James Carroll Concludes the Pentagon Is Our Out-of-Control 'House of War'

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 07/20/2006 - 2:32am. Interviews

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

It isn’t that the United States shouldn’t exercise power in the world. It’s that it only knows how to exercise one kind of power -- the hard brutal power of military force.

We’ve totally neglected the soft power of diplomacy. The State Department should be at the center of American government expenditure and energy. It isn’t.

... And we neglect what really threatens us.

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Author James Carroll is a winner of the National Book Award and an astute columnist for The Boston Globe. He talks here with BuzzFlash about his newest book, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. He connects the dots, gets the big picture, and provides insights that can help us all grasp the reasons for war -- and see how we can find alternatives.

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BuzzFlash: Your latest book is House of War. In our previous interview with you about the book Crusade, we touched upon something that seems to us significant to your narrative in House of War, which is, you have a personal connection to the Pentagon.

James Carroll: I was raised in Washington. My father worked at the Pentagon as an Air Force officer, and I went there with him as a child. In some large way, it’s a building that shaped my imagination of the public realm. I confess that, when the Pentagon was struck on 9/11, I recognized, in a way I never have before, almost the mythic power of that building in my own imagination -- and I think in the imagination of our nation. The building is very much a personal metaphor in my life.