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

[C. G. Estabrook]

One point on which Bacevich has it right - and Swanson is surely wrong - is 
Swanson's remark below. (Lee Harvey Oswald probably did act alone, Cheney 
probably didn't know about 9/11 before the fact, and you can't draw to an inside 
straight.)

That can be important if one draws a king's-evil-advisers argument from it - 
that the problem is the CIA, or the neocons, or Republicans, etc. - and fails to 
see the consistency of US policy from administration to administration.

 > 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."


On 8/3/10 8:22 PM, Robert Naiman wrote:
> 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
>