Postdating the empire.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: 'Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power' - Book review

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

By Rachel Maddow

Crown. 275 pages. $25.

I like Rachel Maddow. I enjoyed her Air America radio program, and I appreciate the job she does on MSNBC. She knows her stuff, she is respectful of guests she disagrees with, and her bemused tone and raised eyebrow are more effective than the high volume you find on some other shows.

So when I heard she had a book coming out, I was eager to grab it. In many ways, it's an important book. Written in a breezy and colloquial style, she addresses crucial issues.

She documents the enormous distance we've traveled away from the designs of our Founders on the fundamental question of whether Congress or the President gets to take the country into war. She shows how Presidents have usurped that power and how Congress has abdicated it.

Beyond that, she stresses how unaccountable U.S. warmaking has become. The President now has the Joint Special Operations Command that is beyond the purview of all but a couple members of Congress. The CIA, with its drone warfare, has turned into a mini-War Department all of its own. And with private military contractors doing a lot of the heavy lifting in modern U.S. wars from Bosnia to Iraq and Afghanistan, the ability of Congress--and therefore the American people--to get a handle on our government's military policy has become severely impaired.

We're in a permanent warfare state now, the very thing our Founders warned against, she notes. "After a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us, of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the Presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happening--war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state," she writes. "It never stops."

Along the way, our civil liberties have taken a beating and the nation's Treasury has been drained while "the national security state has become a leviathan," she adds.

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And she argues persuasively that war has become like background noise for most Americans--those who don't have loved ones in the armed services or working for Blackwater or DynCorp.

"Civilian life has rolled on virtually uninterrupted," she writes. "If you're not in a military family, you've barely even felt it...