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.