"Set thine house in order."

That quote from the bible distills a conversation between Bill Moyers and Andrew Bacevich. Bacevich has just written “The Limits of Power”, which I just bought from Amazon and I hope many of you also buy it. Here are some quotes from the Moyers interview:

BILL MOYERS: So, this is a version of "Physician, heal thyself?"

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, yes, "Physician, heal thyself," and you begin healing yourself by looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing yourself as you really are.

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ANDREW BACEVICH: We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the book's balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal year. And therefore, we want this unending line of credit.

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BILL MOYERS: You say, "U.S. troops in battle dress and body armor, whom Americans profess to admire and support, pay the price for the nation's refusal to confront our domestic dysfunction." What are we not confronting?

ANDREW BACEVICH: The most obvious, the blindingly obviously question, is energy. It's oil. I think historians a hundred years from now will puzzle over how it could be that the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, as far back as the early 1970s, came to recognize that dependence on foreign oil was a problem, posed a threat, comprised our freedom of action.

How every President from Richard Nixon down to the present one, President Bush, declared, "We're gonna fix this problem." None of them did.

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BILL MOYERS: And you use this metaphor that is intriguing. American policy makers, quote, "have been engaged in a de facto Ponzi scheme, intended to extend indefinitely, the American line of credit." What's going on that resembles a Ponzi scheme?

ANDREW BACEVICH: This continuing tendency to borrow and to assume that the bills are never going to come due. I testified before a House committee six weeks ago now, on the future of U.S grand strategy. I was struck by the questions coming from members that showed an awareness, a sensitivity, and a deep concern, about some of the issues that I tried to raise in the book.

"How are we gonna pay the bills? How are we gonna pay for the commitment of entitlements that is going to increase year by year for the next couple of decades, especially as baby boomers retire?" Nobody has answers to those questions. So, I was pleased that these members of Congress understood the problem. I was absolutely taken aback when they said, "Professor, what can we do about this?" And their candid admission that they didn't have any answers, that they were perplexed, that this problem of learning to live within our means seemed to have no politically plausible solution.

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BILL MOYERS: What do you value most?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I think the clearest statement of what I value is found in the preamble to the Constitution. There is nothing in the preamble to the Constitution which defines the purpose of the United States of America as remaking the world in our image, which I view as a fool's errand. There is nothing in the preamble of the Constitution that ever imagined that we would embark upon an effort, as President Bush has defined it, to transform the Greater Middle East. This region of the world that incorporates something in order of 1.4 billion people.

I believe that the framers of the Constitution were primarily concerned with focusing on the way we live here, the way we order our affairs. To try to ensure that as individuals, we can have an opportunity to pursue our, perhaps, differing definitions of freedom, but also so that, as a community, we could live together in some kind of harmony. And that future generations would also be able to share in those same opportunities.

The big problem, it seems to me, with the current crisis in American foreign policy, is that unless we do change our ways, the likelihood that our children, our grandchildren, the next generation is going to enjoy the opportunities that we've had, is very slight, because we're squandering our power. We are squandering our wealth. In many respects, to the extent that we persist in our imperial delusions, we're also going to squander our freedom because imperial policies, which end up enhancing the authority of the imperial president, also end up providing imperial presidents with an opportunity to compromise freedom even here at home. And we've seen that since 9/11.

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ANDREW BACEVICH: But, doesn't really mean that Bill Clinton before him, or George Herbert Walker Bush before him, or Ronald Reagan before him, were all that much better. Because they all have seen military power as our strong suit. They all have worked under the assumption that through the projection of power, or the threat to employ power, that we can fix the world. Fix the world in order to sustain this dysfunctional way of life that we have back here.

ANDREW BACEVICH: "Be careful." "Don't plunge ahead." Recognize that force has utility, but that utility is actually quite limited. Recognize that when we go to war, almost inevitably, there are going to be unanticipated consequences. And they're not going to be happy ones.

Above all, recognize that, when you go to war, it's unlikely there's a neat tidy solution. It's far more likely that the bill that the nation is going to pay in lives and in dollars is going to be a monumental one. My problem with the generals is that, with certain exceptions, one could name as General Shinseki, with certain exceptions-

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ANDREW BACEVICH: We look to the President, to the next President. You know, we know that the current President's a failure and a disappoint - we look to the next President to fix things. And, of course, as long as we have this expectation that the next President is going to fix things then, of course, that lifts all responsibility from me to fix things.

