Open ended war
The final section of the book examines the current overbearing military presence that has extended the Washington rules into an era of proclaimed never ending war. This “Long War”, the “Global war on terror”, two terms now trying to be forgotten – along with Bush’s ill-considered but with elements of truth “Crusade” – represents an era when “open-ended war became accepted policy.” Congress under the Democrats “routinely voted the money needed to ensure the war’s continuation, tacitly signaling their fealty to the Washington consensus.” While Obama campaigned on the slippery concept of change but only “produced results that served primarily to affirm the status quo,” “little of substance has changed” with the Washington rules, only affirmation and extension.
Two groups accommodated willingly to this enterprise. First, “The American people more generally, accommodated themselves to this prospect,” even though “victory had essentially become indefinable and the benefits accruing to Americans were at best obscure.” The second group more obviously was the military itself, wherein “An officer corps that had once resolved to avoid protracted war at all costs now contemplated an era of conflict without end,” and “persuaded [the generation of officers represented by Patraeus] to see armed conflict as an open-ended enterprise.”
Surge, COIN, and Obama’s accommodation
The surge in Afghanistan, (modeled on the surge in Iraq that was “successful” only by a co-relationship with U.S. money buying off the Sunni insurgents) demonstrated that “By escalating the U.S. military presence there, the president in effect ratified the Long War.” The “counter-insurgency campaign” – COIN, or more accurately a “targeted assassination campaign” that is far from accurate — became the new idea introduced into “Obama’s war.”
Obama does not ride easy with Bacevich as with the surge, “the actual ability to exercise choice had already passed from his hands.” The result, reiterated, is the ratification of the long war, wherein “the president had effectively forfeited his opportunity to undertake a serious reassessment of the basic approach to national security formulated over the course of the preceding six decades….Real change would have to wait for another day.”
Education
Recognizing that “there is no end in sight, even though the conditions that first gave rise to Washington rules have ceased to exist,” that “the problem set has changed, while the solutions proffered…remain largely the same,” Bacevich looks for a solution.
First he returns to the credo and trinity express in his introduction. These Washington rules “Deliver profit, power, and privilege to a long list of beneficiaries: elected and appointed officials, corporate executives and corporate lobbyists, admirals and generals, functionaries…media personalities and policy intellectuals from universities and research organizations.” The credo combined with the money and power opportunities “make the imperial city on the Potomac one of the most captivating, corrupt, and corrupting places on the face of the earth.” If the status quo remains, the future holds “a military that is perpetually at war and…an economy propped up by perpetual borrowing caus[ing] one or both to collapse.”
Alternately, Bacevich sees the U.S.’ role as to model democracy and freedom rather than impose it, to create at home a “more perfect union” that is a beacon to illuminate and exemplify the way, and “any policy impeding that enterprise — as open-ended war surely does — is misguided and pernicious,” not to mention deadly and disastrous at home as well as abroad.
He asserts that “No evidence exists — none — to suggest that U.S. efforts will advance the cause of global peace.” Military supremacy is both an illusion and a disaster, and U.S. forces should primarily be stationed in the U.S. The only effort that will succeed is that “U.S. troops should withdraw from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia forthwith.” Unfortunately in that regard, “The Washington consensus persists…because if conforms to and reinforces widely accepted, if highly problematic, aspects of American civic culture,” a large part of which is “individual choice above collective responsibility and immediate gratification over long term well being.”
Ultimately, “If change is to come, it must come from the people.” Thus the need for education “to take on the responsibilities of an active and engaged citizenship – has become especially acute,” otherwise “Over the horizon a shipwreck of epic proportions awaits.”
A powerful conclusion, from a well-written, well-sequenced work. Bacevich has a logical, coherent thread throughout his arguments about the militarization of U.S. society by way of the national security strategies. As for education, it initially rises from seeing enough or being given enough information that is accurate (media take note) such that “dissonance [is] too great to ignore. The ensuing process of confronting illusions…and of dissecting the contradictions besetting U.S. policy [is] sometimes painful and never easy…The ability to see things as they are, without blinders, is [a great gift]”
Bacevich has been well gifted.
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[1] see Andrew J. Bacevich:
American Empire, Harvard University Press (2002);
The New American Militarism, Oxford University Press (2005);
The Limits of Power, Metropolitan Books (2008).
[2] see Stephen Kinzer:
All the Shah’s Men, John Wiley & Sons (2003);
Overthrow, Times Books – Henry Holt and Company (2006).
[3] see Nick Cullather, Secret History, Stanford University Press (1999) for details of this overthrow.
