You first started listening to Rachel Maddow back when she was on Air America and you were charmed by her combination of wit and intelligence. Now that she has moved to a cable news format, she has kept those same qualities, but now she often borders on silly, her wit often threatens to turn into snarkiness. You've always been annoyed by this. She is a Rhodes scholar. It's okay for her to be serious. Even if you find her jokes funny, you sometimes feel that the frivolous attitude she can adopt robs some of her subject matters of their importance. Unfortunately "Drift" flirts with that same problem. In her attempt to keep her voice authentic, she gets dangerously close to losing imoqartial readers who might not be familiar with her quirky personality. Maddow lays out some pretty astonishing things in this book, some pretty weighty and important things. But she uses the same voice in the book that she uses on her show, and it doesn't quite translate to the different medium. TV shows are over in an hour. Books are forever.
But "Drift" is important. In it Maddow chronicles how the United States over the last fifty years has handed over the power of making war to the executive branch (and to corporations) and how we have foolishly divorced ourselves from the emotional pain of asking our young men and women to make war on others. She starts by quoting Madison condemning war, not because war is inherently terrible, but because it so often robs citizens of liberty, imposing debts and onerous taxes, bringing out the worst in people and tempting nations towards aristocracy or monarchy. Madison framed the Constitution specifically to make going to war difficult. By forcing the executive branch to seek the declaration of war from the legislative branch he tried to ensure that there would be public debate about the merits of any looming conflict. Maddow spends the rest of the book outlining how America has strayed far from Madison's framework, and drifted closer to the society he warned we might become if we ignored him.
President Johnson started the problem as Maddow sees it. He went to war in Vietnam using only active duty forces swollen with draftees, without mobilizing the National Guard or Reserves. This divorced the American public from the war in a way that had never been done before. Those weekend warriors remained just that, most of them staying home instead of risking their lives on the battlefield. With the result that many Americans began to think of the war as something that other people were fighting, not something the nation was fighting. General Creighton Abrams was US commander in Vietnam before returning to wind the war down as the Army Chief of Staff. He was not amused by Johnson's decision or by how his troops were regarded when they returned from such an unpopular war. He quickly restructured the Army to make it nearly impossible to ever go to war again without mobilizing the Guard or the Reserve. He gave these citizen soldiers jobs that were essential to fighting a war of any significant size. It was called the Abrams Doctrine: presidents couldn't go to war without making damn sure that the people of the United States were supportive of that war.
Congress was also not amused with the way President Johnson had mislead them into allowing him kingly war-making powers (Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) that would have been anathema to the framers of the Constitution. They decided to make the rules more strict and passed the War Powers Act into law even after President Nixon vetoed it. This was how the government was designed to work and when President Ford wanted more funds to bolster the falling government of South Vietnam, no one less than Senator John Glenn himself (former Marine and astronaut) told the president that he was out of luck. Ford's Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld was not pleased at Congress' reassertion of its place as the branch of the government endowed with the power to declare war (this comes up later).
At this point, "Drift" moves into the era of President Reagan. Maddow was not a big fan of The Gipper as president. Candidate Reagan had made a series of terrifying claims about the threat that the USSR posed to America. President Reagan acted on those claims. Even though these claims were provably untrue, the Reagan administration doubled the amount the US spent on its military, despite the fact that we already spent more than anyone else in the world. Under President Ford, a virulent anti-communist DC think tank (The Committee on the Present Danger) had been allowed to contribute to the CIA's secret analysis of the Soviet Union's military strength. Their claims were wildly inaccurate and the team had no business taking part in any intelligence briefing. They admittedly based their most alarmist findings on speculation and intuition rather than on, you know... facts. Nevertheless, their findings were taken as gospel truth by the Reagan administration. President Reagan began hiring members of this think tank into the government as soon as he was sworn in.
You remember being a kid growing up in the world that this kind of hysteria created. You read your uncle Jimmy's copies of "Soviet Military Power" (which Maddow refers to as propaganda) and worried about a looming Soviet invasion. You played war games always assuming that the bad guys were communists and that there were Russians hiding behind every tree. You rarely questioned why this was. It just was. President Reagan operated in the same way. The Russians were the bad guys, they were very very dangerous, and they were getting stronger every day. Never mind that all actual intelligence pointed to the opposite conclusion. Never mind that Soviet leaders were expounding on the madness of nuclear war. Never mind that objective fact pointed to the US as the international saber rattler, not the USSR. President Reagan was granted his wish and the United States doubled its military spending, arming up for a war that would never come against an enemy it had largely made up.
President Reagan did get one real war though. The US invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and that invasion, now almost forgotten, has proven to be a template for later wars. Trump up a bullshit reason for invasion (like freeing American medical students from possible captivity). Lie to reporters (and the public). Insist you were right about the need for war all along (even when the facts show different). Relate this military action with a previous one (like the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, half a world away). Use the boost in polls to jack up military spending even higher afterwards.
