[Peace-discuss] David Swanson on Bacevich: "War Scheduled to End Same Day as World"

[Robert Naiman]

War Scheduled to End Same Day as World
By David Swanson
http://warisacrime.org/node/54326

Andrew Bacevich's new book, "Washington Rules: America's Path to
Permanent War," is a good summary of the past 65 years' worth of war
thinking in Washington, D.C.  "Prior to World War II," he writes,
"Americans by and large viewed military power and institutions with
skepticism, if not outright hostility.  In the wake of World War II,
that changed.  An affinity for military might emerged as central to
the American identity."  For the past 65 years or so, Bacevich writes,
these beliefs have been Washington's "sacred trinity":

"an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international
peace and order require the United States to maintain a global
military presence, to configure its forces for global power
projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying
on a policy of global interventionism."

The people putting this expansion of Manifest Destiny into practice,
Bacevich writes, have not fundamentally been presidents, as everyone
believes, much less Congress, as the Constitution would have had it.
"Pretending to the role of Decider, a president all too often becomes
little more than the medium through which power is exercised."

Bacevich highlights the roles of two men in establishing structures of
war power, Allen Dulles at the CIA and Curtis LeMay at Strategic Air
Command.  They established the power, for themselves and their
successors, respectively, to do anything at all in secret, and to
determine nuclear weapons policies.  And they established the practice
of lying about Soviet military threats as a means toward escalating
the already dominant U.S. military.

Bacevich describes President John Kennedy as taking some of these
powers into the White House.  "The methods devised by Allen Dulles and
the methods perfected by Curtis LeMay worked in tandem to create an
aura of secrecy, prestige, and power that now allowed presidents to
assert and exercise quasi-imperial prerogatives."  And Bacevich points
to LeMay's public descent from revered wise man to dangerous buffoon
as illustrative of the damage the Vietnam War did to Washington's
rules, damage that did not last long at all.

"Failure in Vietnam seemingly left the Washington rules in tatters,"
writes Bacevich.  "That within five years of Saigon's fall they were
well on their way to reconstitution qualifies as remarkable.  That
within another decade the American credo and sacred trinity had been
fully restored deserves to be seen as astonishing."

Bacevich repeats this sort of astonishment in the course of the story
he tells, including when the end of the Cold War slows the U.S. war
machine down even less than defeat in Vietnam did, and including when
counter-insurgency theories are resurrected for General David
Petraeus' "surge".  Each time Bacevich is right to be astonished, but
in each case the astonishment is lessened, I think, to the extent that
one views war proponents as frauds rather than well-intentioned fools.
 That those in power, profiting financially and electorally from wars,
immediately argue for more war is simply to be expected.  That they
persuade others to share their beliefs is, indeed, astonishing, albeit
less so to the extent that one examines how our communications system
works -- something Bacevich does not do.  The five year recovery
post-Vietnam may have a recent parallel.  By 2005, Washington's war
lies were in worse than tatters, but by 2010 it was considered
impolite to mention that excuses for wars were lies.

By the time we get to Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, Bacevich is writing
as though presidents are Deciders.  He notes that the United States
could now go to war without inconveniencing most of its people, and
that wars tended to give boosts to presidents' approval ratings.  This
was a major change, but another came when the current wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq became understood as permanent or at least
open-ended.  And the military adopted a policy of "counter-insurgency"
that involved primarily non-military work.  This is another
astonishing revolution, as Bacevich points out, except that -- as far
as I can tell -- the military is not actually following its new
policy.  Are we putting 80% into civilian efforts?  Last time I looked
it was more like 4%.

"Washington Rules" was written before General Stanley McChrystal ended
his career but not before he did things that should have ended it.
When, in Bacevich's account, McChrystal publicly pressures President
Barack Obama to escalate Afghanistan, Bacevich returns to his
discussion of the 1950s: Presidents are not the real power.

As in his past books, Bacevich does a terrific job of nudging the
reader away from belief in popular militaristic and patriotic myths,
in the direction of some beginning grasp of reality.  And he
explicitly charts a wiser course, a new "trinity":

"First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or
remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital
interests.  Second, the primary duty of the American soldier is in
America.  Third, consistent with the Just War tradition, the United
States should employ force only as a last resort and only in
self-defense."

Of course, that doesn't resemble any just war tradition, and eight
years ago the just war theorists were explaining the need to attack
Iraq.  The ONLY duty of the American soldier should be to defend the
United States, minus any extraneous "vital interests."  But this is
vast progress, and Bacevich describes himself in the introduction to
his book as "a slow learner" who didn't begin paying attention or
asking questions until he was 41.  He must also be a fast learner,
because from that point on he's come to understand and explain the
U.S. empire as well as anyone.

But there are two areas in this book in which I think Bacevich is
still resisting adequate questioning of orthodoxy.  The first is in
his understanding of U.S. news media.  The media is never mentioned,
except for a passing reference to media executives in a list of those
benefitting from current policy.  Repeatedly Bacevich laments the
public's backward attitudes, never considering where they come from if
real, or noticing when the public is actually far ahead of what passes
for "public discourse."  Does Bacevich know that a majority of
Americans oppose the current wars?  Even when Bacevich's
generalizations about the public may be fair, he omits any notice
whatsoever of the sizable minority that opposes war mongering.
Bacevich's examples of heretics who have resisted the march to
permanent war are always those with power and the prestige of having
spent years going along, rather than early leaders or those with the
most penetrating analysis.  In Bacevich's world a "left-leaning"
publication is The New Republic.

The second place I see acceptance of the official story as getting in
the way of Bacevich's narrative is in his apparent belief that Lee
Harvey Oswald acted alone.  Bacevich's argument that people like
Dulles held the reins of power would be stronger and look very
different if he acknowledged the well-documented push-back against
Kennedy's firing of Dulles and Kennedy's steps toward peace.
According to Bacevich, "There is no evidence that any lessons drawn
from his administration's Cuban encounters had a positive effect on
the way it dealt with Vietnam."  Kennedy, in Bacevich's account,
wanted war and more war in Vietnam, and everything was up to him.  "At
the White House, the president and his lieutenants were in charge of
everything, including the Central Intelligence Agency."

Yet, on October 11, 1963, Kennedy issued a secret order for a
withdrawal of 1,000 troops from Vietnam in National Security Action
Memorandum 263.   Two years earlier, as described in James Douglass'
"JFK and the Unspeakable" Kennedy successfully blocked public
discussion of troop escalation by planting the false story in the
media that his generals were against it.  Yes, Kennedy mostly went
along with the Washington Rules, but he tested their limits and
apparently found them.
--

David Swanson is the author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial
Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union"

http://davidswanson.org

http://warisacrime.org

http://facebook.com/pages/David-Swanson/297768373319

http://twitter.com/davidcnswanson

http://youtube.com/afterdowningstreet

-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org

Urge Congress to Support a Timetable for Military Withdrawal from Afghanistan
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/feingold-mcgovern