One of the real problems with the imperial presidency, I think, is that it has hollowed out our politics. And, in many respects, has made our democracy a false one. We're going through the motions of a democratic political system. But the fabric of democracy, I think, really has worn very thin.

ANDREW BACEVICH: There are many people who say they support the troops, and they really mean it. But when it comes, really, down to understanding what does it mean to support the troops? It needs to mean more than putting a sticker on the back of your car.

I don't think we actually support the troops. We the people. What we the people do is we contract out the business of national security to approximately 0.5 percent of the population. About a million and a half people that are on active duty.

And then we really turn away. We don't want to look when they go back for two or three or four or five combat tours. That's not supporting the troops. That's an abdication of civic responsibility. And I do think it - there's something fundamentally immoral about that.

Again, as I tried to say, I think the global war on terror, as a framework of thinking about policy, is deeply defective. But if one believes in the global war on terror, then why isn't the country actually supporting it? In a meaningful substantive sense?

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ANDREW BACEVICH: How did we come to be a nation in which we really thought that we could transform the greater Middle East with our army?

What have been the costs that have been imposed on this country? Hundreds of billions of dollars. Some projections, two to three trillion dollars. Where is that money coming from? How else could it have been spent? For what? Who bears the burden?

Who died? Who suffered loss? Who's in hospitals? Who's suffering from PTSD? And was it worth it? Now, there will be plenty of people who are going to say, "Absolutely, it was worth it. We overthrew this dictator." But I hope and pray that there will be many others who will make the argument that it wasn't worth it.

It was a fundamental mistake. It never should have been undertaking. And we're never going to do this kind of thing again. And that might be the moment when we look ourselves in the mirror. And we see what we have become. And perhaps undertake an effort to make those changes in the American way of life that will enable us to preserve for future generations that which we value most about the American way of life.

Bacevich and Moyers

Andrew Bacevich was interviewed by Bill Moyers last week. Bacevich had some interesting - and dispiriting - comments as to how things stand there. Here are some excerpts:

BILL MOYERS: These civilian casualties that we've been hearing about, they're inevitable in war, right?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Sure they are. But I think that what's particularly important about the incidents that we're reading about is that they really call into question U.S. strategy. I mean, when General McChrystal conceived of this counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan, one of the, sort of the core principles is that we would act in ways that would demonstrate our benign intentions. We're supposed to be protecting the population. And when it turns out that U.S. forces are killing non-combatants, and there are repeated incidents that have occurred, I think it calls into question the sincerity, the seriousness of the strategy. Or it calls into question the extent to which McChrystal is actually in control of the forces that he commands.

There doesn't seem to be any noticeable change, and any noticeable reduction in the frequency with which these incidents are occurring. So, I mean, were I an Afghan, I think I would not place a whole heck of a lot of credibility on the claims that, you know, "We're here to help."

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BILL MOYERS: General McChrystal himself has said that we've shot - and this is his words not mine—an amazing number of people over there who did not seem to be a threat to his troops.

ANDREW BACEVICH: I think that is—that's clearly the case. When McChrystal was put in command last year, and devised his counterinsurgency strategy, the essential core principle of that strategy is that we will protect the population. We will protect the people. And the contradiction is that ever since President Obama gave McChrystal the go-ahead to implement that strategy, we have nonetheless continued to have this series of incidents in which we're not only not protecting the population. But indeed we're killing non-combatants.

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Well, here in the year 2010, nobody in the officer corps believes in military victory. And in that sense, the officer corps has, I think, unwittingly really forfeited its claim to providing a unique and important service to American society. I mean, why, if indeed the purpose of the exercise in Afghanistan is to, I mean, to put it crudely, drag this country into the modern world, why put a four-star general in charge of that? Why not—why not put a successful mayor of a big city? Why not put a legion of social reformers? Because the war in Afghanistan is not a war as the American military traditionally conceives of war.