When the Reagan administration was busted breaking lots and lots of US and international laws by supplying terrorists with modern weapons and using the extra cash to fund anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua, they started rewriting the rules again. The excuse they came up with to defend their actions was preposterous enough to be almost funny if it hadn't become de facto policy ever since: "The president couldn't have committed any crime because, as Commander In Chief, he can wage any war he wants and employ any military might in his prerogative without seeking Congressional approval." This was patently untrue. And furthermore if it were true, why had the administration worked so hard to keep their actions secret in the first place?! In any case, this excuse added to the perceived power of the executive more than any previous presidents had committed.
President Reagan had stripped from the US government any vestiges of checks on the executive's ability to make war... except the checks within the military itself. The Abrams Doctrine was still there, making sure that presidents had to get approval from the public before waging any big wars. When Reagan's predecessor, President Bush, was preparing to invade Iraq in 1991 to kick Saddam Hussein's armies out of Kuwait, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted that the war plans must include overwhelming force, clear objectives, a well defined exit strategy, and popular support at home. This idea, the Powell Doctrine, also ensured that the Reserves and National Guard would be deployed as well. This was not some quixotic scheme by the highest ranking soldier in America to avert war, but simply General Powell asserting the Abrams Doctrine and stepping in where Congress could no longer, to ask the American people if we were absolutely sure we wanted this particular war.
President Bush got his war, but General Powell got his debate too. Congress eventually approved the use of force in Iraq. Still, President Bush and many of the people who worked for him (and would later work for his son) took the ideological view that President Reagan had. The President of the United States is not required to seek approval from Congress for any military action ever. Anytime. Anywhere. Against any foe. Using any number of troops and spending any amount of money to do it. The authorization from Congress was viewed as merely a formality.
Maddow then chronicles how Presidents Clinton and Bush and Obama perpetuated this belief. But these three presidents took the unmooring of American military power even further. They privatized or outsourced much of what the military does to the point where the cost of the wars they fought was even more deeply hidden from the public's consciousness. Presidents can now deploy the smallest number of war fighters, contract out the logistical support to private corporations, and voila'! you get wars that almost no one protests! The contractors also grant the added bonus that they don't have to report anything to Congress and they don't have to ask permission before taking actions that US soldiers might be court-martialed for.
President Bush and his Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfled clearly stated after September 11th 2001, that the War on Terror would have no declaration of war, it would have no clear borders or surrender documents. The War on Terror would go on exactly how the executive branch of the US government wanted to wage it. There might be warrant-less wiretapping, or torture, or America might be asked to embrace the idea of preemptive war (a notion the WW II generation loathed when Japan used it to justify attacking Pearl Harbor). The United States might be involved in propping up more terrible regimes or toppling dictators who never attacked us. The president could do whatever he wanted wherever he wanted. No matter the cost. Congress might be notified about some of it, but they would sure sign the huge checks required to pay for it.
And now today, President Obama regularly orders the bombings of suspected terrorist targets in nations with which we are not at war, some of whom have turned out to be American citizens (if that's not more power than the framers of the Constitution wanted the president to have, then you have been reading that document wrong for years). Two years ago, the US lead a massive air campaign that allowed the rebels in Libya to oust their long time dictator (something Reagan could never do) and we are now openly arming rebel forces in their attempt to overthrow their dictator in Syria. All with no declaration of war. All without seeking approval from Congress. Remember? The president can do whatever he wants. Whenever he wants. No matter the cost. You shiver to think of what else the next president might do with this unprecedented power, or the next, or the next.
There are checks and balances written into the Constitution with the intent to keep the power to take our nation into war out of the hands of one person. They have all but disappeared. No one party or president was solely responsible for this. Each piled onto the previous precedents. And Congress has become too feckless and too obsessed with their own reelections to fight it. Maddow makes it clear that this is not some partisan issue. It is an American one. We should do something about it, but we probably won't.
You just have to hope that someone will run for office on a platform of changing this. You hope that someone will have the guts to take office and give power back to the branch it belongs in. Until then...
On to the next book!
P.S. There was a whole chapter about our aging nuclear arsenal. The most shocking part was how it has completely deteriorated. Detonators are failing from old age and accelerators are in need of replacement, but there is just one small problem. We don't remember how to make those things any more and no one wrote down how to do it what with the Russians and all. Very Top Secret, you know. So now we have thousands of weapons that could destroy the Earth a thousand times over which no one really wants to do anymore, and those weapons are slowly becoming useless because of old age and our own fetish for secrecy. But they did cost the United States eight billion dollars to create, so they're probably not going anywhere. This chapter was in "Drift" and it was fascinating, but you weren't exactly sure what it had to do with the premise of the book, so you are mentioning it here in the P.S. because you don't want to forget it.
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