<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div class="inside clear-block">
<div id="node-header">A thoughtful analysis.</div><div id="node-header"><span class="submitted"><br></span></div><div id="node-header"><span class="submitted"><a href="http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/29-6">http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/29-6</a></span></div><div id="node-header"><h1 class="title"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">The End of (Military) History? The US, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War </span></font></h1><p class="author">by Andrew Bacevich</p>
</div>
<div id="node-body"><p>"In watching the flow of events over the past decade or
so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has
happened in world history." This sentiment, introducing the essay that
made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention
today, albeit from a different perspective.</p><p>Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold
War, had convinced Fukuyama that the "end of history" was at hand.
"The triumph of the West, of the Western <i>idea</i>," he wrote in 1989, "is evident... in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism." </p><p>Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events
during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to
another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain
considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course.</p><p>For
Fukuyama, history implied ideological competition, a contest pitting
democratic capitalism against fascism and communism. When he wrote his
famous essay, that contest was reaching an apparently definitive
conclusion. </p><p>Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that
competition's course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the
twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new,
or more effective, instruments of coercion. Military innovation
assumed many forms. Most obviously, there were the
weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and
missiles, poison gas, and atomic bombs -- the list is a long one. In
their effort to gain an edge, however, nations devoted equal attention
to other factors: doctrine and organization, training systems and
mobilization schemes, intelligence collection and war plans. </p><p>All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great
Britain, Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a
common belief in the plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest
terms, the Western military tradition could be reduced to this
proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft, the
accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility. … (read on)</p><p><b><br></b></p>
</div></div></body></html>