I totally endorse Andy Bacevich’s new book Endless War. Though I am for a professional, but small and hard hitting military, it is based on the doctrine of 3-3-3 which I discussed in earlier blogs. The bottom line, we have too many problems at home to continually go out and make everyone smaller versions of the USA. But Dr. Bacevich’s book goes beyond that, he correctly states it is more than a feeling good doctrine (which is a facade), it is actually the influence of big money behind our continual wars of occupation, using whatever doctrinal fad is used that month by one of the high paid think tanks. The flavor this month is COIN (Counter Insurgency) where we have convinced ourselves of both parties that we can fight wars at low cost. When in fact, we may have low casualties (as compared to past wars), but how about the domestic civilian population? Additionally, in a world dominated by 4th Generation Warfare, our nation, led by the think tanks, refuse to reform the military from the 2nd Generation (with few exceptions 3rd Generation culture), while selling a doctrine that requires all the premises of a 3rd Generation Force. As several other heros have pointed out, but Andy Bacevich leaves out, such as Franklin C Spinney, Winslow Wheeler, Pierre Sprey, G.I. Wilson, William S. Lind and Douglas MacGregor, as well as the late COL John Boyd, we are a 2nd Generation military trying to fight 4th Generation wars, with disastrous results both abroad and here at home as we go deeper in debt while living the lie where our public becomes ever larger consumers in a crowded world of shortages. It is this dismissive belief that puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. citizens who have an obligation to have HONEST and HARD HITTING debates, and then go to the ballet box, put into office true leaders, not the corrupt fools we have now. As Bacevich has pointed out, the reality is the opposite, as long as the goods flow, the oil remains cheap, and lies are told regarding the rest of the world, such as dismissing the dangerous levels of overpopulation (organized religion tells them to go out and continue to bear fruit), the public continues to live with its heads buried in the sand.
Have a happy Labor Day,
Don
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Bass-t.html?ref=review&pagewanted=print
Endless War
By GARY J. BASS
WASHINGTON RULES
America’s Path to Permanent War
By Andrew J. Bacevich
286 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25
In 1947, Hanson W. Baldwin, the hawkish military correspondent of this
newspaper, warned that the demands of preparing America for a possible
war would “wrench and distort and twist the body politic and the body
economic . . . prior to war.” He wondered whether America could
confront the Soviet Union “without becoming a ‘garrison state’ and
destroying the very qualities and virtues and principles we originally
set about to save.”
It is that same dread of a martial America that drives Andrew J.
Bacevich today. Bacevich forcefully denounces the militarization that
he says has already become a routine, unremarked-upon part of our
daily lives — and will only get worse as America fights on in
Afghanistan and beyond. He rips into what he calls a postwar American
dogma “so deeply embedded in the American collective consciousness as
to have all but disappeared from view.” “Washington Rules” is a
tough-minded, bracing and intelligent polemic against some 60 years of
American militarism.
This outrage at a warlike America has special bite coming from
Bacevich. No critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have
brighter conservative credentials. He is a blunt-talking Midwesterner,
a West Point graduate who served for 23 years in the United States
Army, a Vietnam veteran who retired as a colonel, and a sometime
contributor to National Review. “By temperament and upbringing, I had
always taken comfort in orthodoxy,” he writes. But George W. Bush’s
decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Bacevich says, “pushed me fully into
opposition. Claims that once seemed elementary — above all, claims
relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power — now
appeared preposterous.”
From Harry S. Truman’s presidency to today, Bacevich argues, Americans
have trumpeted the credo that they alone must “lead, save, liberate
and ultimately transform the world.” That crusading mission is
implemented by what Bacevich caustically calls “the sacred trinity”:
“U.S. military power, the Pentagon’s global footprint and an American
penchant for intervention.” This threatening posture might have made
some sense in 1945, he says, but it is catastrophic today. It
relegates America to “a condition of permanent national security
crisis.”
