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39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
KOLKO: A Randolph Bourne for Our Age, April 17, 2006
The seminal debate over America's entry into World War I was between John Dewey and his one-time student Randolph Bourne. Debate may be too strong a word as Dewey never responded to Bourne's eloquent jeremiad against his embracement of "the war technique" as the preferred route to democratizing the world. Bourne died, aged 32, as the Great War was ending, but his spirit lived and lives on.
Dewey's spirit lives on as well (even if he ultimately accepted that Bourne was right), most recently under the banner of "Humanitarian Intervention," a banner that has probably seen numerous defections based on the report card of their latest Noble Cause, Iraq.
But they'll be back. The peculiar romance of American Liberalism with military adventures: Korea and Vietnam, to name the most important, must account for some of its intellectual and moral paralysis in the face of Bush the 2nd's Middle East disaster.
It's the Bournian spirit that pervades the vast body of work of Gabriel Kolko and his wife, Joyce Kolko. Like Bourne, Kolko is an "irreconcilable" to the self-satisfied, optimistic chauvenism that has led this country into more wars since 1945 than any other.
His first published writings appeared over 50 years ago. They have embraced a staggering range of topics, and displayed great depth of scholarship and an intellectually uncompromising effort to understand who we are and what we have done to others.
Kolko is a self-professed, but non-Marxist, man-of-the-left. Yet the American Left has produced few balanced, as opposed to sectrian, critiques of its rather meager achievements to match Kolko's. See, for example, his 1966 essay, The Decline of American Radicalism.
Many of Kolko's insights into the workings of American history have been adopted by historians without attribution. I don't think this is conscious plagiarism, but speaks to something of a bad-conscience regarding Kolko within the domestic historical profession.
In his massively researched book on the Vietnam War, Choosing War (1999), to mention one example, Fredrik Logevall informs us that "Historians have been slower than political scientists in exploring the concept" of "credibility," as a causal agent in the American military escalation, citing "political scientists" who "got" the saliency of the concept before "historians" did, citing, in the former category, works published no earlier than 1976. Kolko treats "credibility" as a cental motive for the escalation no later than his 1972 essay in Vol V of the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers.
American historians are, understandably, a largely patriotic group, and Kolko is, well, just too intellectually uncompromising, skewering America's complacent optimism in refrains that would have pleased H.L. Mencken.
But Kolko's skewering does not share the jaded and joyous elitism of Mencken but rather the belief that "American intellectuals," as Bourne put it in "War and the Intellectuals," "seem to have forgotten that the real enemy is War..."
Like Bourne, Kolko is, in Russell Jacoby's sense of the term in his book The Last Intellectuals, a Public Intellectual. Kolko is not mentioned in Jacoby's book, although despite the density, depth and originality of Kolko's work, he has always written a readable Plain Style, pitched to educated, public-spirited Americans, not academic specialists.
But perhaps Kolko isn't commonly viewed as an essentially public intellectual because he seldom seeks the public eye: he avoids the polemical combat that becomes "the talk of the town", I've never seen him on TV, never heard him on radio, never seen a book review by him, etc. I've seen just one picture of him: on the back-flap of his 1968 book, The Politics of War.
The Age of War is a short book, a summing up of American foreign policy since the Korean War, but especially since 9/11. Those of have read most of his work will not find surprises. The volume's larger themes are The Limits of Power (the title of his 1972 book, co-authored with Joyce Kolko), and the limitlessness of the illusory and disasterous belief in military power within the foreign policy elite, whether neo-con, liberal or conservative.
Worth watching, in terms of the trends Kolko predicts in The Age of War, is the terminal decay of the Western Alliance, and whether the result will be as positive as he believes it will be. As usual, Kolko's perspective on this issue is unconventional.
As an avid reader of Kolko since 1969, my hope is that he will again explore new intellectual territories -- his most exciting writings for this reader are those where he's obviously exploring what is to him new territory.
P.S. I commend the previous reviewer, Mr. Williams, for giving Kolko 4 and a half stars, but he misstates virtually all of Kolko's ideas, and spins his own crack-pot conspiracies as a better alternative. It wasn't Weaver in 1988 who discovered Kolko for conservatives, but Ayn Rand in the mid-1960's. Read Kolko.
