[Peace-discuss] Bacevich...

[C. G. Estabrook]

Bacevich was certainly a well-out-of-the-closet imperialist when he published 
his book "American Empire" in 2002, where he wrote about "the imperative of 
America's mission as the vanguard of history, transforming the global order and, 
in doing so, perpetuating its own dominance [guided by] the imperative of 
military supremacy, maintained in perpetuity and projected globally" (p.215ff.) 
That's barely English, but the import is clear.

What's remarkable - and didn't come thru to me in his rather bland interview 
with Democracy Now! (with its one-sentence mention of oil) - is how much he's 
quite consciously changed his views in recent years.

Bacevich now is a vaguer version of Bill Kauffman ("Ain't My America: The Long, 
Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism," 
2008). At the heart of his new book is a notion of a left-right coalition 
against the war - quite right, but I didn't hear it in the DN interview.

That does come thru in a hostile review of Bacevich's new book.  David Green 
found this when he was researching Michael Lind, a true imperialist goof, who 
therefore liked the old (2002) Bacevich, not the New Model Army man, as he 
explains below.

The critical bromide is that the best analysis comes from an acute critic.  I 
don't think Lind's too acute (some do), but he gives a better account of 
Bacevich's views here than Bacevich himself seemed to on Democracy Now. And they 
are important views, as Bob notes:

	America Under the Caesars
	Review of "Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path
	to Permanent War" (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010)
	by Andrew J. Bacevich
	Michael Lind, New America Foundation
	June 22, 2010

IN THE waning years of the Vietnam War, leftist and liberal opponents of the 
Cold War discovered that they shared much in common with the critics of these 
policies on the libertarian or traditionalist right. The result was a rebirth of 
a current of thinking about American foreign policy that is usually labeled 
isolationism but which, out of deference to members of this school who reject 
such a term as perhaps far too loaded, I shall instead describe as 
“anti-interventionism.”

This is a tradition that has long dominated American politics, and one that can 
find its heartland in the small-town America of the Midwest. In fact, its 
political eclipse lasted for a very short period of time indeed—from the 
selection of Dwight D. Eisenhower over Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft for president 
by the Republican Party in 1952 to the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1972 of 
George McGovern, with his slogan “Come Home, America.” Taft and McGovern were 
both products of the Midwest, which along with much of New England had been the 
center of opposition to U.S. participation in both world wars and the battle 
with the Soviet Union. The supporters of these conflicts were disproportionately 
found in the South and Southwest and among the Atlanticist financial and 
commercial elites of the northeastern cities. During the Cold War, the former 
diplomat George Kennan and the scholar William Appleman Williams argued for 
drastically reducing America’s military interventions and foreign commitments, 
as the influential historian and Indiana native Charles Beard had done in the 
1930s and 1940s. Kennan and Williams, too, were products of the Midwest. 
Williams was an Iowan; Kennan hailed from Wisconsin and wrote elegantly about 
his pioneer roots. Whether they were on the left or right, all of these thinkers 
lamented the passing of pastoral, small-town Middle America and blamed social 
change in part on the effects of what they saw as American imperialism.

According to these men, the United States was once a country with a 
public-spirited, frugal citizenry and a limited government that abstained from 
aggression abroad. Then, at some point, the Republic was betrayed by elites who 
steered the United States on the course to perpetual empire and war. It is a 
narrative whose origins lie in a parallel between the United States and ancient 
Rome, which lost its republican government and became an autocratic empire under 
the Caesars.

Anti-interventionists do not agree on the exact moment when the American 
Republic gave way to the American empire. For some, the transition came with the 
rise of the Cold War “national-security state” during the administration of 
Harry Truman. For others, it was William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt’s 
“splendid little war” against Spain in 1898.

Nor is there universal agreement among anti-interventionists as to the motives 
of those who turned the Republic into an empire. For Williams, it was the desire 
of American mass-production industries to obtain foreign markets through a 
global Open Door economic policy. For Beard, it was the lust for power on the 
part of politicians like Franklin Roosevelt, whom Beard detested and accused of 
knowing about Pearl Harbor in advance (an accusation only slightly less deranged 
than the claim of “truthers” that 9/11 was staged by the U.S. government).

Yet whatever their differences, members of this school share the hope that a 
repudiation of most or all U.S. foreign-policy commitments and a dramatic 
reduction in armed forces can make possible a restoration of something like the 
idealized, small-town America of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century 
Midwest.

