John W. Dower - The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II

John Dower ends this grim recounting of seventy-five years of constant war, intervention, assassination, and other crimes by calling for serious consideration of why the most powerful nation in world history is so dedicated to these practices while ignoring the nature of its actions and their consequencesan injunction that could hardly be more timely or necessary as the Pentagons arc of instability expands to an ocean of instability and even an atomic arc of instability in Dowers perceptive reflections on todays frightening world.

Noam Chomsky

No historian understands the human cost of war, with its paranoia, madness, and violence, as does John Dower, and in this deeply researched volume he tells how America, since the end of World War II, has turned away from its ideals and goodness to become a match setting the world on fire. George W. Bushs post-9/11 global war on terror was not a new adventure, but just more of the same.

Seymour Hersh

In The Violent American Century , John Dower has produced a sharply eloquent account of the use of US military power since World War II. From hot Cold War conflicts to drone strikes, Dower examines the machinery of American violence and its staggering toll. This is an indispensable book.

Marilyn Young

John Dower is our most judicious guide to the dark underbelly of postwar American power in the world. Those who focus on Europe and North America speak of a Pax Americana. This is to ignore the technologies of violence that Washington meticulously deployed in Asia and the global South, from total war to shock and awe, of which Dower is our unflinching analyst.

Juan Cole

A lucid, convincing, and chilling account of the self-deceiving American fall into violence. Dowers clear-eyed analysis of a terrible history, for its faith in the power of truth, invites a fresh determination to demand another way. Just in time.

James Carroll

A timely, compact, and utterly compelling expos of the myriad contradictions besetting US national security policy. John Dower has written a powerful book.

Andrew J. Bacevich

If you think that because weve never experienced World War III the world is becoming far more peaceful, John Dowers book is mandatory reading. In clear, carefully documented fashion, this superb historian shows just how much violence the United States has unleashed outside its borders since 1945, so much of it below the radar of our awareness at the timeand of our memories today.

Adam Hochschild

THE

VIOLENT

AMERICAN

CENTURY

War and Terror
since World War II

JOHN W. DOWER

Dispatch Books

Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

2017 John W. Dower

Published by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

info@haymarketbooks.org

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-726-6

Trade distribution:

In the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services,
www.turnaround-uk.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

This book was published with the generous support of the
Wallace Action Fund and Lannan Foundation.

Cover image of oil wells on fire during the 1991 Gulf War. Cover design by Rachel Cohen.

Library of Congress CIP Data is available.

For Yasuko

CONTENTS

PREFACE

In 2015, the Japanese publisher Iwanami Shoten issued the first of a multivolume collection of topical essays on recent times, to which I contributed an article titled War and Terror since World War II. This short book builds on that undertaking.

The subject is the same but now framed by the famous American century phrase coined in 1941 by publisher Henry Lucehere prefaced with the unsettling adjective violent. Luces resonant term caught on for obvious reasons. America did indeed emerge from the war as the most prosperous, powerful, and influential nation in the world, and it remains so today. Still, this requires many qualifications.

Despite a great deal of Pax Americana rhetoric over the course of the postwar decades, the United States never exercised anything close to global hegemony. The Cold War from 1945 to 1991 witnessed an alarming confrontation between the American and Soviet superpowersor, more generally, between two camps or blocs, capitalist and communist/socialistand even this bipolar branding was a gross simplification of a fractured, tumultuous world.

Beyond this, despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the consequent emergence of the United States as the worlds sole superpower, the twenty-first century has seen an ever-increasing number of reasons to dismiss the conceit of an American century. The end of the Cold War was indeed a momentous triumph for the United States, and the virtually simultaneous US demolition of Iraqi forces in the short Gulf War of 1991 seemed to confirm the nations unassailable capabilities in a new era of digital warfare and precision weaponry. This double victory, however, turned out to be deceptive.

The United States already had experienced stalemate and defeat in Korea and Vietnam during the Cold War, despite its overwhelming power. A mere decade after 1991, military failure would prove to be the case again, as Washingtons initiation of a global war on terror in response to al-Qaedas attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, triggered seemingly endless instability and chaos in the Greater Middle East. To Washingtons enormous chagrin and frustration, the Pentagons unprecedented technological superiority was stymied by an almost anarchic aggregation of nonstate and national actors engaged in largely low-level irregular warfare.

We are thus confronted with the contradictory picture of America as a rich and spectacularly weaponized nation of high rhetoric, enormous might, overweening hubris, profound paranoia, and deep failings and pathologies. Despite all this, the American century coinage still strikes me as useful. For good or ill, America bestrides the globe without truly close competitors. Its economy is second to none. Its prosperity and professed ideals are still beacons to many. However one may evaluate its success in warfighting (or peacekeeping), its reach remains impressive. The world has never seen a state with so many military garrisons in so many far-flung countriesclose to eight hundred in the second decade of the twenty-first century, manned by a hundred and fifty thousand troops in around eighty nations. Americas annual military-related spending is greater than much of the rest of the world combined. When it comes to maintaining and ceaselessly updating the most sophisticated instruments of destruction imaginableand provoking allies and potential antagonists alike to try to keep pacethe United States simply has no peer.

This military preeminence, with all its fault lines and failures, is a cardinal aspect of the American century that emerged after World War II. Side by side with thisthe other part of this books titleis the violence that runs like a ground bass through these long postwar decades. Thus, one simple but central concern here has been to assemble a concise overview of the breadth, scale, and variety of global conflict and war-related death, suffering, and trauma since 1945. This extends to genocides, politicides, civil wars, and localized conflicts in which the United States may have played no role or at best a peripheral one. At the same time, America has engaged in violence abroad far more frequently than most Americans realize or perhaps care to knowsometimes in publicized deployments, sometimes in conjunction with the United Nations or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but frequently in solo, clandestine, and black operations. Both during and after the Cold War, the United States, like the Soviet Union and its successor Russia, also abetted violence through proxy wars, arms sales, and support for authoritarian regimesall invariably undertaken in the US case in the name of peace, freedom, and democracy. A good portion of this interventionism fueled, and still fuels, anti-American blowback.