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14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enlightening readers on the international environment's likelihood to produce another great war due to its flailing status, May 5, 2006
The Age Of War: The United States Confronts The World by Gabriel Kolko (Research Professor Emeritus, York University, Toronto, Canada) is an informed and comprehensive study of what may potentially occur in Professor Kolko's prediction of the world's current state and instability. Enlightening readers on the international environment's likelihood to produce another great war due to its flailing status, The Age Of War describes the American ideals and irrational pursuit of control of the world through a contemporary expression of a kind of "manifest destiny" mentality. A impeccably researched and well authored historical documented and predictive study, The Age Of War is very strongly recommended reading for all young Americans registered for the draft, scholars of American politics and contemporary social issues, modern political science, and those searching for a conceptual interpretation of America's coming potential future on the international scene.
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23 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Age of Corporate Statism, April 14, 2006
Many conservatives, neoconservatives, libertarians, and free market advocates probably first heard of Gabriel Kolko when reading ex-neoconservative and free enterprise author Paul H. Weaver's "The Suicidal Corporation" (1988). In Weaver's memoir of his employment at Ford Motors Corporation as Economic Communications Planning Director (written after his discovery that corporations are hostile to free enterprise), he wrote "Aside from their socialism and anticapitalist animus, which I found as alien as ever, the strictly historical conclusions of the New Left historians now struck me as persuasive and even revelatory" (Weaver, p102). The New Left historians that Weaver was referring to were William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, and others who were busy during the 1960s revising interpretations of American history based upon the historical examination of elite behavior. Kolko's thesis in his PhD dissertation, which was later published in 1965 as a study of railroad regulation ("Railroads and Regulation 1877-1916"), was that corporations favored government regulation because they feared competition and preferred Italian-style corporatism over free enterprise. During the 1960s, Kolko's ideological assumptions were considered radical and his conclusions were generally rejected by other scholars. Since then, Kolko has turned his historical eye from the history of U.S. business to the history of U.S. foreign policy and war.
In his six-chaptered "The Age of War", Kolko examines the effects on Americans generally and on the country as a whole since the British were able to partner with the U.S. to provide the brawn to British empire during and since World War II (see Nicolas John Cull's "Selling War" on how Churchill and his British fifth column accomplished this partnership) - a partnership that Kolko fails to discern. The result of Anglo-American global empire (where the Anglo piece to the equation remains obscure to Kolko) has been "a basic neglect of human necessities and an increasingly decaying public infrastructure of roads, bridges, and much else that people require for their health and welfare" (p2). Kolko views these changes as "an aspect of U.S. foreign policy frustrations and failures" since 1941 (p2).
Chapter one is subtitled "Warfare at an Impasse: The Road to Vietnam". Here Kolko argues that contrary to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's complaint that there were no Vietnam experts, the Vietnam experts who were churning out reports from thirteen intelligence services were ignored. Kolko says that ignoring intelligence is not something that U.S. government leaders began in 2001 - they have always sought the politically expedient and let future leaders worry about the blowback and fallout.
Chapter two is subtitled "Prelude to Permanent Crises: The Background". Kolko states "To the extent the United States was the most active power on the world scene after 1950, wars and conflict since then have increasingly resulted from policies it pursued" (p39). Kolko argues that as British power declined, U.S. power supplanted it. Kolko views the U.S. role in supplanting British power as somewhat predatory rather than a partnership that profited Anglo and American elites alike. He believes that the U.S. is now the sole bully and does not see Blair or other British whispering advice into Bush's ear. Kolko's dismissal of an Anglo-American alliance can be attributed to his view that instead of an Anglo-American alliance calling the shots, especially in the Middle East, there is an Israeli-American alliance doing that. He believes that the Six-Day War and the January 1968 massive arms aid to Israel (over half a billion in 1971 reaching 2 billion in 1973) indicate that U.S. foreign policy is Israeli foreign policy, stating "The difficulties that the United States has experienced in the Middle East began with this decision. Today Israel still receives $2 billion [annually] in free US arms aid" (p45). While it is true that Israel is the number one recipient of U.S. foreign aid dollars, Kolko neglects to inform us that Egypt is number two.
