What The War Wants

[rich]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23110

The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in
chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear
alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire
national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the
expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and
information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with
the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"—all these make
a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at
dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers
(1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional
diminishment the settled order.

A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets. He
feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military
personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command.
Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something
impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner
of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a
modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It
has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that
makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He
is a self-entangling giant.