The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth by Mark Mazzetti

In a way, it all began with the collapse of the Soviet empire. The raison d'être of the Central Intelligence Agency and American military might evaporated between 1989 and 1991. Washington and Langley might not always realize it, but one of the main reasons... More

In a way, it all began with the collapse of the Soviet empire. The raison d'être of the Central Intelligence Agency and American military might evaporated between 1989 and 1991. Washington and Langley might not always realize it, but one of the main reasons the United States has been uninterruptedly at war since the '40s — either officially or by proxy, somewhere in the world — is that state military spending has been a primary fuel of capitalist growth.

With the demise of the USSR, a justification had to be found to continue to fund what Eisenhower called, with such eerie prescience that it has become a cliché, the military-industrial complex. Without the pretext of Soviet threat, defense spending needed a rationale. For a while it seemed as if the so-called drug war could supply a mission (maybe 3,000 Panamanian civilians killed); then came the Bush-Clinton new world order of "military humanism" (around 100,000 Iraqi and hundreds of Serb and Albanian civilians killed).

Then on Less