It is the longest war in American history. And it is a war for which there is no end in sight. And to my mind, it is a war that is utterly devoid of strategic purpose. And the fact that that gets so little attention from our political leaders, from the press or from our fellow citizens, I think is simply appalling, especially when you consider the amount of money we're spending over there and the lives that are being lost whether American or Afghan.

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ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, we need to assess the threat realistically. Osama bin Laden is not Adolf Hitler. Al-Qaeda is not Nazi Germany. Al-Qaeda poses a threat. It does not pose an existential threat. We should view Al-Qaeda as the equivalent of an international criminal conspiracy. Sort of a mafia that in some way or another draws its energy or legitimacy from a distorted understanding of a particular religious tradition.

An Abdication of Responsibility

That's what Andrew Bacevich sees in our country today. And he's not talking only of our leaders, he is talking about us. He arrives at this point by reviewing changes in our military policy over the past 30+ years. Bacevich sees three primary phases in our military policy:

• "Great Divorce" stemming from the abolition of the draft by Nixon. This served to separate citizenship and military service.
  
• "Great Reconstitution" with Reagan's funding of the military. We became spectators to our military's efforts and were like football fans cheering on our team from afar.
  
• "Great Expectations", the phase we are now in and have been in since Bush I, where we think we can save the world.
  

Bacevich closes with these words:

With regard to civil-military relations, the next president will face an especially daunting challenge. What we need appears quite clear: for American citizens to acknowledge their own accountability for what American soldiers are sent to do and for all that occurs as a consequence. To classify Iraq as “Bush’s war” is to perpetrate a fraud. Whether that conflict is moral or immoral, essential or unnecessary, winnable or beyond salvaging, it is very much the nation’s war. Vacuously “supporting the troops” while carrying on for all practical purposes as if the war did not exist amounts to an abdication of basic civic responsibility.

As long as Americans persist in seeing national security as a function that others are contracted to perform, they will persist in this unaccountability. In this regard, the restoration of civic responsibility will require first restoring some connection between citizenship and military service. We need to reinvent the concept of the citizen-soldier. Yet we need to do so in a way that precludes conscription, for which next to no support exists in the Pentagon or in the public at large.

This is a tall order. Yet until we repair our democracy, repairing the defects in our military policy will remain a distant prospect.

Bacevich One More Time

Andrew Bacevich should be one of the people directing the future of this country. I've posted many articles based on Bacevich's work. Here are some excerpts from his latest talk with Bill Moyers.

We are not, the people are not engaged in any serious way. The people are not asked to sacrifice. The people are asked only to applaud when we are told after the fact that an attack has succeeded. For example, the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.

And I would applaud, and do applaud, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But I also have this question to ask. And that is, what is the political objective of a strategy of targeted assassination? How many people do we think we're going to kill? How long are we going to kill people in Yemen or in Somalia or in Pakistan before we get to some point where we can say, “Yes, now our political purposes have been achieved, and therefore the war can end, that Plan C will have run its course?” And my fear is that we'll never, we'll never run out of targets. And that describes where we are.

permanent, open-ended war cannot be good for the country. Permanent, open-ended war, in essence, is an abdication of strategic thought. Are we so unimaginative, are we so wedded to the reliance on military means, that we cannot conceive of any way to reconcile our differences with groups, nations, in the Islamic world, and therefore bring this conflict to an end? And there may be some people who would answer, “No, there is no way.” Well, I-- woe betide our nation, if indeed there is no alternative but endless war.

That there are people out there who are plotting. Whose minds cannot be changed. And we do need to identify them and do whatever is necessary to ensure that they cannot harm us. But, those groups, those individuals exist within a milieu, a political context, a culture.

And it seems to me that the strategic imperative is to understand that milieu, to understand the grievances that ultimately gave rise to this animosity expressing itself in terrorist activity. And as a realist, and somebody who's not given to optimism, it seems to me that there are indications that we can engage or have some hope in positive change.

I think the harder, deeper problem is the retarded development of nations in the Arab world. Meaning that the people have been denied opportunity. They've been denied opportunities to exercise freedom. But I think that we have to concede that an element of that harder, deeper problem is the West's involvement and presence in the Arab world, or more broadly, the Islamic world.

That presence, those activities, have never been motivated by British concern, French concern, or American concern, about the well-being of the people who live there. That presence has been motivated by imperial ambition, by desire to have access to oil, by geopolitical calculations relative to the Soviet Union back in Cold War days.

