JOLLY DAYS

House of Confusion

There are so few good critics on the NYT. William Grimes is one of them. His review of House of War is a model of morally centered, balanced, sharply wrought assessment.

The book under review is a peculiar book Grimes tells us. A book that hysterically deplores American power — almost to the point of implying that the wrong side won in the cold war. Everything and anything is better than America to the writer, James Carroll:

Always, the Soviet Union is seen as a willing partner for peace, driven into a corner and forced to react defensively by an American government bent on gaining nuclear superiority. (Eastern Europe was acquired, in Mr. Carroll's view, by accident, not design.)

All American apprehensions are either “paranoid” or “hysterical.” All United States arms control proposals and foreign-policy ventures are duplicitous. And continue to be. Today Iran with nuclear weapons is not a threat. “When it comes to nuclear danger, Washington is by far the graver problem,” he writes.

James Carroll, the son of an FBI agent, is working out some problem with pops:

The personal connection makes “House of War” a strange hybrid, part history and part autobiographical psychodrama. Mr. Carroll makes much of the coincidence that he and the Pentagon were born in the same week. It would be too much to say that the building embodies the cold, remote, all-powerful parent who never gave him love or approval, but in an imagined conversation he tells his young self that he will go on to write a book and that “that book will be your long-delayed conversation with your father.”

Carroll is paradigmatic of the ideologues of our time, who have squandered their intelligence, credibility and integrity. The toxic ideological zeitgeist draws people like Carroll out of the woodwork. They can't figure out who the good guys are…

(It was just announced on TV that the real good guys have finally gotten the psychopath al-Zarqawi.)