Drift

I read Rachel Maddow's book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (#274) with a great deal of interest.  Just what is going on with the outrageous amounts of money in our national Defense Budget?  Why hasn't Congress been more involved in making the decisions about when and where and with whom we go to war?  Will it ever stop?

Rachel Maddow explains in this easy to read and often funny (but hard to stomach!) book how the power to declare war was deliberately given to Congress in our Constitution, but has shifted since World War II from Congress to the Executive Branch.  How did we wind up in Vietnam, or Nicaragua or Bosnia?  What about Iraq and Afghanistan?  I felt for the first time on reading Drift that I had some glimmers of understanding about what was going on in these places.

Rachel Maddow feels that we can change course to come closer to the "deliberately peaceful" ideal the Founding Fathers wished for our country, and outlines a few steps we could take in that direction.  A lot depends on Congress becoming proactive in protecting their Constitutional rights.  (And I wish all of us Americans good luck with that!  I'm sure we'll be seeing pigs (or possibly drones!) flying past our windows before that happens!)  It's eye-opening, to say the least.  I think this book should be on every thinking American's "To Read" list.