TH E N EW AM E R ICAN M I LITAR I SM How Americans Are Seduced by War ANDREW J. BACEVICH 1 2005 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2005by Andrew J. Bacevich Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bacevich, A. J. The new American militarism : how Americans are seduced by war / by Andrew J. Bacevich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13:978-0-19-517338-3 isbn-10:0-19-517338-4 1. Militarism—United States—History—21st century. 2. United States—Military policy. 3. United States—Foreign relations—2001–. 4. Conservatism—United States-History—21st century. 5. United States—Politics and government—2001–. I. Title. ua23.b14 2005 355.02'130—973dc22 2004023277 Book design and composition by Mark McGarry, Texas Type & Book Works Set in Stempel Garamond 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To the memory of George M. Blough 1947–2003 Casualty of a misbegotten war This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1 Wilsonians under Arms 9 2 The Military Profession at Bay 34 3 Left, Right, Left 69 4 California Dreaming 97 5 Onward 122 6 War Club 147 7 Blood for Oil 175 8 Common Defense 205 Notes 227 Index 262 This page intentionally left blank Preface This is a book about the new American militarism—the misleading and dangerous conceptions of war, soldiers, and military institutions that have come to pervade the American consciousness and that have perverted pres- ent-day U.S. national security policy. Implicit in the argument that follows, in the selection and interpretation of evidence, and in the conclusions drawn from that evidence is a set of pre- sumptions or predispositions that ought to be made explicit. Although in researching and writing this account I have sought to be fair and to keep my own prejudices in check, the views expressed cannot be detached from the author’s personal background and outlook. Hence this brief prefatory note, consisting of four observations. First, I am a Vietnam veteran. As one commentator famously noted, the United States military did not fight a decade-long war to preserve South Vietnam; rather, it fought a one-year war ten times over. My own year fell in the conflict’s bleak latter stages, from the summer of 1970to the summer of1971—after Tet, after the Cambodian incursion, and long after an odor of failure had begun to envelop the entire enterprise. Several of my college classmates died in Vietnam. Other friends came away from the war physically or psychologically scarred, the boyhood chum and brother-in-law to whose memory this volume is dedicated not least among them. For me, the experience was merely baffling and, indeed, has become even more so with the passage of time. Vietnam provides the frame of refer- ence within which I interpret much else, a tendency that some readers may x preface well judge excessive. But there is no point in trying to conceal what is prob- ably self-evident: this book represents one manifestation of a continuing effort to sift through the wreckage left by that war and to reckon fully with its legacy. Second, after returning from Vietnam, I stayed on in the U.S. Army and became a professional soldier. In essence, my service coincided with the lat- ter half of the Cold War, an ostensibly simpler time that some have already made an object of nostalgia. But from a military officer’s perspective these were roller-coaster years. No one who served during the interval stretching from the abruptly terminated presidency of Richard Nixon to the crowded but abbreviated era of the elder George Bush will recall this as a time of sta- bility or easy living. Yet inside the cocoon of military life, there existed one fixed point of absolute and reassuring clarity. Those of us whose day-to-day routine cen- tered on furiously preparing to defend the so-called Fulda Gap, the region in western Germany presumed to be the focal point of any Warsaw Pact attack, had no need to torment ourselves with existential questions of pur- pose. Indeed, our purpose was self-evident: it was to defend the West against the threat posed by Communist totalitarianism. Here was the lodestar that endowed military service after Vietnam with its peculiar savor. Even when the country seemed not to care—and during much of that period it obviously didn’t—we were keeping the Soviets at bay and therefore preserving freedom. So at least we believed, with an unwavering conviction. This—not conquest, regime change, preventive war, or imperial polic- ing—we understood to be the American soldier’s true and honorable call- ing. That old-fashioned understanding of soldierly purpose, now perhaps rendered obsolete, also informs much of what follows. The third point concerns politics, to which I am a latecomer. Although the prevarications and outright lies surrounding Vietnam had left the American military professional ethic much the worse for wear, enough of it survived that most young officers still understood in that war’s aftermath that when it came to politics they were to have none. To be a serving soldier in my day was by definition to be apolitical. Although