Book Reviews
Webb Reviews: The
New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War
by Andrew J. Bacevich
The American Scholar
Spring 2005
History, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "has many
cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues, deceives with
whispering ambitions, guides us by vanities." And the great poet
certainly would be having fun if he were alive today, watching the
absolutely unbelievable shifts in alliances and rhetoric that have
marked recent debates over American foreign policy.
As the Vietnam War was winding down, few could have imagined how the deck chairs on the good ship America would be so re-arranged in the space of one generation. The thoroughly discredited Truman doctrine of interventionism has been re-hatched, pumped full of steroids, and sold to the American people as the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. Many of the same personalities who used protests against the Vietnam War as a device to decimate the entire American system (David Horowitz comes immediately to mind) now claim that even questioning the logic of the Iraq War is, in effect, treason.
A years-long media onslaught that brought down Presidents, uncovering even the most minute government irregularity, has been replaced by celebrity journalism where the watchdogs of government have turned into eager puppies, with one thriving news channel functioning as little more than the ruling party's ministry of propaganda. The direct intellectual descendants of the civilian think-tankers who so misjudged Vietnam's battlefield strategy took us to war in Iraq by propounding their own false optimism.
On the other side Vietnam's
Great Divide, the most intelligent warnings about the downside of an
elective war against a nation that was not directly threatening us
came from long-serving military officers rather than the
rabble-rousing Left. And America's military men and women have
ascended from the role of national scapegoats to that of revered
cultural heroes.
Andrew Bacevich in his book The New American Militarism (Oxford,
261pp.) gives us an excellent first attempt to explain how these
turns of events interrelate. Bacevich brings the right balance of
qualifications to such an analysis. A West Pointer who served in
Vietnam and then earned a doctorate in history from Princeton, he
now directs the Center for International Relations at Boston
University.
Like many who know war first-hand and spent their young years
studying the history of the use of military power, the author was a
cautionary voice against the invasion of Iraq. In an explanatory
preface he details his own intellectual journey from an early
affiliation with the neoconservative movement to concern about its
methods and its aims, and finally to a view that the American
political system has become "fundamentally corrupt," both ends of
the political spectrum having become obsessed with power for its own
sake. This corruption, he writes, is accentuated by an historic
transition, with the power to make war forfeited to the Executive
branch of government at the same time the Presidency has been both
"militarized" and compromised by Machiavellian forces. Thus, much of
the American system has become a sham, and in the foreign policy
arena dedicated to ever-more-frequent war - "it is the mainstream
itself, the professional liberals and the professional
conservatives, who define the problem (italics his). Two parties
monopolize and, as if by prior agreement, trivialize national
politics."
In easily readable chapters, Bacevich breaks apart the components
that he asserts are feeding this new national militarism - a
changing Presidency whose emphasis in international affairs is
focusing too heavily on the use of military force; a military
profession which in its struggle to adapt to post-Vietnam realities
"made militarism possible, and has "ended up paying much of the
price;" the emergence, ruthlessness, and eventual foreign policy
dominance of a small group of neoconservative intellectuals; the
societal impact of Hollywood; the hardening of the conservative
Christian community, which provides a "presumptive moral
palatability" to American militarism; the transition of American
strategic development following World War II, away from the military
and into the hands of scientists who regularly fail to comprehend
war's human dimensions; and an oversized emphasis on the Middle
East, coupled with relentless efforts at the second tier of
government, which has dangerously "converted the Persian Gulf into
the epicenter of American grand strategy."
Running through these pages is the first overt articulation of a
confrontation that has slowly been gathering steam for more than ten
years. This confrontation goes to the core of the American
experience. One side is represented heavily by those with a
classical training in America's past wars (and frequently with
experience in having fought them), who would send American forces
into harm's way only if the nation is directly threatened. The other
side is dominated by a group of theorists, most of whom have never
seen the inside of a military uniform, who adhere to an essentially
Trotskyite notion that America should be exporting its ideology
around the world at the point of a gun.
