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Democracy Now bericht: 'We speak with James Carroll, one of Boston's best known writers. A decade ago he won the National Book Award for his memoir "An American Requiem: God, My Father and the War that Came between Us." He is also a prize-winning columnist for the Boston Globe. He has just published a new book titled "House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power." In the book Carroll examines the growth of the military industrial complex since World War II and his personal connection to the Pentagon. He grew up in a military family. His father was a three-star general and the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He oversaw the agency throughout much of the Vietnam War. But Carroll took a different path becoming a vocal opponent of the War and a writer. For the past six years he has been researching the history of the Pentagon and what he calls the "disastrous rise of American power."
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the “disastrous rise” of American power. Talk about the trajectory from then to now.
JAMES CARROLL: Well, “disastrous rise” is a phrase -- it’s a polemical phrase, I acknowledge that. It's a phrase, though, that I get from Eisenhower in his famous military-industrial complex speech. He was, of course, talking about the military-industrial-political-academic-economic complex, labor, all of the great pillars of American life were recruited into, conscripted, you could say, into the power of this military machine centered in the Pentagon. At the crucial turning points of American history since World War II, again and again decisions have been made all too easily in favor of war and against creating structures of peace. It happened at the end of the war with the decision, the unnecessary decision to use the atomic bomb. It happened immediately after the war with the unnecessary militarization of the contest with the Soviet Union and so forth. At each of these crucial points, America misperceived the world and made decisions to protect against a threat that was more imagined than real.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you feel it wasn't necessary to drop the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
JAMES CARROLL: Well, obviously, it's a complicated question about which historians are still in argument. My conclusion is that the issue of unconditional surrender was the blinder that prevented American leaders at that crucial moment of fully taking in the messages they were getting from Japan. Japan was all but defeated in the spring of 1945. We had savaged 60 Japanese cities with firebombing. There were signals from the Japanese that they wanted to surrender, and we were willfully blocked in taking those signals in, especially under the leadership of Secretary of State Burns, and the irony is that we re-asserted our demand for unconditional surrender at the crucial point, the Potsdam Declaration at the end of July, yet again saying “unconditional surrender.” All the Japanese wanted by then was assurances about the emperor, which we refused to give them. When the Japanese did surrender after Nagasaki, they still didn't surrender unconditionally. They included a condition about the emperor, which at that point we accepted. My conclusion is: If we had accepted the condition on the emperor – the emperor was a divine being to the Japanese. They couldn't tolerate the thought that what happened to Mussolini and Hitler would happen to him. If we had accepted that condition ahead of the atomic bombings, there would have been no need for those bombings. That's the conclusion I came to.' Lees verder: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/10/1345217