ANOTHER CENTURY OF WAR: ANALYSIS AND COMMENT
America needs an "enemy" of some sort to maintain its military/industrial complex going. At the end of World War II, there was Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, and more recently, Iraq. Kolko argues that "The United States is now the sole nation with the ambition and presumably the military power and economic resources to rearrange the political destinies of states in whatever corner of the world it chooses to intervene" (Kolko 2002 viii).
The author uses the "crisis" and "terror" as a result of 9/11 as a means of pointing out the inevitability of these events. "The United States itself is now on war's front line- and it will remain there permanently" (18). This is a serious thesis, and goes counter to what many "average citizens" believe: that the U.S. is nothing more or less than the moral and democratic "policeman" for the world.
As far as the Middle East is concerned, he states the obvious: we are interested in preserving the oil pipeline, to continue to protect and shore up the nations (like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) whose oil is needed for America's gas guzzlers. At the same time, he points out America's political failures- Iran and Afghanistan. He also states that "there are very crucial disagreements between Washington and Moscow, the ends of the cold wear notwithstanding" (58). However, these disagreements are far less political than economic, especially in deals with former soviet republics which have some thirty percent of the world's natural gas reserves.
Kolko is pessimistic. Not merely about world peace, but about America's ambitions to maintain a stranglehold- whether through diplomacy or military might, over the nations it considers either friendly or unfriendly. He sees no middle ground. At the same time, he sees the U.S. as less able to control matters: "America is today even less able to control events; and rather than producing greater s...