Bacevich has two main targets in his sights. The first are the
commissars of the national security establishment, who perpetuate
these “Washington rules” of global dominance. By Washington, he means
not just the federal government, but also a host of satraps who gain
power, cash or prestige from this perpetual state of emergency:
defense contractors, corporations, big banks, interest groups, think
tanks, universities, television networks and The New York Times. He
complains that an unthinking Washington consensus on global
belligerence is just as strong among mainstream Democrats as among
mainstream Republicans. Those who step outside this monolithic view,
like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul, are quickly dismissed as crackpots,
Bacevich says. This leaves no serious checks or balances against the
overweening national security state.
Bacevich’s second target is the sleepwalking American public. He says
that they notice foreign policy only in the depths of a disaster that,
like Vietnam or Iraq, is too colossal to ignore. As he puts it, “The
citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity
to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national
security policy.”
Bacevich is singularly withering on American public willingness to
ignore those who do their fighting for them. He warns of “the
evisceration of civic culture that results when a small praetorian
guard shoulders the burden of waging perpetual war, while the great
majority of citizens purport to revere its members, even as they
ignore or profit from their service.” Here he has a particular right
to be heard: on May 13, 2007, his son Andrew J. Bacevich Jr., an Army
first lieutenant, was killed on combat patrol in Iraq. Bacevich does
not discuss his tragic loss here, but wrote devastatingly about it at
the time in The Washington Post: “Memorial Day orators will say that a
G.I.’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S.
government assigns to a soldier’s life: I’ve been handed the check.”
Bacevich is less interested in foreign policy here (he offers only
cursory remarks about the objectives and capabilities of countries
like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran) than in the way he thinks
militarism has corrupted America. In his acid account of the
inexorable growth of the national security state, he emphasizes not
presidents, who come and go, but the architects of the system that
envelops them: Allen W. Dulles, who built up the C.I.A., and Curtis E.
LeMay, who did the same for the Strategic Air Command. Both of them,
Bacevich says, would get memorials on the Mall in Washington if we
were honest about how the capital really works.
The mandarins thrived under John F. Kennedy, whose administration “was
fixating on Fidel Castro with the same feverish intensity as the Bush
administration exactly 40 years later was to fixate on Saddam Hussein
— and with as little strategic logic.” The Washington consensualists
were thrown badly off balance by defeat in Vietnam but, Bacevich says,
soon regained their stride under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton —
setting the stage for George W. Bush. Barack Obama campaigned on
change and getting out of Iraq, but when it comes to the war in
Afghanistan or military budgets, he is, Bacevich insists, just another
cat’s-paw for the Washington establishment: “Obama would not challenge
the tradition that Curtis LeMay and Allen Dulles had done so much to
erect.”
Bacevich sometimes overdoes the high dudgeon. He writes, “The folly
and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into
an ill-defined and open-ended ‘global war on terror’ without the
foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won
and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by
slightly mad German warlords.” Which slightly mad German warlords
exactly? Bacevich, an erudite historian, could mean some princelings
or perhaps Kaiser Wilhelm II, but the standard reading will be Hitler.
And he underplays some of the ways in which Americans have resisted
militarism. The all-volunteer force, for all its deep inequities, is a
testament to American horror at conscription. He never mentions Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, the great New York senator who fought government
secrecy and quixotically tried to abolish the C.I.A. after the end of
the cold war. Although Bacevich admires Dwight D. Eisenhower for his
farewell address warning against the forces of the
“military-industrial complex,” he slams Eisenhower for enabling those
same forces as president. Yet the political scientist Aaron L.
Friedberg and other scholars credit Eisenhower for resisting demands
for huge boosts in defense spending.
Bacevich, in his own populist way, sees himself as updating a
tradition — from George Washington and John Quincy Adams to J. William
Fulbright and Martin Luther King Jr. — that calls on America to
exemplify freedom but not actively to spread it. It isn’t every
American’s tradition (and it offers pretty cold comfort to Poles,
Rwandans and Congolese), but it’s one that’s necessary to keep the
country from going off the rails. As foreign policy debates in the
run-up to the November elections degenerate into Muslim-bashing
bombast, the country is lucky to have a fierce, smart peacemonger like
Bacevich.
Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at
Princeton, is the author of “Freedom’s Battle” and “Stay the Hand of
Vengeance.”
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