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

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Our state department used the Ba'ath Party in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan as pretexts for turning those nations into tributaries of the U.S. We will be spending billions to "assure" some sort of compliance with a democratic way of life in a world where democracy has never gained a foothold. Several years ago, an advertising campaign featuring NBA star Michael Jordan proclaimed: "I want to be like Mike!" The State and Defense Departments, assisted by the White House, is now campaigning that the Middle East be like America- free and open. What American politicians fail to realize is that "free and open" democracies are relatively unknown in the Middle East. One reason America is so hated, is that we are attempting to make everyone over in our image. We can see that eve influential leaders do not understand the ethnic and religious and racial differences in the world. When a noted Army general goers around preaching that the Judeo-Christian God is superior to the Allah of Islam, is it any wonder that the hundreds of millions of Muslims fear that we seek to destroy their faith by whatever means necessary? Kolko writes the U.S. may have "to admit it has the vainglorious and irrational ambition to rule the world" (

Category: History - A