is not a sign that something's gone wrong," she declares. "It's the way the founders set us up."
It's a compelling narrative and Maddow's cheerful, snarky voice is recognizable from late night American TV. And there are inaccuracies and generalities.
Yet as the US extracts itself from two wars of uncertain achievement - and with politicians, not generals, threatening military action against Iran - "Drift" is a thought-provoking and timely book.
And many readers, conservative and liberal alike, will embrace one of Maddow's practical prescriptions: that taxes should be raised or war bonds sold to pay for any conflict, since "going to war, being at war, should be painful for the entire country, from the start."
Maddow, a former Rhodes Scholar, cites Thomas Jefferson telling Congress: "Were armies to be raised whenever a speck of war is visible in our horizon, we never should have been without them."
She quotes James Madison saying that "the Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature."
But especially in the last half-century, Maddow argues, the decision to go to war has become too easy. Congress' constitutional prerogative to declare war has routinely been ignored. Only a tiny fraction of the US population serves or sends a family member to war, allowing a majority to remain oblivious to its grisly human price.
Contractors supply the battlefield support that once was the work of soldiers. A bloated security industry profits from the near-permanent state of conflict, sharing proceeds with pliable members of Congress. And now robotic drones carry out combat from an antiseptic distance.
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