IN RECENT years, this venerable American tradition has found its most eloquent 
and influential champion in Andrew Bacevich. Now a professor of international 
relations and history at Boston University, Bacevich served in Vietnam and the 
Persian Gulf, retiring from the army with the rank of colonel. Although he is a 
traditionalist conservative, or “paleoconservative,” Bacevich has found his 
audience chiefly on the liberal left, where he has filled the role of Kennan, 
another conservative and former insider whose views seemed to validate the 
Left’s critique of U.S. foreign policy.

In a number of books and articles, Bacevich has sought to revive the 
anti-interventionist approach. He has written sympathetically about Beard and 
wrote an introduction to a reprint of a book by Williams. He has also authored a 
series of polemics criticizing contemporary U.S. foreign policy, including The 
New American Militarism (Oxford University Press, 2006) and The Limits of Power 
(Metropolitan Books, 2008). Washington Rules is the latest salvo in this campaign.

Bacevich claims that the foreign policy of both parties is determined by four 
“Washington rules.” According to him, “Every president since Harry Truman has 
faithfully subscribed to these four assertions and Obama is no exception.”

The rules are as follows:

     "First, the world must be organized (or shaped). . . . Second, only the 
United States possesses the capacity to prescribe and enforce such a global 
order. . . . Third, America’s writ includes the charge of articulating the 
principles that should define the international order. . . . Finally, a few 
rogues and recalcitrants aside, everyone understands and accepts this reality."

Bacevich declares:

     "Mainstream Republicans and mainstream Democrats are equally devoted to 
this catechism of American statecraft. Little empirical evidence exists to 
demonstrate its validity, but no matter: When it comes to matters of faith, 
proof is unnecessary."

The Washington rules have condemned imperial America to perpetual “semiwar.”

This new offering portrays Bacevich’s increasing alienation from the U.S. 
foreign-policy consensus in terms of a narrative of awakening and repentance: 
“In measured doses, mortification cleanses the soul. It’s the perfect antidote 
for excessive self-regard.” His doubts about U.S. foreign policy began, he 
writes, when he visited the former Communist state of East Germany and 
discovered it to be run-down and impoverished. He took this, not as proof that 
the West’s superior system had prevailed over that of the Soviets, but as 
evidence that the Cold War threat had been exaggerated or nonexistent.

Like others in the tradition in which he writes, Bacevich views disasters like 
Vietnam and Iraq as the all-but-inevitable results of the hubris of America’s 
postrepublican empire builders. “George W. Bush’s decision to launch Operation 
Iraqi Freedom in 2003 pushed [Bacevich] fully into opposition” to what he saw as 
a growing American willingness to adopt an aggressive posture across the world. 
Bacevich’s son Andrew, an army first lieutenant, was killed in Iraq.

IN THE same vein as Bacevich’s other recent books, Washington Rules is a 
polemic, not a dissertation, and should be judged by the standards of its genre. 
But even as such, Washington Rules will not persuade those who do not belong to 
the choir to whom Bacevich is preaching.

Bacevich recycles many of the references used by other anti-interventionist 
authors. Once again, we read that publishing magnate Henry Luce proclaimed the 
American Century. Once again, Graham Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American is 
cited as evidence of the folly of American diplomacy in Vietnam, or elsewhere.

Bacevich also parades the familiar anti-interventionist pantheon, ranging from 
John Quincy Adams’s opposition to the Mexican-American War, through Dwight D. 
Eisenhower with his warning about the “military-industrial complex,” all the way 
to Vietnam War critics Martin Luther King Jr., William Fulbright and Mike 
Mansfield. Other than providing quotes that could be taken out of context and 
used as proof texts by later generations of anti-interventionist polemics, these 
figures have little in common—Adams, for example, may have opposed the Mexican 
War, but he favored the American acquisition of Cuba and the Pacific Northwest, 
and Fulbright was a reactionary segregationist, unlike his fellow Vietnam War 
critic King. Eisenhower supported the Johnson administration’s escalation of the 
war in Vietnam, a point never mentioned by the anti-interventionists who quote 
him about the military-industrial complex.

