Drift, by MSNBC’s popular news show host, Rachel Maddow, combines an  easy and difficult read in one volume.  Easy because Maddow writes as fluidly as she speaks on her nightly, mostly brainy, newscast.  None of the turgid academic prose of so many historians. In fact, she steps (no pun intended) into new, popular vernacular with her coinage and use (twice) of ‘chickenshittery.’ It is a difficult read because we are reminded of the terrible use of military power since the Reagan presidency and the concurrent, linked, expansion of Presidential Executive Power, bypassing completely the Constitutional role assigned to Congress to declare war, which, as she points out, was the chief concern of the Founders, and the reason for the division of powers between Legislative, Executive and Judicial.

She begins with a marvelous citation from John Madison:

In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. …  War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

In nine chapters, a prologue and epilogue, Maddow lays out the case that American military power has ‘drifted’ far from the original intentions of the founders, and right into their fears.  The Prologue, with the subtitle of ‘Can We Descope this?’ uses examples from her home town, Kabul, Afghanistan and Faluja, Iraq to set up her thesis.  Wildly expensive and dubiously conceived projects in homeland security in her Western Massachusetts town, in a overbuilt American neighborhood in Kabul, and in a waste-water treatment plant in the middle of a war zone [5 years over-deadline and 3 times the cost, without, as yet, a functioning system] are juxtaposed to the Founding Fathers’ fear of military growth. As she reminds us, whether to have a standing army at all was debated at the Constitutional Convention. And yet, since the September 11th, 2001 attacks the national security budget of $30 billion a year has increased by 250% into a set of systems so wide ranging and complex that, as one official said, “we can’t even assess if it’s making us more safe.”

Maddow argues, unlike others concerned about the expansion of the war powers of the American President, that there is no dark conspiracy behind this, but that we, the American people, “have drifted off the historical course… This book is about how and why we’ve drifted.  It wasn’t inevitable and it’s fixable.”

Her starting point for the Post WW II exercise of unchecked war power is Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam.
She reminds us of the ways he tried to hide what was going on from the American people.  His refusal to call up the Reserve and the National Guard was done deliberately to avoid sending a signal to the Congress or the American people that this intervention was a big deal.  To ensure the Vietnamese did think it was a big deal, he doubled up on the draft, sending young men into battle without pulling the wage-earners, corporate executives and small town businessmen in the Guard and Reserve, which would have really made the country sit up and take notice.

Following the withdrawal of the military from Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams set about re-building the army, then in a muddle of anger, accusation and ill will.  His analysis was that the army had been sent off to distant lands, in undeclared wars, without the support of the American people.  To ensure this would not happen again, his re-geared army involved the National Guard and Reserves as fundamental assets.  If the army were sent, elements of the Guard and Reserves would have to go, and would have to be authorized by congress. Additionally, in 1973 the War Powers act was passed in Congress.  It was immediately used to prevent President Ford from advancing $722 billion to the barely standing South Vietnamese government.

It was against these two speed bumps that Ronald Reagan’s belief in his ‘private right to go to war’ unfolded.   She gives the Reagan invasion of tiny Grenada more pages than it got at the time — in all its secrecy and bumbling execution– when it served as a feel good sop to the terrible loss of 241 American military in the Beirut barracks bombing 48 hours before.  More infamous was the notorious arms trade with the declared-to-be-supporters-of-terrorists, the Iranians, and the back-door siphoning of money to the contras in the undeclared war in Nicaragua.

This is all relatively recent history and for most of us unpleasant to be reminded of.  But more, by compressing the attacks, the arms smuggling, the lies, and ‘self-corruption’ of the Reagan administration, as conservative columnist William Safire called it, into detail rich chapters we understand the undeclared war actions of the Reagan Administration to be not only unpleasant but dangerous to the future of the country. Right wingers today like to refer to President Obama as tending towards monarchism; little was it noticed when it began with Ronald Reagan.

President Bill Clinton used unauthorized war powers in Bosnia and Serbia.  George H W Bush ignored a congressional demand during the build up to Desert Storm in Iraq that he seek a declaration of war from the congress. Most telling, and what really meets the image of ‘drift’ is the increasing use of outsourcing for tasks and actions, previously done by the military, to contractors. From hiring Philippinos to peel potatoes in a war zone to putting armed mercenaries in charge of Pooh-Bah security the practice has been widespread, lucrative to the contractors, and in many cases dangerous to the workers and those around them.  She details horrifying instances of Dyncore employees in the Bosnian intervention, providing themselves with sex-slaves.  The billions of dollars paid to outfits such as Brown and Root, Blackwater and others in the Iraq invasion and still in Afghanistan are of more recent memory.