We have made it harder. We have made it deeper. And I think the beginning of wisdom, in terms of finding a way out, is to acknowledge that we have contributed to the difficulties we face.

The problem is that prior to 9/11, we were largely ignorant of the historical record. We have been a prisoner of a particular narrative of the 20th century that has focused on a series of events, World War I, followed by World War II, followed by the Cold War. In that narrative, the Islamic world has never been anywhere except on the periphery.

he never imagined that he would live in a world in which the biggest threat to the United States of America was Iran. I mean, threats used to be powers that somehow more or less were our equivalent. Countries that had big armies. Countries that possessed empires. Countries that had thousands of nuclear weapons. Countries that possessed the ability to destroy us in a heartbeat.

Well, Iran can't do any of those things. Iran doesn't possess any of those things. So whatever threat Iran poses is very, very limited. And certainly does not constitute any kind of a justification for yet another experiment with preventive war.

I mean, this is-- we don't live in a perfect world. In a better world, we would eliminate nuclear weapons. Well, we're the ones who invented them, we're the ones who used them, we're the ones who once defined power in terms of the size of your nuclear arsenal. So, it seems unlikely to me that we are going to lead the way to the elimination of nuclear weapons. So we're going to have to live with the snake under the bed. And I believe it's better to live with that snake under the bed than to undertake another war.

But, you know, again, when you look at it from an Iranian perspective, and I have to emphasize, it's always important in these matters to look at things from your adversary's perspective, they do have serious security threats. They have every reason to view the United States of America as hostile.

We should now appreciate the extent to which any war is a roll of the dice. That anyone who pretends to predict how a war is going to play out is-- doesn't know what they're talking about. So yes, this would be a big roll of the dice, maybe more than most. Because you and I don't know what intelligence is available about Iranian nuclear sites. I'm not sure the extent to which the intelligence community actually is confident in their intelligence.

You know, I think honesty requires us to say that were we Israeli Jews, we might evaluate us this threat somewhat differently. I'm not an Israeli Jew, I'm an American. And I believe that the basis for deciding when and where the United States rolls the dice to go to war needs to be informed above all by a calculation of what serves the interest of the American people.

Israel is in a circumstance right now where I think it perceives itself and perhaps accurately perceives itself as increasingly isolated in the world stage. Isolated, and therefore evermore dependent upon the United States as patron, partner, supporter, source of security assistance, a couple billion dollars per year.

I mean, we need to be able to see the world and ourselves and the consequences of our actions in very real terms. Nowhere more so than when it comes to the exercise of military power.

It means that history has moved on. It means that the 21st century is in all likelihood, to the extent that we can foresee the future, and we must all acknowledge that our capacity to do so is very limited, but to the extent that we think we can glimpse the future, the 21st century is going to be a multipolar order. There are going to be some number, bigger than one, some number of powers who together will either create order or replicate the catastrophes that occurred in the first half of the 20th century, when the last multipolar order collapsed.

Well, I think it does. We began the 21st century with a balanced budget. For the past few years now, we've had a trillion dollar deficit. We began the 21st century, with a military that we were not only persuaded was the best in the world, but with a military that we were certain could win any fight quickly, achieve victory.

We've been engaged in war for more than a decade now and we have no victories that we can claim. We began the decade with an economy that seemed to be cooking on all cylinders. And that for the past several years now has been in deep recession with large numbers of Americans, we're still what, over 8 percent unemployment without work, millions losing their homes. What does this signify? What do these bits of evidence signify? Well, they signify something. And what they signify is not that the American century continues or that chance about American exceptionalism constitute the basis for sound policy.

That if there was an American century, it's over. That the combination of the failure of President George W. Bush's Freedom Agenda and the onset of the Great Recession, as we call it, has opened up a new era. And we need both to contemplate on the significance of the era past, and to begin to think about the uncharted territory in which we are headed.

Memorial Day 2011

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Andrew Bacevich continues to lament the decline in this country's wish for and attempts to achieve peace.  Our attitude towards our soldiers has come 180 degrees from that of the Vietnam era. Now, we are almost dedicated to "supporting the troops", especially since this involves nothing on our part except paying our taxes, which is never mentioned in the same breath as supporting the troops.