many of us voted, we did so less as an expression of partisanship than from a sense of civic obligation. preface xi Only upon leaving the army, already well into middle age, did I experi- ence the raising of political consciousness that my fellow baby boomers had undergone back in the heady days of youth. As much in response to deeply felt religious convictions as anything else, I became a self-described conser- vative. During the 1990s I began to contribute with some regularity to mag- azines identified with the political right, including the Weekly Standard, National Review, andFirst Things. As long as we shared in the common cause of denouncing the foolish- ness and hypocrisies of the Clinton years, my relationship with modern American conservatism remained a mutually agreeable one. But even before the disputed election of 2000resolved itself, it became clear, to me at least, that conservatives were susceptible to their own brand of foolishness and hypocrisy. At that point, my ties to the conservative literary establishment began to fray and soon dissolved. Today, I still situate myself culturally on the right. And I continue to view the remedies proffered by mainstream liberalism with skepticism. But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embod- ied in the present Bush administration and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering foreign policy, a disregard for the Constitution, the barest lip service as a response to profound moral controversies: these do not qualify as authentically conservative values. On this score my views have come to coincide with the critique long offered by the radical left: it is the mainstream itself, the professional liber- als as well as the professional conservatives, who definethe problem. Two parties monopolize and, as if by prior agreement, trivialize national politics. Each panders to the worst instincts of its core constituents. Each is seem- ingly obsessed with power for its own sake. The historian Walter Karp’s acerbic assessment of early twentieth-century politics strikes me as equally applicable to the early twenty-first century: “Behind the hoopla of parti- sanship, the leaders of the two parties worked together in collusive har- mony.”1The Republican and Democratic parties may not be identical, but they produce nearly identical results. Money buys access and influence, the rich and famous get served, and those lacking wealth or celebrity status get screwed—truths not at all unrelated to the rise of militarism in America. I have no doubt that the world of politics is not without men and women of honor. But the system itself is fundamentally corrupt and func- xii preface tions in ways inconsistent with the spirit of genuine democracy. This any- one with eyes to see recognizes. So what follows bears an unmistakably conservative stamp, notably in attributing great significance—perhaps too great—to the 1960s, in the eyes of devout right-wingers the locus of all the ills afflicting contemporary America. But it is also the account of someone who understands that many of those who in occupying the public eye pass themselves off as conserva- tives share responsibility for those afflictions, the excessive militarization of U.S. policy not least among them. Some will misread this as cynicism. It is instead the absence of illusion. The final point concerns my understanding of history. Before moving into a career focused on teaching and writing about contemporary U.S. for- eign policy, I was trained as a diplomatic historian. My graduate school mentors were scholars of great stature and enormous gifts, admirable in every way. They were also splendid teachers, and I left graduate school very much under their influence. My own abbreviated foray into serious histori- cal scholarship bears the earmarks of their approach, ascribing to Great Men—generals, presidents, and cabinet secretaries—the status of historical prime movers. I have now come to see that view as mistaken. What seemed plausible enough when studying presidents named Wilson or Roosevelt breaks down completely when a Bush or Clinton occupies the Oval Office. Not only do present-day tendencies to elevate the president to the status of a demigod whose every move is recorded, every word parsed, and every decision scru- tinized for hidden meaning fly in the face of republican precepts. They also betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. What is most striking about the most powerful man in the world is not the power that he wields. It is how constrained he and his lieutenants are by forces that lie beyond their grasp and perhaps their understanding. Rather than bending history to their will, presidents and those around them are much more likely to dance to history’s tune. Only the illusions churned out by public relations apparatchiks and perpetuated by celebrity-worshipping journalists prevent us from seeing that those inhabiting the inner sanctum of the West Wing are agents more than independent actors. Although as human beings they may be interesting, very few can claim more than mar-