Like the isolationists of the 1930s and early 1940s who quoted George 
Washington’s warning against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address, 
Bacevich tries to enlist Washington as a patron saint of the 
anti-interventionist school:

     Americans once believed—or at least purported to believe—that citizenship 
carried with it a responsibility to contribute to the country’s defense. In his 
“Sentiments on a Peace Establishment,” written in the immediate aftermath of the 
American Revolution, George Washington offered the classic formulation of this 
proposition. “It may be laid down, as a primary position, and the basis of our 
system,” the general wrote, “that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a 
free government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his 
personal services to the defense of it.” Out of this proposal came the tradition 
of the citizen-soldier, the warrior who filled the ranks of citizen armies 
raised for every major war fought by the United States until that system 
foundered in Vietnam.

Turning George Washington, rather than Thomas Jefferson, into the champion of 
citizen militias does violence to history. In reality, Washington, like his 
wartime aide and later political ally Alexander Hamilton, was so appalled by the 
performance of state militias during the War of Independence that he supported a 
large and well-equipped standing army. At the Constitutional Convention, George 
Washington allegedly inspired Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to mock a proposal 
that the constitution limit the regular army to several thousand men by asking 
whether invading foreign armies would agree to the same limitation. And 
Washington was far from a Middle American populist. He ruthlessly kicked 
squatters off the vast acreage that he owned as a speculator in the future 
Midwest, and when frontier farmers rose up against excise taxes in the Whiskey 
Rebellion, the wealthy, slave-owning president mounted the saddle and led the 
U.S. Army to intimidate them into submission. Indeed, late in life, William 
Appleman Williams, one of the predecessors whom Bacevich so admires, came to 
believe that the adoption of the Constitution had set the United States on the 
course to imperial aggrandizement. Washington was as much a power-mongering 
imperialist for Williams as FDR was for Beard.

BACEVICH’S RHETORICAL technique here resembles that found in similar works by 
linguist Noam Chomsky, the late historian Howard Zinn, and their imitators on 
the anti-military left and the anti-interventionist right. The heroes in 
Bacevich’s narrative include Midwesterners who see through the pretensions of 
the conceited East Coast elite. For example, Bacevich writes the following about 
former–Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup, who criticized the Vietnam War:

     "Like Fulbright, David Shoup was a son of the Middle Border, born and 
raised in Indiana and carrying to Washington a wariness of East Coast elites. . 
. . In a speech to a gathering of students in Los Angeles on May 14, 1966, the 
former marine revealed his own populist inclinations, targeting what he saw as 
the bogus rendering of U.S. history that Americans had been conditioned to 
accept. In surveying the landscape of the past, Shoup saw mostly lies."

One senses a self-portrait in this description.

When it comes to those with whom he disagrees, the mocking of major figures in 
U.S. foreign policy following World War II, whether liberal or conservative, 
Democratic or Republican, that goes on in Washington Rules seems mean-spirited 
after a while.

A few examples will have to stand in for many others. CIA Director Allen Dulles 
was “the great white case officer.” One imagines Bacevich’s audience of 
populists and leftists hissing at his frequent cues: “A cool, urbane, 
Princeton-educated patrician. . . . Breeding and education seemingly fitted 
Dulles for his sensitive post. If the United States was going to dirty its hands 
in the spy business, at least there was a gentleman in charge.” One American 
policy maker after another suffers from denigration-by-description. General 
David Petraeus:

     "Petraeus was a gifted officer, identified early in his career as someone 
meant for big things. Among his most prominent gifts were those of a courtier: 
The young Petraeus displayed a considerable talent for cultivating influential 
figures, both in and out of uniform, who might prove useful in advancing his own 
prospects. And he was nothing if not smart."

Now and then Bacevich uses the cartoonist’s art to draw caricatures of U.S. 
foreign-policy makers as a group. “Beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, every U.S. 
president had insisted that at the far side of America’s resistance to 
totalitarianism world peace awaited. The reward for exertions today was to be a 
reduced need for exertions on the morrow.” Bacevich expects his audience to nod 
in agreement at the folly of Roosevelt and his successors, but a critical reader 
might ask: if that was really their belief, weren’t they correct? After all, the 
defeat of Nazi Germany allowed the United States to rapidly demobilize up until 
the Korean War, and the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union allowed 
Washington and its allies to dramatically draw down their troop numbers and 
military spending. Indeed, Bacevich’s constant editorializing and sarcasm are 
used to point the reader to a conclusion that the factual narrative itself does 
not necessarily support.