And as for our leaders? Here's Bacevich, "For politicians sending soldiers into battle, generals presiding over long, drawn-out, inconclusive campaigns, and contractors reaping large profits as a consequence, this war-comes-first mentality is exceedingly agreeable".

Our indifference and our leaders' war-comes-first mentality results in the soldiers engaging in wars without end. None of our leaders has a plan for ending these wars or even seems to be looking for a way to end the wars. We are in a state of perpetual warfare. This is year 11 and we're still counting.

Bring back the draft!

More wise words from Andrew Bacevich

I think Mr. Bacevich has been saying truths for several years.  Here's an excerpt from his latest.

For at least the past 35 years -- that is, since well before 9/11 -- the United States has been "at war" in various quarters of the Islamic world. At no point has it demonstrated the will or the ability to finish the job. Washington's approach has been akin to treating cancer with a little bit of chemo one year and a one-shot course of radiation the next. Such gross malpractice aptly describes US military policy throughout the Greater Middle East across several decades. While there may be many reasons why the Iraq War of 2003 to 2011 and the still longer Afghanistan War yielded such disappointing results, Washington's timidity in conducting those campaigns deserves pride of place. That most Americans might bridle at the term "timidity" reflects the extent to which they have deluded themselves regarding the reality of war.

In comparison to Vietnam, for example, Washington's approach to waging its two principal post-9/11 campaigns was positively half-hearted. With the nation as a whole adhering to peacetime routines, Washington neither sent enough troops nor stayed anywhere near long enough to finish the job. Yes, we killed many tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, but if winning World War IV requires, as Cohen writes, that we "break the back" of the enemy, then we obviously didn't kill nearly enough. Nor were Americans sufficiently willing to die for the cause. In South Vietnam, 58,000 G.I.s died in a futile effort to enable that country to survive. In Iraq and Afghanistan, where the stakes were presumably much higher, we pulled the plug after fewer than 7,000 deaths.

In other words, waging World War IV would require at least a five-fold increase in the current size of the US Army -- and not as an emergency measure but a permanent one. Such numbers may appear large, but as Cohen would be the first to point out, they are actually modest when compared to previous world wars. In 1968, in the middle of World War III, the Army had more than 1.5 million active duty soldiers on its rolls -- this at a time when the total American population was less than two-thirds what it is today and when gender discrimination largely excluded women from military service. If it chose to do so, the United States today could easily field an army of two million or more soldiers.

here's the ultimate irony: even without the name, the United States has already embarked upon something akin to a world war, which now extends into the far reaches of the Islamic world and spreads further year by year. Incrementally, bit by bit, this nameless war has already expanded the scope and reach of the national security apparatus. It is diverting vast quantities of wealth to nonproductive purposes even as it normalizes the continuing militarization of the American way of life. By sowing fear and fostering impossible expectations of perfect security, it is undermining American freedom in the name of protecting it, and doing so right before our eyes.For a rich and powerful nation to conclude that it has no choice but to engage in quasi-permanent armed conflict in the far reaches of the planet represents the height of folly. Power confers choice. As citizens, we must resist with all our might arguments that deny the existence of choice. Whether advanced forthrightly by Cohen or fecklessly by the militarily ignorant, such claims will only perpetuate the folly that has already lasted far too long.

Bacevich on Mattis etal

Excerpts from an article by Andrew Bacevich in the Atlantic:

The most intriguing aspect of the exchange between Mattis and members of the committee was the absolute absence of interest, from either side, in how the armed forces of the United States have performed in recent years. In Afghanistan, in the now-resumed war in Iraq, in U.S. combat operations, large and small, in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria—none has yielded anything approximating conclusive victory. However you define U.S. aims and objectives—promoting stability? Spreading democracy? Reducing the incidence of Islamist terrorism?—they remain unfulfilled. Yet no senator thought to ask Mattis for his views on why that has been the case, what conclusions he draws from that absence of success, and how he might apply those conclusions as defense secretary.

