[Peace-discuss] Bacevich...

[Robert Naiman]

I have to admit, although Michael Lind is obviously a jerk, I enjoyed
reading his review, which was well-written.

By the way, his critique of Bacevich on the economics is spot on.
Unfortunately, in purely economic terms, the US can "afford" this war
and many more. War is not the primary cause of the US budget woes, as
Lind correctly points out.

Nonetheless, obviously, there is a broader point here which is true:
from the point of view of the interest of the majority of Americans,
and certainly the majority of humanity, the money could obviously be
much better spent - including by refunding it to the American people
by lowering their taxes. I myself would rather spend it on social
needs, but would unite in a second with any Republican to refund it
through lower taxes, if it would keep the money away from the
Pentagon.

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 8:02 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 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.
>



-- 
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
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