Fight Makes Right?
A conservative writer unmasks the perils of unchecked American militarism.
- July 28, 2005
by Andrew Bacevich
Oxford University Press, 270 pp.
$28
Perhaps it's too strong to argue that America is no longer a republic. Let's say, then, that it is now a pro forma democratic republic. It has the form of republicanism--representative government, a written constitution, elections--but power is increasing held in the hands of self-perpetuating oligarchs whose own political agents are now developing dynasties: Kennedy, Bush, Clinton, etc. Even at the local level, we can observe how politicians are bequeathing to their sons and daughters their political positions via the family name.
In the Cold War era, America's morphing into something other than the land of the free was an issue mostly of concern to the left. But now conservatives--people who favor strong national defense, small government, and budgetary restraint--are becoming increasingly concerned that the Bush administration's "war on terror," and especially the gambit in Iraq, has taken us, who in the Soviet era fancied ourselves the anti-imperialists, into the realm of what historian Niall Ferguson calls the "imperialism of anti-imperialism."
To say the least, the 9/11 attacks caused much anxiety in the American population. Indoctrinated with the news that America was the greatest nation on earth--in history!--and blessed with God's providence, rather than understanding that al Qaeda was motivated, in part , by U.S. foreign policy, Americans simply applauded as the military was sent into Afghanistan. Then, deciding that the next move was into Iraq, numerous neocon apparatchiks in the Bush administration dusted off plans that had sat on the shelf since the Clinton administration, and on we rolled. Bush decided that regime change was in order, but not necessarily based on any real criteria for defending American security--say, weapons of mass destruction--but so we could export American democracy, American values.
But how does one go about exporting American values? As Andrew J. Bacevich argues in his new book, you do it via the new American militarism. In the view of this conservative, Americans have become a nation of "Wilsonians under arms," believers in liberal democracy and free enterprise, who feel that American principles are "the principles of mankind and must prevail."
In The New American Militarism , Bacevich, a graduate of West Point, a Vietnam veteran, and a professor of international relations at Boston University, examines the use of force by the U.S. military and how Americans have been "seduced by war." It's a crisply written, nuanced book that looks at the multiplicity of factors that has led the United States to become a militaristic society.
The old Clausewitzian notion of war being a policy continued by other means has been turned on its head. In its place: Whatever the policy, use the military to execute it. This has led to the fraying of international relations and the creation of humanitarian crises, all while evoking the mythos of the American fighting man to buck up the nation.
Bacevich doesn't see this new militarism as something cooked up in back rooms but as a series of conceived ideas, unacknowledged plans of action, incoherent policies and unintended consequences. And each Democratic and Republican administration contributed to it, some more than others. The roots of America's seduction by war lie in the military, especially the American military's defeat in Vietnam. In the army's eyes, the problem was that civilian leadership encroached into their field of expertise, warfare. Soldiers were executing policies not of their making.
(That, of course, is the way our government works: We have civilian leadership over the military so we can fire the commander-in-chief without fear of a coup d'état.)
Following Vietnam, the Army began crafting policies meant to guarantee, for any military entanglement, clear missions, exit strategies, and the capability of using overwhelming force. It had already, by way of Nixon, ended the draft, kicked out its miscreants and begun rebuilding itself. Previous to Nixon's decree, General Creighton Abrams had made sure that any use of force in future engagement would also include the use of National Guardsmen and reservists. This was a response to the Joint Chiefs of Staff's advocating that Johnson call up the reserves for Vietnam. Johnson wouldn't bite, since doing so would have meant that the nation was moving to a war footing, and Johnson, wanting both guns and butter in his Great Society programs, wanted to "keep the war small."
One of the ironies of the army's new policy was that even as it sought to restore its relationship with the American citizenry, the government scuttled the one mechanism that had made military service universal, if not democratic: the draft. Now the country, in relying on citizen soldiers, no longer shares a collective sense of sacrifice. Moreover, Bacevich argues, the nation's elite is less represented in the military than ever before. This makes going to war easier and more of an abstraction for those who plan the nation's grand imperial schemes or cheerlead from the sidelines.
Americans now rely on the military to represent national virtues that the nation as a whole has tossed aside. The military, in Bacevich's view, is the "national icon, the apotheosis of all that it is great and good about contemporary America." This demands that Americans "support the troops"--even if they are caught torturing prisoners of war, and even when no high-ranking military official is held accountable for the actions of these troops.
No "political figure of genuine stature" challenges the drift of the nation into militarism, a phenomenon the author finds deeply troubling. He writes:
"Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global superiority might be at odds with American principles. Indeed, one striking aspect of America's drift toward militarism has been the absence of dissidence offered by any political figure of genuine stature. Members of the political class, Democrats and Republicans alike, have either been oblivious to the possibility that something important might be afoot or else have chosen to ignore the evidence."
A good example of Bacevich's point can be found in the March 21, 2005, edition of the New Yorker , in which Jeffrey Goldberg's "The Unbranding" looks at the phenomenon of what he calls "national security Democrats."
These are Democrats--Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, John Edwards, Evan Bayh, Bill Richardsonwho feel the need to "market" themselves as just as bellicose as the Republicans, regardless of the fact that such a posture has nothing to do with truly protecting the security of the United States, or, for that matter, understanding the limits of force. John Kerry argued that he could better manage the war in Iraq, not whether the U.S. should have been there to begin with. The more the nation becomes obsessed with security, the less secure it finds itself, and the more willing it becomes to toss aside its tradition of civil liberties.
But to voice such would be politically suicidal. And the neocons, as Bacevich points out, have been very good at skewering those Democrats who think there may be better ways to export American values than through war.
It took about 15 years for the military to rebuild itself, a timeline spanning the mid-'70s to the first Gulf War. Reagan pushed the process forward when he significantly beefed up defense expenditures in the 1980s. The military wanted to get away from the kind of counterinsurgency war that it didn't like to fight like in Vietnam, and it concentrated on looking at a battle in Europe against the Soviet Union.
The Gulf War, with its smart bombs and light casualties, returned the American fighting man to the public's esteem and made Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf folk heroes. Herein lies an unintended consequence on the road to militarism: The new can-do military was called upon to can-do everything that it was not equipped to handle or solve--Haiti and Somalia, for example.
In the wake of big wars, Americans had traditionally demobilized the armed forces and kept no large standing armies. But that was a quaint tradition, from a society that prided itself on being a republic, not an empire. Americans now have a decision to make: return to their republican heritage or embrace empire as a way of life. Bacevich's book shines a rare, illuminating light, trying to lead the nation out of a dark forest before it trips and falls into an abyss that it can't climb out of.