The World Turned Inside Out

by James Livingston

  The rationale for anticommunist war in Southeast Asia is adumbrated in William Y. Elliott et al. (the Woodrow Wilson Study Group and the National Planning Association), The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy (New York: Holt, 1955), and explained fully in William Borden, The Pacific Alliance: U.S. Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery, 1947–1955 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).

  For the extant explanations of the military disaster in Vietnam, see Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and David L. Anderson and John Ernst, eds., The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007). On the reconstruction of the armed services in the aftermath of the Vietnam debacle, the place to start is Thomas Ricks, Making the Corps (New York: Scribners, 1997). See also work forthcoming from Jennifer Mittelstadt of Penn State, which treats the all-volunteer army as an instance of the welfare state; she presented her preliminary findings at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in January 2008 and in a lecture at Rutgers University on February 6, 2009.

  The architects of the war on Iraq have received lavish attention. See, for example, Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), and Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold (New York: Penguin, 2006). I have relied on James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Penguin, 2004); Cheney is quoted from here. Meanwhile, dozens of books on the invasion of, and insurgency in, Iraq have appeared since 2003. Among the most useful and provocative are John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire (New York: Scribner’s, 2004), Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire (Boston: Beacon, 2004), Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), and George Packer, The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). See also the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), with a foreword by Gen. David H. Petraeus. On the price of oil as measured by the aims of the Iraq war, see Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence (New York: Penguin, 2007).

  The National Security Strategy document of September 2002 is accessible online; its intellectual genealogy can also be traced online through the Project for a New American Century.

  On the new terrorism of the late twentieth century and the American efforts to address, contain, and defeat it in view—or not—of the constraints imposed by domestic and international law, see Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003), Richard Posner, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), John Yoo, War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2006), David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003), Richard C. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want (New York: Random House, 2006), Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2004), Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), Kurt M. Campbell and Michelle A. Flournoy, To Prevail: An American Strategy for the Campaign against Terrorism (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies Press, 2006), and Lawrence Freedman, ed., Superterrorism: Policy Responses (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). To my mind, the two most important contributions to the discussion are Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the 21st Century (New York: Knopf, 2008), and Audrey Kurth Cronin, “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism,” International Security 27 (2002–2003); I do not agree with their conclusions, but their analysis of the phenomenon and their assessment of plausible countermeasures are indispensable to serious thinking about the new terrorist movements.

  About the Author

  James Livingston has taught history at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, since 1988. Before then he taught in a junior college, three state universities, a small liberal arts college, and a maximum security prison. He has written on Shakespeare, Poe, Dreiser, and Disney as well as the origins of the Federal Reserve System and the connection between pragmatism and feminism. This is his fourth book. He is currently a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, where he is writing two books, one a biography of Horace Kallen, the founding father of cultural pluralism, the other on the long-wave origins of the economic crisis that began in 2007.