Presidential timber?

I say this only half in jest. Andrew Bacevich for president!

This guy is a straight arrow, West Point grad, Vietnam War vet, who left the military to get his Ph.D. from Princeton, and now teaches at B.U.

Until fairly recently a National Review contributor, he (along with James Carroll, who literally grew up in the Pentagon) is one of the few military industrial complex insiders who has been able to see what an abominable war machine America has created. He's especially good on America's "shortsighted infatuation with military power," and the (mostly sinister) ways the military has changed in recent years. And he, like Carroll, has come around to the full horror of our nation's blind acceptance of strategic bombing and nuclear weapons.

This week Bacevich has been speaking to Tom Engelhardt, who has recently featured a terrific series of interviews with the likes of Mike Davis, Katrina vanden Heuvel and Chamlers Johnson. Here are a few excerpts from his chat with Bacevich.

In any case, the Cold War essentially ends in 1989 when the [Berlin] Wall goes down; in '91, the Soviet Union collapses. I get out of the Army in 1992 and I'm waiting with bated breath to see what impact the end of the Cold War is going to have on U.S. policy, particularly military policy. The answer is, essentially, none. We come out even more firmly committed to the notion of U.S. military global supremacy. Not because there was an enemy -- in 1992, ‘93, ‘94, there's no enemy -- but because we've come to see military supremacy and global hegemony as good in and of themselves.

The end of the Cold War sees us using military power more frequently, while our ambitions, our sense of what we're supposed to do in the world, become more grandiose. There's all this bloated talk about "the end of history," and the "right side of history," and the "indispensable nation," politicians and pundits pretending to know the destiny of humankind. So I began to question my understanding of what had determined U.S. behavior during the Cold War. The orthodox narrative said that the U.S. behaved as it did because of them, because of external threats. I came to believe that explanation was not entirely wrong but limited. You get closer to the truth by recognizing that what makes us behave the way we behave comes from inside. I came to buy into the views of historians like Charles Beard and William Appleton Williams who emphasize that foreign policy is an outgrowth of domestic policy, in particular of the structure of the American political economy.

So I became a critic of U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s, a pretty outspoken one.

TD: You wrote a book then with the word "empire" in the title...

Bacevich: Yes, because I became convinced that what we saw in the 90s from both Democrats and Republicans was an effort to expand an informal American empire. Fast forward to 9/11 and its aftermath, and the Bush doctrine of preventive war as implemented in Iraq, and the full dimensions of our imperial ambitions become evident for all to see.

I have to say, I certainly supported the Afghanistan War. I emphatically believed that we had no choice but to take down the Taliban regime in order to demonstrate clearly the consequences of any nation tolerating, housing, supporting terrorists who attack us. But the Iraq War just struck me as so unnecessary, unjustifiable, and reckless that... I don't know how to articulate its impact except that it put me unalterably in the camp of those who had come to see American power as the problem, not the solution. And it brought me close to despair that the response of the internal opposition and of the American people generally proved to be so tepid, so ineffective. It led me to conclude that we are in deep, deep trouble.

An important manifestation of that trouble is this shortsighted infatuation with military power that goes beyond even what I wrote about in my most recent book. Again, it revolves around this question of energy and oil. There's such an unwillingness to confront the dilemmas we face as a people that I find deeply troubling. I know we're a democracy. We have elections. But it's become a procedural democracy. Our politics are not really meaningful. In a meaningful politics, you and I could argue about important differences, and out of that argument might come not resolution or reconciliation, but at least an awareness of the consequences of going your way as opposed to mine. We don't even have that argument. That's what's so dismaying.

TD: You've used the word "crusade" and spoken of this administration as "intoxicated with the mission of salvation." I was wondering what kind of "ism" you think we've been living with in these years?

Bacevich: That's a great question, and it's not enough to say that it's democratic capitalism. Certainly, our "ism" incorporates a religious dimension -- in the sense of believing that God created this nation for a purpose that has to do with universal values.

We have not as a people come to terms with our relationship to military power and to the wars we've engaged in and the ways we've engaged in them. Now, James Carroll in his new book, House of War, is very much preoccupied with strategic bombing in World War II and since, and especially with our use of, and attitude toward, nuclear weapons. His preoccupation is understandable because those are the things we can't digest and we can't cough up. You know, at the end of the day, we, the missionary nation, the crusader state, certain of our righteousness, remain the only people to have used nuclear weapons in anger -- indeed, to have used them as a weapon of terror.

TD: Air power, even though hardly covered in our media in Iraq, has been the American way of war since World War II, hasn't it?

Bacevich: Certainly that "ism" that defines us has a large technological component, doesn't it? I mean, we are the people of technology. We see the future as a technological one and can't imagine a problem that doesn't have technological solutions...

TD: ...except when it comes to oil.

Bacevich: Quite true. In many respects, the technological artifact that defines the last century is the airplane. With the airplane came a distinctive style of warfare. The Italians dropped the first bomb in North Africa; the Japanese killed their share of civilians from the air as did the Germans, but we and our British cousins outdid them all. I've been thinking more and more that our record of strategic bombing is not simply an issue of historical interest.

We are not who we believe we are and, in some sense, others perceive us more accurately than we do ourselves. The President has described a version of history -- as did Clinton, by the way -- beginning with World War II in which the United States is the liberator, Americans are the bringers of freedom. There is truth to that narrative, but it's not the whole truth; and, quite frankly, it's not the truth that matters a lick, let's say, to the Islamic world today. Muslims don't give a darn that we brought Hitler or the Third Reich to its knees. What they're aware of is all kinds of other behavior, particularly in their neck of the woods, that had nothing to do with spreading democracy and freedom, that had everything to do with power, with trying to establish relations that maximized the benefit to the United States and American society. We don't have to let our hearts bleed about that. That's the way politics works, but let's not delude ourselves either. When President George W. Bush says, "America stands for freedom and liberty, and we're coming to liberate you," it's absurd to expect people in that part of the world to take us seriously. That's not what they've seen and known and experienced in dealing with the United States.

TD: And, of course, within the councils of this administration, they threw out anyone who knew anything about the record of U.S. policy in the Islamic world.

Bacevich: Because those experts would have challenged the ideologically soaked version of history that this administration has attempted to carry over into the 21st century. Only if we begin to see ourselves more clearly, will we be able to understand how others see us. We need to revise the narrative of the American Century and recognize that it has been about a host of other things that are far more problematic than liberation. There can be no understanding the true nature of the American century without acknowledging the reality of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Hanoi, and Haiphong.

Read the whole interview