In the 1991 Gulf war the ratio of contract workers to soldiers was 1:100.  In the Balkin Conflict the ratio was close to 1:1, with some 20,000 contract workers. In 2011 in Iraq, the numbers were 45,000 soldiers to 65,000 contractors.

The leakage of military duties into the CIA gets its own chapters.  Though she doesn’t mention Harry Truman’s post presidential wish that the CIA be returned to its original function of intelligence gathering, and removed from “subversive operations abroad” it is clear from her findings that she would agree.  The CIA doesn’t even acknowledge its covert drone war.  Even so, if some things are too delicate for the CIA there is the JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command, a private army directed by the President himself. Congress be damned.  It can’t even know what the budget details for the CIA are, much less the plans and results of JSOC operations.

The final chapter is a bit of an outlier.  Though the U.S.  nuclear weapons stockpile and delivery systems are interesting, in a scary way, they don’t quite fit, unless in an opposite way, her primary thesis: the drift into increased, and unaccountable war powers.  There is a drift with the nukes, but is a drift of attention away from their still  terrifying potential, all 19,000 of them, and aging.  Maddow has found reports of fungus growing on the edges of wings of the missiles; she recaps the unnoticed transport of 12 nuclear missiles  6 fully armed, across the United States;  points to the inability of young soldiers and engineers to operate mechanisms put in place fifty years ago.  It’s very unsettling, but not quite as tightly tied into the general thrust of the book as the preceding chapters.

In fact, the evidence she presents tells me her title is ill chosen. A lot of drifting has certainly been going on but it is abundantly clear that an enormous amount of work has gone into making sure the engines of choice and decision are broken. The American people may indeed have drifted into a dangerous complacency, but the work of LBJ, the two president Bushes, and their prime facilitators Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and yes Presidents Clinton and Obama was not drift, but deliberate and determined. A better title might have been: Bullied, or Intimidators. Or, since she shows near the end, that one of her prime arguments is false — that necessarily involving the ‘citizen soldier’, in the form of National Guard or Reserves, will slow the race to war, perhaps a better title would be Addicted.  We Americans like Executive Power. We like flashing our big guns and we want our Presidents to be steely eyed and not to worry over the committee of 535.

She’s done a lot of research, which she talks about in “Notes on Sources,” pulling from books most lefties, as she identifies herself, would not read, including Jim Webb’s “Fields of Fire,” from Presidential speeches,columnists’ writings and even General Petraus’ “U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.”

She has an eye for the telling quote, here from Congressman Abraham Lincoln criticizing President Polk who…” trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory–that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood–that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.”

Oddly, in a book devoted to Presidential military over-reach there is no mention of the invasion of Panama under George H W Bush in December 1989, even though it was a major proof, to incoming Presidents,  that Congress’ War Powers act didn’t mean shit. Nor is there a chapter devoted to the expansion of presidential powers to authorize torture, hold suspects indefinitely or order the killing of Americans abroad with no legal authority.

Having heard her out I encourage you to also. [I mean ‘heard’ literally.  I listened to her reading in the Audible version of the book, replete with her mostly amusing asides and mannerisms, but thankfully in a lower register than she sometimes rises to when she gets excited on-air.]  Though Drift is a history of sorts the salting of snarkiness is enough that it won’t be read as such but as a long, informed editorial piece, which I don’t think she’d be unhappy about.

Despite my questions, Drift brings a fine, compressed narrative of very serious events in our recent American experience.  It will push many readers to the sources she sampled for a fuller, and weightier account: books and articles from Jane Mayer, particularly Landslide. The Unmaking of the President, 1984 – 1988 in which Reagan’s Iran-Contra law breaking is detailed, and her New Yorker reporting on the CIA drone program as well as the special report in the Washington Post, 2012, by Dana Priest and William Arkin titled “Top Secret America.” 

If we are indeed, adrift, as she says, what we need is not a ‘course correction,’ but to get the engines re-started, take some bearings and chart a way out of a nether-world where all the stars look like Mars.