Any book with a subtitle that refers to "The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power" bears a heavy burden of proof--to show that the exercise of American power has indeed been a disaster. This would seem a difficult case to make, given that over the past six decades the U.S. has presided over an unprecedented expansion of free governments and free markets across the world, kept the peace in Europe and East Asia after centuries of disastrous conflicts, and defeated such monstrous regimes as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Soviet Russia and Baathist Iraq. The true disaster would have been if, as in 1914 and 1939, America had failed to exercise its power.

James Carroll does not bother to confront any of these obvious points in his lengthy diatribe against the "garrison state." An erstwhile Catholic priest turned moralistic writer (of novels, nonfiction books and a Boston Globe column), he simply assumes as his first principle that American power is indefensible and then unspools a long narrative of America's conduct since the 1940s to illustrate the point. His case should be familiar to anyone who has read anything by such far-left luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Jonathan Schell, or Seymour Hersh. It goes like this:

The bombing of German and Japanese cities, culminating with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a war crime akin to the Holocaust. Thus "America's mid-twentieth century initiation into world power was as much in the state of mortal sin as its birth in slavery had been." America continued sinning by building more atomic bombs and targeting them on the Soviet Union. Good ole Joe Stalin simply wanted to live and let live--if only we had let him. "By portraying Stalin and his system as warmongering monsters," Mr. Carroll writes, early hard-liners like George Kennan and James Forrestal "helped push the Kremlin in that direction."...