None of the lawmakers present—several of whom made a point of promoting weapons systems produced in their state, or engaged in politically correct posturing—thought to solicit Mattis’s views on the this gap between effort and outcomes. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut elicited ironclad assurances that Mattis favored modernizing the navy’s submarine fleet, subs being made—surprise—in Connecticut. And Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York was able to advertise her credentials as a champion of women serving as combat infantrypersons. So of senatorial preening, there was plenty on display. Of questions touching on core issues of national security, there were next to none.

The strategic vacuum in which America’s endless wars drag on went unremarked upon. Whether members of the Armed Services Committee are oblivious to the absence of strategy or don’t see such matters falling within their jurisdiction is unclear. Perhaps they just don’t care.

Mattis responded to senatorial questioning like the career military officer that he is: by making the case for more. More money for maintaining and refurbishing hard-used equipment, more money to buy new weapons, more money to expand the size of the army, navy, air force, and Marine Corps. New nukes? Yes. New strategic missiles? Yes. A new long-range manned bomber? Yes. New submarines? Yes. The gold-plated, years-behind-schedule F-35? Love it. Oh, yes, Mattis promised to be a careful steward of the nation’s resources, a vow that senators pretended to take seriously. The various entities comprising the military-industrial complex, from General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, to Boeing and Raytheon, have got to be licking their chops.

It’s misguided policies based on a flawed understanding of what armed force can and cannot do, and when it should or should not be employed. On that score, Mattis and members of the Senate Armed Services are certainly on the same page. They are clueless.

Stop our wars

That's a message that Andrew Bacevich has been preaching for a while. While we may have the strongest and best military in the world, we have not won a war since WWII. Yet, there is very little talk about the recurring shortcomings of our military leadership. And we've had a lot of generals; 11 in Afghanistan and 9 in Iraq. Maybe it's time to cut our losses.

Bacevich has some comments about the 21st century view of war.  "War empowers Washington. It centralizes. It provides a rationale for federal authorities to accumulate and exercise new powers. It makes government bigger and more intrusive. It lubricates the machinery of waste, fraud, and abuse that causes tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to vanish every year. When it comes to sustaining the swamp, nothing works better than war."

Bacevich on Syria

It's kind of a long video (thirty-three minutes) but he makes some strong points not only about the current situation with Syria, but also with the fact that, since the end of the Cold War, we have become essentially a militarized nation.  Bacevich is not happy with the volunteer army. Not only does it make us more willing to wage war, but the reality is that our all-powerful volunteer army has yet to win  war. He calls the volunteer army "Washington's Army" and contrasts it with the Citizen Army that won WWII.

He speaks of more than the military.  One of his strongest points is that we refuse to accept the reality of today's Mid-East.

I have not written about him for a while, but he is one of the people we should listen to.

Bacevich again

This time it's an article in Foreign Affairs, 'Ending Endless War'. He introduces here the role of the people in our war-making endeavors. That's something you don't see very much. He brings up something I've have been advocating - restore the draft. Bacevich modifies this so that there are fewer exemptions. He introduces the idea of increasing taxes to pay for the cost of wars we enter in the future.

Our obligation

This weekend saw many ceremonies honoring our dead soldiers. Andrew Bacevich, whose son died in Iraq, thinks we need to do more than acknowledge their sacrifice. We need to hold our leaders accountable. Were the post-911 wars worth it? 

Bacevich says,"Those conflicts, the longest in US history, have exacted a terrible price without yielding anything even remotely approximating success. For proof, look no further than current conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then tally up the moral and material costs incurred since US forces first intervened in those countries. That the war against Iraq, innocent of any involvement in the 9/11 attacks, was also patently unnecessary only makes the results that much more mournful." 

His conclusion, "That accounting should begin with an acknowledgment of the grievous lapses in leadership that have marred recent American wars. To avert our eyes from evidence of duplicity, recklessness, and incompetence at the top is tantamount to betraying those who have borne the burden of the fight. Much the same can be said of the assumptions and ambitions underlying the policies that find the United States today more or less permanently at war. They require critical scrutiny. We must never forget those who gave their all while in service to the nation. But remembering requires more than unveiling monuments while offering words of consolation. It requires truth-telling, however painful or discomfiting. While remembering, in other words, we must also learn. Otherwise the expenditure of young American lives to no discernible purpose will continue."