NOWHERE IS this more true than in Bacevich’s treatment of the Cold War, which 
echoes the polemical literature of the anti-interventionist Left between the 
1960s and the 1980s. Those works sought to make U.S. policy toward Korea, 
Indochina, Cuba and Latin America appear ludicrous and irrational, by insisting 
that these conflicts were not what they in fact were—proxy wars in great-power 
struggles—but unprovoked attacks by a bullying superpower on small countries 
whose regimes were really independent of Moscow and Beijing. Much of that 
writing has been discredited since the end of the Cold War, by the partial 
publication of Soviet archives, which shed light on the workings of other 
regimes, and the controlled releases of material by China, North Korea and 
Vietnam. All tell a far more complicated story than the simple tale of 
unprovoked American aggression.

Scholars are still sorting through the reams of new information, but already the 
material has transformed our understanding of the Cold War. For example, during 
that struggle many American historians claimed that North Korea’s invasion of 
the South caught Stalin and Mao by surprise. We now know that Stalin and Kim Il 
Sung arranged the attack and consulted with Mao in advance. We have learned that 
Soviet pilots took part in air combat with their American counterparts in the 
skies above Korea, while hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops were stationed 
in North Vietnam during the mid-1960s, running the North’s infrastructure, 
manning antiaircraft defenses and enabling North Vietnamese regulars to 
infiltrate South Vietnam.

One could still make an argument against the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as 
America’s anti-Castro policy. But even a critic of American foreign policy, in a 
book on the subject published in 2010, ought to cite some of the voluminous 
scholarship about the Cold War from the other side that has been published since 
1989. Instead, there is not a single reference in Bacevich’s book to this 
growing body of work.

THIS DEMONSTRATES one of the fundamental weaknesses of the type of 
foreign-policy thinking which Bacevich has embraced and seeks to revitalize. Its 
basic article of faith is that since the 1940s or the 1890s (if not the 1790s), 
U.S. policy makers have invented nonexistent threats or exaggerated real threats 
in order to justify military buildups and military interventions which, in fact, 
serve other purposes: opening foreign markets, winning elections for hawkish 
politicians, or padding the resumes of careerist diplomats and soldiers. In 
order to make that case, however, an anti-interventionist historian must 
demonstrate—using evidence from the other side, not just from the United 
States—that Washington’s enemies were never threats at all, except in the 
imaginations of American policy makers. Simple assertion is not enough.

In the great-power struggles of the twentieth century, America was joined by 
other great-power allies. Russia, Britain and France fought with the United 
States against Germany twice, and when the Cold War ended, Washington was 
formally allied with the major European powers and Japan, and informally with 
the People’s Republic of China. French President François Mitterrand, a 
socialist, flew to Bonn to persuade the West German Bundestag to allow the 
installation of U.S. missiles. If leaders in Washington invented or exaggerated 
the threats from Germany and the Soviet Union, were leaders in London, Paris, 
Moscow, Bonn, Tokyo and Beijing equally foolish or equally hypocritical, all at 
the same time? Were America’s allies colluding with Washington to pretend that 
there were threats to their shared interests when none in fact existed? An older 
generation of anti-interventionists proposed a solution to this problem: 
gullible Americans were tricked into fighting on behalf of the British Empire in 
two world wars and the Cold War, with the help of Anglophiles (and, in some 
versions, Jews) on the East Coast. Bacevich does not propound such conspiracy 
theories, but absent some sort of international elite collusion, it is difficult 
to understand why a number of great powers would engage in hot or cold war 
together against another great power or great powers. Unless, of course, the 
threats were real.

A DIFFERENT problem weakens Bacevich’s arguments against our most recent forays 
into Iraq and Afghanistan. Anti-interventionists always proclaim that not only 
are the threats themselves ephemeral but also the military spending required to 
fight them will inevitably lead to our downfall. It is one thing to oppose the 
Iraq War and the escalation of the Afghan war because they are unnecessary 
conflicts that have inflicted needless suffering on the people of those 
countries, as well as American soldiers and their families—a view I share. It is 
quite another to claim that the United States cannot afford them. Bacevich 
argues that America’s perpetual “semiwar” policy is on the verge of bankrupting 
the country. According to Bacevich, “Promising prosperity and peace, the 
Washington rules are propelling the United States toward insolvency and 
perpetual war.” He points to the national debt and deficits:

     "A study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecast 
trillion-dollar deficits for the next decade. Based on that analysis, by 2019 
the total size of the national debt is likely to surpass $21 trillion, an amount 
substantially greater than the nation’s GDP."

