Bacevich on the national security ideology

Wow, People he agrees with are principled, and people he disagree with are unprincipled. Incisive commentary, that.

Don't be too hard on yourself. It's hard to organize when there's not that many of you.

"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)."

Hmmm. Perhaps if Paleconservatives quit flirting with groups like the COucil of Conservative Citzens( The ole good ole boy White Citizen Leagues) and neo confederate groups that seem to do among other things be on the PRO radical serbia party line we could respect them more.

Sorry but the lack of respect I started to have toward Paleo conservatives started long ago with the company they were keeping.

Yes, and because W took national security too seriously, the U.S. was hit by multiple terrorist attacks in the last several years.

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.

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.

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.