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Andrew Bacevich has written another authoritative and well written book examining the U.S. military and its influence on the United States. His writing - here as with his earlier works [1] - is provocative, challenging, well researched, informative, and logically argued. Only someone thoroughly imbued with the rhetoric of U.S. benign stewardship of global affairs and ignorant of many key events within recent and current U.S. foreign affairs might be able to ignore Bacevich's presentations and contentions about U.S. foreign policy and U.S. militarism.
This most recent work, Washington Rules, is appropriately titled and well focused on the one main theme that "Washington' - the political and military structures of U.S. government - is responsible for and the only country capable of maintaining world peace through global leadership and the only means to do so is through military might. This leads to Bacevich's "trinity": a global military presence, global power projection, and global intervention. The route this trinity takes through successive governments from Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon through to Bush, Clinton, and more Bush demonstrates that it is neither a Democratic nor a Republican ideal but is instead a government institutional ideal that all presidencies have bought into up to and including Obama. The media presents presidents as being the ""Decider, a president all too often becomes little more than the medium through which power is exercised."
Certainly there have been differences in approaches, permutations of ideas and means, changes in structures and devices, but the over-arching "American credo of global leadership and the sacred trinity of U.S. military practice - commit the United States to what is in effect a condition of permanent national security crisis." This permanent crisis, fostered first by anti-communism and now by anti-terrorism, this trinity, this strategy "has propelled the United States into a condition approximating perpetual war."
Ironically, by being so engaged, "this reliance on military might creates excuses for the United States to avoid serious engagement" making it "unnecessary to attend to what others might think or to consider how their aspirations might differ from our own." That also leads to "an excuse to avoid serious self-engagement" to the extent that "citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy."
Those statements, coming from a retired U.S. army colonel who has taken it upon himself to educate himself about the discrepancies he perceived after the fall of the Berlin Wall, are a powerful indictment of the U.S. military, political, and economic structures that allow a state of perpetual war while ignoring the problems at home, "Fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit." Education becomes part of the answer as "When Americans demonstrate a willingness to engage seriously with others, combined with the courage to engage seriously with themselves, then real education just might begin."
All the Presidents
After these introductory comments, Bacevich takes the reader on a tour through the highlight events of U.S. foreign policy as dealt with by successive presidents.
Starting with Eisenhower, the base line was set for a paradigm of global dominance via covert activities from the CIA under the tutelage of Allen Dulles, and overt activities with the start up of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), under the tutelage of General Curtis LeMay. The CIA's "successes' included the overthrow of the Mossadegh constitutional democracy in Iran in 1953 [2] and the CIA instigated coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guaman in Guatemala. [3] LeMay's success was the creation of the overwhelming nuclear force of bombers that he provided the battle plans for, worrying little about costs as per Congress, "SAC served as an institutionalized economic stimulus program."
Both were intent on defeating the looming national security crisis of communism. While Dulles and Lemay "testified to [their] hopes of averting a showdown with the Soviet Union, each promoted patterns of behaviour that increased the risk of such a confrontation."
Transiting from Vietnam
From that base Bacevich works forward in time. The Kennedy years witnessed Cuba and Vietnam, two significant events which reinforced the U.S.' adherence to the "trinity' of global affairs. It also witnessed the development of a "fraternity of nuclear strategists" who were "Trafficking in jargon tricked out as profundities" generating "a dizzying array of obfuscating twaddle." Not much has changed there except that perhaps the "twaddle" gets piled higher and deeper as time goes on.
Vietnam, "a war fought to sustain the Washington consensus," resulted after all was said and done as a transformation of "a people's army into a professional force," in which "decision makers gain[ed] a free hand to use a military over which the American people had forfeited any ownership."
Former UN ambassador and secretary of state, Madeleine Albright serves as Bacevich's focus to demonstrate how the Washington rules had been "fully refurbished" for delivery "into a new millennium." He quotes four significant statements from her, the two which stand out are, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" and the usual U.S. boasts that ""we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further"into the future."
Bacevich recognizes the language as "pretentious"grating"and royal" yet realizes that she was "deadly earnest"and expressing sentiments widely shared across the foreign policy elite." These views, "central to the Washington consensus"the pursuit of exalted ends empowers the United States to employ whatever means it deems necessary," resulting in, as described earlier in the book, "highly flexible moral standards."
Into the Gulf
The presidency under Jimmy Carter is often viewed in the media as that of a "peace' president, but Carter did more than his share to push forward the military power of the U.S. He reneged on his vow to remove troops from Korea, and under his watch, the Pentagon "began developing a major new base in the Indian Ocean on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia, a project that involved expelling the island's inhabitants." This ethnic cleansing of a colonial British claim set up the major base in the Indian Ocean from which the U.S. watches and operates throughout the Middle East and all of Southern Asia.