American Exceptionalism as seen by some members of the press

Andrew Bacevich has fun reviewing the press' reaction to the Ukraine situation. He sees a number of media people citing our need to act there because we are who we are, an exceptional nation. Bacevich sees this largely as selective amnesia on their part. There are numerous examples of each tenet. Herewith some excerpts:

Tenet Number One. History is what exponents of American Exceptionalist theology choose to remember. What they choose to forget does not exist. Or, at the very least, it lacks relevance. So selective amnesia is not only permitted—it’s essential.

Tenet Number Two. The events we are commanded to remember are those that happened during the period 1933-1945. In geographic terms, we can be even more specific: They occurred in the space bounded by London, where stiff upper lips withstood the Blitz, and Auschwitz, where countless Jews were murdered. But the true epicenter was Munich, site of the great betrayal from which the horrors were said to follow.

Tenet Number Three. The events of 1933-1945 summoned the United States to determine history’s future course. This became and remains the nation’s responsibility— not only to prevent any recurrence of 1933-1945, but to create a new world in America’s own image. When Washington exercises “global leadership,” good things happen—peace reigns, economies grow, freedom rings. When Washington hesitates, the world goes to hell in a hand basket.

Tenet Number Four. Too few ordinary Americans recognize the nation’s providentially ordained responsibility. The unwashed masses are too quick to give into the temptation to shirk their duty.

Precept Number Five. Political leaders without guts or gumption, seeing the world in shades of gray rather than black-and-white, facilitate this shirking of duty. The key to preventing Americans from behaving irresponsibility, the world once again experiencing the horrors of 1933-1945, is visionary and charismatic leadership. The Ukraine crisis provides only the latest example of our wimpy president’s failure to lead.

Special Ops

It's Andrew Bacevich again.  This time he's inveighing against the military Special Operations forces, Green Berets, Seals, etc.

Did you know that there was a Special Operations Forces industry?  Their annual conference drew 8,000 people, including the Special Ops commander, Admiral William McRaven.  I guess one should expect a conference - which is basically a sales opportunity - when the US  spends $2 billion a year on the latest devices to kill people.

What gets Bacevich is the aura of privilege and the secrecy attendant on Special Ops doings which insulates them in most cases from having to worry about politics.  We don't hear that much about the doings and never when they fail. Since 9/11, the forces have only become more prominent. Their budget has quadrupled, their staff doubled.  And our current president is in love with them, so you can only see the money and people increasing and transparency decreasing.

Accept Reality

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In the July issue of The Atlantic Andrew Bacevich continues his crusade to convince us that it is better to accept our limitations and the reality in Afghanistan now than to continue to waste people's lives and money on the quixotic war in Afghanistan.

On the money side he projects a cost in Afghanistan of at least $1 trillion, which is what Iraq has cost so far, without counting the future bills for veterans' medical expenses. In Bacevich's view it's money we don't have. He has a point.

He advocates an acceptance of the Afghan world where tribal chiefs rule, as long as we motivate them (with money, of course) to keep the really bad guys out. He has a point.

However, I doubt our government will follow his advice. Someday there may be a monument to our soldiers like the monument to the Russian soldiers shown here.

Just not enough volunteers

Today's Boston Globe carries an article entitled, "The Failure of an All-Volunteer Military", which argues that the volunteer army came about because, after the Cold War, we "came to see war as something other than a human enterprise; the secret of military superiority ostensibly lay in the microchip. The truth is that the sinews of military power lie among the people, who legitimate war and sustain it." But, in the opinion of the author, Andrew Bacevich, because of our approval of the volunteer military, we have forfeited our right to legitimate this war and are unwilling to make the sacrifices that are necessary when a nation, not its mercenaries, is at war.

I disagree with Bacevich about the people's ability to legitimate a war. I don't think that has ever happened. Our leaders have declared war and we had little say about it. My WWII childhood has embedded the idea in me that war means sacrifice for all of us. But Bush's idea of sacrifice is not the same as mine.

The article also caused me to think about whether enough people want to spend their career in the military so that the country is truly capable of defending itself in a variety of hostile situations.

Strong Language

Andrew Bacevich certainly does not mince words when giving his opinion of our Commander-in-Chief. Here's his latest from a blog in The New Republic.