But relatively little of that red ink is the result of military spending, even 
on two simultaneous wars. The chief short-term cause is the collapse of 
government revenues, as a result of the global economic crisis. Long-term budget 
shortfalls are caused partly by the Bush tax cuts and partly by the escalating 
costs of Medicare, which are driven by industry-wide medical-cost inflation in 
the United States. If America were to adopt measures to ensure that its citizens 
pay no more for doctors, hospitals or drugs than those in other industrial 
democracies, then projected deficits will shrink dramatically. Certainly, if 
medical costs are not contained, the U.S. economy will be wrecked, even if the 
United States radically downsizes the military.

AS A passionate and articulate exponent of the American anti-interventionist 
tradition, Bacevich is a worthy successor to Kennan, Williams and Beard. But 
that tradition is not convincing, either in its portrayal of American foreign 
policy as an avoidable decline from republic to empire, or its assumption that 
America’s economic and social problems would be significantly different if the 
United States adopted a minimalist defense strategy. It is not enough to offer 
an alternative to America’s foreign-policy orthodoxy. The alternative must be 
plausible.

Copyright 2010 The National Interest Online

http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2010/america_under_the_caesars_33484

On 8/3/10 6:46 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> Thanks for sending this on, Bob. Some on this list think Bacevich is a
> stooge, a closet imperialist. Quoting: * * */*Bacevich is an imperialist
> goof.
>
> For his generally benighted view, see his book "American Empire" (2002),
> where he wrote about "the imperative of America's mission as the vanguard of
> history, transforming the global order and, in doing so, perpetuating its own
> dominance [guided by] the imperative of military supremacy, maintained in
> perpetuity and projected globally" (p.215ff.)
>
> This is the sort of person who ends up as professor of "international
> relations" at Boston University (where Howard Zinn was hounded out).
>
> His objection to American policy in the Mideast on Democracy Now! today is
> that it isn't working. We're not killing enough Asians to make our writ run,
> and it's too expensive.
>
> To his credit - because it's so rare - he devotes exactly one sentence to the
> real purpose of the war - "We are in that part of the world because of oil" -
> but that's all!
>
> The totality of the interview is the sort of objection that Nazi generals
> might have made of the Russian campaign.
>
> The antiwar movement continues to be in serious trouble when people who
> purport to be against the war praise Bacevich. --CGE*/* */ /* *Quite
> remakable. *
>
> What is to be emphasized here are the virulent attacks on those who do not
> precisely say what these guys want them to say (or admit),/ even when they
> are saying things that would get the U.S. government to change its behavior.
> /It is all devious, they say. / /It appears as a kind of absolutely rigid
> ideological response not so different from when the Communist party line
> eminating from Lenin and Stalin condemned those like Rosa Luxemberg,
> Mensheviks, Trotskyities, socialists of various stripes, etc. in the early
> part of the 20th century. They would have been happy to see these deviants
> burned at the stake. (Trotsky indeed was assasinated, and others also fell.)
>
> --mkb On Aug 3, 2010, at 5:16 PM, Robert Naiman wrote:
>
>> Campaigning for President, Senator Obama said: "I don't want to just end
>> the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first
>> place." But as Andrew Bacevich notes in his new book, "Washington Rules:
>> America's Path to Permanent War," as President, Obama has done the
>> opposite: he has promoted and acted on behalf of the mindset that leads to
>> war. Bacevich's book is a call for Americans to reject the Washington
>> consensus for permanent war, global counterinsurgency and global military
>> power projection, and to demand instead that America "come home," as Martin
>> Luther King called for in 1967, and focus on resolving its own domestic
>> problems rather than act as a self-appointed global police and occupation
>> force. Because of his personal background and establishment credentials,
>> Bacevich may be able to move Americans currently beyond the reach of the
>> peace movement. This is important, because a key task for ending our
>> current wars and preventing future ones is to break the current
>> near-monolithic support for permanent war among the dominant institutions
>> of the Republican Party - a stance that effectively disenfranchises the
>> substantial minority of Republican voters who oppose the permanent war.
>>
>> This is why Bacevich's new book is potentially important for the U.S. peace
>> movement. Get the book, read it, give it to a Republican friend, and talk
>> to them about it. Join Just Foreign Policy on September 24th for a "Virtual
>> Brown Bag" with Andrew Bacevich, and try to virtually bring your Republican
>> friend.