ABSTRACT
The warfare state rested not only on a permanent war economy and empire of military bases but on an expanding security managed by the newly-constituted imperial presidency. History shows that a National Security behemoth was driven largely by Cold War politics that would define US foreign policy into the early 1990s, when the Communist enemy gave way to a new global threat, Islamic terrorism. Early postwar America was saturated with frenetic and irrational anti-Soviet hostility, starting with the familiar myth that Soviet "conquest" of Eastern Europe was a sign of an aggressive imperial agenda. During World War II, as noted, full-scale mobilization produced a military Keynesianism that would remain a fixture of the American state-capitalist economy into the present. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq reveals White House authoritarianism in its most brazen form, starting with the 2002 Congressional green light based on fraudulent reports about threatening Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD).