The nexus of this battle includes issues such as who should serve in
time of war, and the conditions under which the nation should
actually decide to use military force, both of which have surfaced
with renewed vigor as the Iraq War lengthens. But the key focus of
this debate is further in the shadows, rarely emerging in the
superficial coverage of the war or the congressional hearings that
usually address such surface issues as funding or the inevitable
scandal of the week. That focus regards who should determine
America's strategic interests, in the process impelling the nation
forward in terms of its economy, its international relationships,
and ultimately when, where, why, for how long, and under whose
authority it will commit its military on foreign soil.
The most illuminating chapters in The New American Militarism
reflect the author's unease with the theorists who at present
control these issues. His chapter on the neoconservative movement is
admirable for its lack of rancor and for its analysis of the slash
and burn political tactics this small group of influential
intellectuals has brought to the national forum. It is chilling to
read the rhetoric of this movement's intellectual stars - Charles
Krauthammer intoning "power is its own reward," Michael Ledeen
claiming "peace in this world only follows victory in war," and the
author concluding that "for neoconservatives like [Robert] Kagan,
the purpose of the Defense Department was no longer to defend the
United States or to deter would-be aggressors but to transform the
international order by transforming its constituent parts."
The chapter regarding the takeover of military strategy by academic
theorists following World War II will help thinking Americans
comprehend an area of national policy that is rarely discussed or
debated. Of particular interest are the author's paragraphs on the
scientific brilliance - and military ignorance - of the oft- revered
Albert Wohlstetter, who served as a tutor and intellectual godfather
to several of those who conceived the present strategy for the use
of force in Iraq and other Middle East nations.
There are uneven sections in the book. While the author correctly
outlines both the power of the Christian Right and its ability to
provide moral cover for the continuous use of force, he misperceives
the history and motivations of the Christian Right by characterizing
them in religious rather than ethnic terms, and thus mislabels the
movement as having been anti-military in the past. Actually this
movement - as opposed to other Protestant sects who have indeed been
anti-military - is centered in the Scots-Irish culture, which is the
most pro-military ethnic group in the country. Billy Graham, Pat
Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, are all reportedly descended from the
Scots-Irish migration. This group also is the most heavily
pro-Israel section of America other than in the Jewish community
itself, based on its own view of religious doctrine.
The author also holds a deeply felt, and in some cases wrongly
placed, opprobrium for President Ronald Reagan. At the outset, he
characterizes Reagan as "[Woodrow] Wilson's truest disciple," then
contradicts himself later, indicating that Reagan was too timid for
the "Wilsonian" neo-conservatives. The neoconservatives did
"infiltrate" the Reagan administration and frequently threw its
foreign policy into contradictory disarray. But it would be wrong to
disassociate many of Reagan's personal decisions from his
determination to face down Soviet expansion in places like
Afghanistan. And it should be remembered that the ill-fated military
mission in Beirut did not involve the unilateral use of American
force, but rather the injection of military units from Britain,
France, Italy and the United States, whose mission was to help
separate different factions after Israel's 1982 invasion of that
country.
With respect to the American military, the author characterizes the
Cold War from an Army-centric perspective, focusing on the ground
threat in central Europe. In reality, the gravest real threat from
the Soviet Union - now being replicated by an expansionist China -
was from the growth of its Naval forces, particularly in the
tinderbox of northeast Asia. The author also lays the blame for the
military's loss of credibility with its civilian counterparts as
being derived heavily from the actions of Colin Powell and Wesley
Clark. He does well to focus on the sometimes-uncomfortable legacies
of these two officers, but the military's difficulties with its
civilian counterparts has a far more complex history - in many cases
running directly to the takeover of American strategic formulation
following World War II, which Mr. Bacevich himself describes so
lucidly.
In sum, it will not be surprising if those now in power, and their
intellectual patrons, attempt to ignore this book. The rest of us
should make sure to read it.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS