Whatever you're doing this weekend, I invite you, I implore you, to sit down and read, and re-read, this transcript of an interview Bill Moyers just did with Andrew Bacevich, author of the forthcoming book "The Limits of Power." It's so rich and powerful and important that I had trouble deciding which passage to highlight on this blog entry. Every syllable counts. But I found these passages especially moving, if depressing:
BILL MOYERS: And do you remember that it was his successor, his Vice President, the first President Bush who said in 1992, the American way of life is not negotiable.ANDREW BACEVICH: And all presidents, again, this is not a Republican thing, or a Democratic thing, all presidents, all administrations are committed to that proposition. Now, I would say, that probably, 90 percent of the American people today would concur. The American way of life is not up for negotiation.
What I would invite them to consider is that, if you want to preserve that which you value most in the American way of life, and of course you need to ask yourself, what is it you value most. That if you want to preserve that which you value most in the American way of life, then we need to change the American way of life. We need to modify that which may be peripheral, in order to preserve that which is at the center of what we value.
And:
BILL MOYERS: You, in fact, say that, instead of a bigger army, we need a smaller more modest foreign policy. One that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capability. "Modesty," I'm quoting you, "requires giving up on the illusions of grandeur to which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise. It also means reining in the imperial presidents who expect the army to make good on those illusions." Do you expect either John McCain or Barack Obama to rein in the "imperial presidency?"ANDREW BACEVICH: No. I mean, people run for the presidency in order to become imperial presidents. The people who are advising these candidates, the people who aspire to be the next national security advisor, the next secretary of defense, these are people who yearn to exercise those kind of great powers.
They're not running to see if they can make the Pentagon smaller. They're not. So when I - as a distant observer of politics - one of the things that both puzzles me and I think troubles me is the 24/7 coverage of the campaign.
Parsing every word, every phrase, that either Senator Obama or Senator McCain utters, as if what they say is going to reveal some profound and important change that was going to come about if they happened to be elected. It's not going to happen.
BILL MOYERS: It's not going to happen because?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Not going to happen - it's not going to happen because the elements of continuity outweigh the elements of change. And it's not going to happen because, ultimately, we the American people, refuse to look in that mirror. And to see the extent to which the problems that we face really lie within.
We refuse to live within our means. We continue to think that the problems that beset the country are out there beyond our borders. And that if we deploy sufficient amount of American power we can fix those problems, and therefore things back here will continue as they have for decades.
One more...
BILL MOYERS: Here is what I take to be the core of your analysis of our political crisis. You write, "The United States has become a de facto one party state. With the legislative branch permanently controlled by an incumbent's party. And every President exploiting his role as Commander in Chief to expand on the imperial prerogatives of his office."ANDREW BACEVICH: One of the great lies about American politics is that Democrats genuinely subscribe to a set of core convictions that make Democrats different from Republicans. And the same thing, of course, applies to the other party. It's not true. I happen to define myself as a conservative.
Well, what do conservatives say they stand for? Well, conservatives say they stand for balanced budgets. Small government. The so called traditional values.
Well, when you look back over the past 30 or so years, since the rise of Ronald Reagan, which we, in many respects, has been a conservative era in American politics, well, did we get small government?
Do we get balanced budgets? Do we get serious as opposed to simply rhetorical attention to traditional social values? The answer's no. Because all of that really has simply been part of a package of tactics that Republicans have employed to get elected and to - and then to stay in office.
BILL MOYERS: And, yet, you say that the prime example of political dysfunction today is the Democratic Party in relation to Iraq.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I may be a conservative, but I can assure you that, in November of 2006, I voted for every Democrat I could possibly come close to. And I did because the Democratic Party, speaking with one voice, at that time, said that, "Elect us. Give us power in the Congress, and we will end the Iraq War."
And the American people, at that point, adamantly tired of this war, gave power to the Democrats in Congress. And they absolutely, totally, completely failed to follow through on their commitment. Now, there was a lot of posturing. But, really, the record of the Democratic Congress over the past two years has been - one in which, substantively, all they have done is to appropriate the additional money that enables President Bush to continue that war.
BILL MOYERS: And you say the promises of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi prove to be empty. Reid and Pelosi's commitment to forcing a change in policy took a backseat to their concern to protect the Democratic majority.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Could anybody disagree with that?
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
Rod: "I meant simply that AnotherBeliever is a female soldier. Jeez, you've got homosocialism on the brain bigtime."
Au contraire; I said nothing about Socialism. It was simply your usual knee-jerk reaction to see "homosocialism" in anything said by Cleveland. At least you had the good sense not to imply that I was talking about AnotherBeliever, about whom I know nothing, sexually speaking.
AnotherBeliever: "The point of the poem Mr Dreher posted was simply that at the end of the day, despite all talk of capitalism and political platforms and this ambiguously defined 'American Way of Life', the only temporal thing worth dying for is the freedom for your loved ones to live in peace, and for your friends and compatriots to live with honor."
The clearly made point of the poem is that the life of a loved one is NOT worth one's liberty.
JonE: "We want freedom to live a peaceful life, 'where none dare molest or make afraid.' That life can never be gained for the price of a bullet or a life."
That's a perfect example of what's wrong with current liberalism, which, BTW, bears no resemblance to the American way of life or traditional Liberalism or rational thought.
You want poetry? Try Sir Walter Scott:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.
The 3:21 PM comment, which made tremendous sense, unlike this new format, is mine.
ANDREW BACEVICH HAS EARNED OUR EAR
Only rarely does someone surface with qualifications as well as insights and a delivery that stimulate thinking. Even more rarely does an individual stimulate the very personal mental articulation of self observation.
http://pacificgatepost.blogspot.com/2008/08/andrew-bacevich-rare-sobering-voice.html
Bacevich deserves as broad an audience as can be exposed.
"Do we get balanced budgets?" Um, yeah, we did, thanks to a Clinton tax increase (following on the heels of a Bush 41 tax increase) that NO Republican voted for. Al Gore broke the tie in the Senate. The Republicans warned us that that tax increase would wreck the economy. Were they right? No, the economy and stock market became so strong that Greenspan had to coin the term "irrational exuberance" and begin a series of rate increases in an effort to slow the economy. Only when a Republican returned to the White House with fairy tales of tax cuts for "everyone", all the military that the contractors would want, and balanced budgets as far as the eye can see did things head in the opposite direction. No difference between Republicans and Democrats? Hardly.
This is not directed at any one individual here:
Regardless of how you interpret the pretty poem I still maintain that liberty is only a means to an end, and that end is your family and comrades living in peace and dignity. If you start trying to tie a bunch of unnecessary stuff to the liberty - excessive materialism, unhealthy lobbyist inroads into Congress, an overweening executive branch, unbalanced individualism, cheap oil regardless of the political cost, expansionist and expanding military policy - if you start piling all these things together under a banner of "freedom" you have no right to screech UNPATRIOTIC! AMERICA HATER! COWARD! at anyone who dares suggest that most of it is not worth a war. Particularly not if the person in question has served in a war zone, or even lost a son in one. They should know better than most what is, and is not, worth fighting and dying for. We would do well to pay attention to Dr Bacevich.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.