In Andrew Bacevich's forthcoming book "The Limits of Power," the conservative professor argues that George W. Bush's doctrines are no different from the "ideology of national security" that preceded it, and which is shared by both parties. It's an ideology of American empire. The problem with Bush is he took it so seriously that he pushed it to its logical extreme, demonstrating its inherent weakness. It's worth considering this point from Dr. Bacevich as we think about the Russia-Georgia situation, and how leaders in both parties respond to it:
Prior to World War II, Niebuhr wrote, "No simple victory of good over evil in history is possible." For Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as for George W. Bush, the actions of the United States during World war II and ever since refute that claim. Theirs is a usable past in which good eventually triumps as long as America remains faithful to its mission.In this way, ideology serves as a device for sharply narrowing the range of policy debate. Dissent, where it exists, seldom penetrates the center so power in Washington. Principled dissenters, whether paleoconservatives or libertarians, pacifists or neo-agrarians, remain on the political fringes, dismissed as either mean-spirited (that is, unable to appreciate the lofty motives that inform U.S. policy) or simply naive (that is, oblivious to the implacable evil that the United States is called upon to confront).
The ideology of national security persists not because it expresses empirically demonstrable truths but because it serves the interests of those who created the national security state and those who still benefit from its continued existence -- the very people who are most responsible for the increasingly maladroit character of U.S. policy.
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Mr. Marier,
It is not an ad hominem attack to note that his self-description is incongruent with his behavior. Commonweal may be a reputable publication in so far as it is not a scandal sheet and is not defrauding the Internal Revenue Service. However, it is an organ for baptized Catholics who wish to replace "ecclesial authority with personal experience as the norm determinative of authentic faith", as Fr. Shaughnessy has described the liberal Catholic project. For serious Catholics, it is anything but reputable. There is no compelling reason for Dr. Bacevich to place articles in Commonweal. It is not a professional journal in his subspeciality has only about 12,000 individual subscribers.
I am a lapsed student of international relations, and was compelled in the course of my studies many years ago to read William Appleman Williams, et al. The folks who produced that school of revisionist historiography did not produce work that stupefied you with its insights or (bar Gabriel Kolko) with its mastery of the trappings of scholarly meticulousness. My instructors assigned these writers (and we all discussed them), but appeared to regard them, ten or fifteen years after their publication, as already dated. That Dr. Bacevich regards W.A. Williams as an inspiration is perplexing. That he does so while referring to himself as 'conservative, Catholic' compounds the perplexity.
There is also no compelling reason for him to offer endorsements of political candidates, much less to elaborate on such endorsements in a way that raises more questions than it answers.
They money quote from James Neuchterlein's review is as follows:
It is difficult to engage an author whose prevailing rhetorical strategy is the bob and weave.
FWIW, Paul Gottfried, in his books 'After Liberalism' and 'Multiculturalism,' makes a similar argument to Bacevich's, but less stridently and better documented. And as far as I can tell, he refers nowhere to W.A. Williams (at least positively), whom I've never heard of until now. IMO, Gottfried is must-reading for conservatives, as like Claes Ryn, he argues that those on the right shouldn't eschew self-criticism.
Yes, and because W took national security too seriously, the U.S. was hit by multiple terrorist attacks in the last several years.
Why should the terrorists bother to expend the resources to try to hit us again? W and his administration have done more to weaken the US at home and abroad than the terrorists themselves could ever have dreamt of accomplishing. When your enemy is determined to shoot himself in the foot, sometimes the smartest thing to do is just stay out of the way.
I agree with David (8:22 am). It's no great accomplishment that we haven't been attacked in the past few years. For one thing, there's no great likelihood we would have been attacked again anyway. But more importantly, Bush behaved exactly as Osama bin Laden wanted him to. No more attacks were necessary.
I've even heard people here in support of the war refer to the "flypaper strategy," meaning that Iraq is like flypaper where all the terrorists are now gathered. (Perhaps we could have asked everyday Iraqis if they would mind our using their country as "flypaper.") Even the current situation between Georgia and Russia shows how much we've been weakened by Bush's taking the bait.
If Bush had stopped himself at Afghanistan, and finished the job, the whole world would be better for it. But now we are bogged down in Iraq, our military is weakened, our credibility is non-existent. In many ways bin Laden has undermined his mortal enemy.
One major problem in foreign and military policy thinking today is the definition of "National Security." Go fuzzy on this concept and you'll begin to see threat everywhere. Threats to our national security include threats to our physical borders, our total military forces, our military and intelligence secrets, our economy as a whole. If none of these are threatened, our national security is not really threatened either.
The FACT is, very few of the world's hot spots constitute a threat to our national security. Except the ones we are currently military engaged in, since that commits rather a lot of our forces. I would judge that Pakistan is a threat, only because the hydra headed Al Qaeda, which HAS attacked our soil, and at a level that took a lot of casualties and severely impacted our economy. "Over the horizon" as they say, Russian and Chinese military advances impact our national security. Instability in oil producing countries also constitute a threat to our national security, since our military quite literally runs on foreign-produced oil (but this is only a better argument for cutting our consumption of it and coming up with alternatives. If we weren't so reliant on foreign oil, we would do better by our national security.)
Another point, the military is not the only tool in defending our national security. Intelligence assets and diplomacy are equally important, and should be sufficiently funded. Also, these three tools can cancel each other out if we don't think things through.
Pakistan - Kashmir? Israel - Palestine? Georgia? The Balkans? Sudan? Taiwan? These are not really threats to our national security. They may constitute a threat to our national interest. But that is a different matter, and should by no means be confused with our national security. These situations may justify diplomacy and aid, military or otherwise. But they are still not actually viable threats against our national security.
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