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I've just finished reading Andrew Bacevich's
latest book, "The New American Militarism" (well, mostly finished. I
skipped quite a bit of it.) Bacevich is professor of international
relations at Boston University. He's a graduate of the U. S. Military
Academy and has a Ph. D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton
University. He is a veteran of the Vietnam war.
I'm not going to go into the book in detail at
this point, but I would suggest that it is well worth reading. One of
Bacevich's strongest and most compelling points is that the "War on Terror"
isn't really that at all, it's "World War IV", IV because WWIII was the Cold War
that ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. Moreover, he argues, WWIV
did not begin with 9/11 but in 1980 with the Carter Doctrine, in which President
Carter in essence stated that an attempt by any outside force to gain control of
the Persian Gulf region would be regarded as an assault on the vital interests
of the US, and would be repelled by any means necessary, including military
force. Bacevich argues that from then to the present day, this doctrine
has remained sacrosanct. Why was it promulgated? Carter had
previously valiantly tried to persuade the US to cut back on the consumption of
its vital energy resources and rely less on the importation of oil from the
Middle East, but to no avail. Not even the oil shocks of the 1970s had
much of an impact. The Middle East would remain a primary source, so
Americans had better make sure that it continued to serve their
needs.
Since the Carter Doctrine, there has been a lot
of positioning of American troops and interests in and around the Middle
East. The people of the Middle East have not been happy about this, nor
about the way their leaders, the Saudis for example and Saddam for a time,
played ball with the Americans. Out of this came people like Bin Laden,
the bombing of barracks and embassies and ultimately 9/11. Allies of the
US, Australians in Bali and most recently Londoners, have also suffered from the
long, ongoing game of murderous tit-for-tat. That it will not end as
easily as the Americans, with their sense of superiority and overwhelming
fire-power, thought, is evident from the continuing and deepening quagmire in
Iraq.
Much of Bacevich's book is taken up with how
various interests contributed to the moulding of the US into a modern military
state. The military had been thoroughly humiliated in Vietnam. It
had not had the support it needed to win decisive victories, and what it might
have accomplished was overruled by civilians in Washington who knew very little
about the situation in the field. It felt that it had to pull itself out
from under civilian control and build up its resources and know-how.
Another major player, the evangelical religious right saw the America of
the sixties and seventies as being in a state of moral decay and saw something
very positive in military order. Evangelicals believed that God favoured
the US and had in fact created the US to show the world the way. Many
believed that Armageddon was coming, and did whatever they could to hasten the
final conflict and the return of Christ. Another group, boffins in
think-tanks, played important roles in advising the US government on military
strategy and weaponry. "Shock and Awe" came out of this.
One thing Bacevich does well is help us to
understand the role of a group we talk about, write about, think about, but
really know very little about - the "neocons". He gives them a Chapter in
which he not only names them but, point by point, tells us what they have been
promoting and what influence on policy and the public mind they've had.
Their ideas are essentially uncompromising. America, with its goodness and
wealth, is a nation under perpetual siege. There is no point to
negotiating with the enemy, as liberals are wont to do. The enemy must be
stared down or knocked down. It's all rather scary total us versus them
stuff, with no shades of grey between. What is even scarier is that their
influence has been, and continues, to be huge.
I won't go on. Read the book. As in
any book of its kind, some parts are much more interesting than others.
The final chapter is a true dud! In it, Bacevich argues that Americans can
get out of the mess they're in by following their Constitution step by
step. Would that it were that easy! My guess is that, having written
a lot of very good chapters, Bacevich didn't know how to pull it all together at
the end. Besides, he was probably tired.
Ed
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