Chapter three is subtitled "The World Comes Apart: The 1990s". This chapter's theme is that the disintegration of the Soviet bloc led Europe from its predictable security to insecurity and regional conflicts. Kolko lambasts government leaders for ignoring U.S., Soviet and British intelligence "most of the time" (p64). He also comments on the Iraqi army invasion of Kuwait on 02 August 1990 and the resulting Gulf War, stating "The administration of George H.W. Bush was utterly surprised; it had no up-to-date maps, desert camouflage netting, and the like"(p65), thereby revealing his ignorance of what really happened. Kolko seems unaware that Kuwait had funded the re-Islamisation of Bosnia and its star city Sarajevo. At the same time, CIA-installed Saddam Hussein was having trouble with internal dissidents and insurgents hoping to topple his regime - an ever-growing problem since the cessation of war with Iran in which both CIA-installed dictators (Hussein and Khomeini) were able to kill off each other's insurgents and maintain stability of their dictatorial regimes under the watchful eye of U.S. AWAC squadrons. The Bush regime decided to kill two birds with one stone - Iraq was instructed to smack up Kuwait and in turn the U.S. would smack up the Iraqi insurgents inducted into the Republican Guard. For 130 consecutive months after the Gulf War, U.S. and/or British bombs continued to fall monthly on the heads of Iraqi insurgents to the benefit of Saddam Hussein's regime. And that's what happened - but Kolko doesn't know this. I wonder why? An over-reliance on published material rather than first-hand participant observation could explain it.
Chapter Four is subtitled "The Twenty-First Century: The United States and War on the World". Here Kolko contends that the U.S. is failing to create a new world order and that Communist China has already eclipsed U.S. power in East Asia - thus showing his lack of any military experience or knowledge of current military installations and operations. Neither does Kolko indicate that he is aware of the Bush Crime Family blowing up the Twin Towers and blaming it on Arabs (see David Ray Griffin's "The New Pearl Harbor" or Webster Griffin Tarpley's "9/ll Synthetic Terror: Made in the USA"); instead Kolko seems to have bought into the government's conspiracy theory that al-CIAdah did it, stating "The war the United States has been fighting abroad since 1947 had finally reached its shores". Many observers do not believe that Arabs did the 9/11 attacks in America or, if they did, they had to have been operated by CIA and/or MOSSAD. Stanley Hilton, for example, has filed a lawsuit against the government on behalf of the families of Twin Tower victims for instructing Marvin Bush to blow them up. As one Muslim educator put it - "you have to be a moron to think that Arabs did it". Kolko does seem to know more about the Taliban than he does about what happened on 9/11, stating the Taliban "were opposed to opium cultivation and reduced it to virtually nothing by 2001" (p110). But Kolko does not appear to know that CIA relies on Afghani opium to fund its covert operations or that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in order to install former Soviet drug lord Hamid Karzai as leader in the quiet name of CIA drugs. Kolko does indicate that he is aware that dictator general Musharraf in Pakistan and dictator Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan are henchmen for U.S. foreign policy in those two Muslim countries and are opposed by the majorities they dictatorially rule over.
Chapter Five is subtitled "Things Go Wrong: The United States Confronts a Complex World". Here the author maintains that Americans face a dire future if their government continues its Nazi-like behaviour, alleging that "the Iraq War greatly accelerated the breakup of traditional US-led alliances" - thus does Kolko ignore the G-8, United Nations Security Council, or the counsel of Ned Beatty's character Arthur Jensen in the 1976 film "Network" that "There's no such thing as countries anymore; the world is a college of corporations". The G-8 led billionaire club (its enrollment up to 796 in 2006 from 500 in 2000) is still calling the shots as usual. The power of information warfare will ensure that people will not remember longer than six months and will believe what ever the corporate media tells them. Catastrophic lies will be rewritten. But Kolko sees none of this, believing that all that the U.S. does, especially in Iraq, is folly. Kolko does not seem to grasp the fact that every country in the world today is ruled by a leader put there by the CIA or allowed to remain there by its blessing. There is no government anywhere today that is independent of the global billionaire club's CIA, NSA, or others in its alphabet soup of government agencies.
Chapter six is subtitled "Conclusion: The Age of Perpetual Conflict". Kolko sees an aggressive interventionist foreign policy spawning blowback and regional insurgencies without end. I, too, see nothing getting better during the twenty-first century; it will remain the century of corporate statism. As Thomas Jefferson, one of the United State's liberty-loving founding fathers, said - "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all peoples, entangling alliances with none" is the only foreign policy that is compatible with traditional American values and liberty. That is the tradition of America's years before the British snookered the Yanks into doing British empire (or before the Israelis snookered the Yanks according to Kolko). Kolko is correct on his main point - expensive and clumsy military approaches to foreign policy always seem to end in disaster for the common man and have made America and the world less safe for Americans and less safe for the victims of their government's military adventurism. At the same time, war is the health of the state. Liberty versus power - which will triumph?
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