Today, when they look at Washington, Americans see a cool, dispassionate, calculating president whose administration lacks a moral core. For prosecution exhibit number one, we need look no further than the meandering course of Obama’s war, its casualties and costs mounting without discernible purpose.

Obama doesn’t want to be in Afghanistan any more than Benjamin Netanyahu wants to be in the West Bank. Yet like the Israeli prime minister, the president lacks the guts to get out. It’s all so complicated. There are risks involved. Things might go wrong. There’s an election to think about.

So the war continues. Sustaining some artfully updated version of the status quo becomes the easier (or more expedient) course. Thus does a would-be messiah promising salvation and renewal succumb to the imperatives of “politics”—with young soldiers and their families left to bear the consequences.

The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?

My emphases.

Learning from Israel

Andrew Bacevich contends that Israel's incursion into Gaza is an admission of strategic failure. It will not end the violence; it will make it worse.

Rather than enhancing Israeli security, occupation has produced a never-ending war of attrition. Although the Israeli army seldom loses an engagement in that war, the conflict is one in which Israel cannot realistically expect to achieve definitive victory. However great the Israeli edge in tanks and fighter-bombers, demography rather than weaponry is likely to determine the conflict's ultimate outcome: That the Palestinian and Arab Israeli birthrate far exceeds the birthrate among Jewish Israelis is a fact with enormous strategic implications.

There are three lessons we should draw from the Israeli experience:

First, getting in may be easy; getting out is the hard part. Once embraced, a tar baby becomes impossible to release. For this reason, the notion that intervention offers a handy problem solver is an illusion.

Second, occupation by outsiders produces alienation, resistance, and radicalization, nowhere more so than in the Islamic world. The longer the stay, the more severe the reaction.

Third, as instruments of pacification, conventional armies possess modest utility. Rather than facilitating political solutions, coercion only exacerbates the underlying problem.

Some questions for the candidates

From Andrew Bacevich:

• What is the present-day justification for maintaining the US nuclear “triad,” a strike force consisting of manned bombers and land-based ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles?
• Why is the Pentagon embarking upon a decades-long, trillion-dollar program to modernize that triad, fielding a new generation of bombers, missiles and submarines along with an arsenal of new warheads? Is that program necessary?
• How do advances in non-nuclear weaponry — for example, in the realm of cyberwarfare — affect theories of nuclear deterrence devised by the likes of Kahn and Wohlstetter during the 1950s and 1960s? Does the logic of those theories still pertain?
• What lessons should be drawn from America’s costly and disappointing post-9/11 wars and how should those lessons apply to future policy?

Do you agree?

Andrew Bacevich inveighs against the idea, according to David Brooks and others,  that "America is the grateful inheritor of other people's gifts. It has a spiritual connection to all people in all places, but also an exceptional role. America culminates history. It advances a way of life and a democratic model that will provide people everywhere with dignity. The things Americans do are not for themselves only, but for all mankind."

He spells out some of the results of this viewpoint: 

Here in any event is a brief inventory of what that euphemism conceals: thousands of Americans needlessly killed; tens of thousands grievously wounded in body or spirit; trillions of dollars wasted; millions of Iraqis dead, injured, or displaced; this nation's moral standing compromised by its resort to torture, kidnapping, assassination, and other perversions; a region thrown into chaos and threatened by radical terrorist entities like the Islamic State that US military actions helped foster. And now, if only as an oblique second-order bonus, we have Donald Trump's elevation to the presidency to boot.

Questions for the candidates

Andrew Bacevich asked these questions in an article about Obama's record:
What exactly does Great Britain bring to the “special relationship” that should justify its continuation?
Even if Berlin was worth fighting for a half-century ago, why does it follow that Kiev is worth fighting for today?
Does “the West” actually exist? And even if it does, why should the racially and culturally diverse United States choose to affiliate with that one particular tribe?
With the world’s economic center of gravity shifting to Asia, what is the residual significance of free-riding Europe?
How should radical changes in the global energy environment affect the status of the Persian Gulf in the U.S. strategic hierarchy?
Given the paltry results achieved through myriad recent U.S. armed interventions in the Islamic world, what exactly is the present-day utility of force?
Under what definition of the term “ally” do countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Pakistan—each routinely behaving in ways contrary to U.S. interests—qualify for that designation?