Andrew J. Bacevich's "The Limits of Power"

This is an excellent book. It is one of the very best that I've read about the post-9/11 world. It isn't limited to that. Andrew J. Bacevich's critique starts with post-WWII. I side with 98% of what he says. The only time I found myself saying "no" and distancing myself from him was when, in the thirteen page conclusion he wanders from the theme of the previous 170 pages and suddenly throws in global warming and nuclear weapons as urgent national security priorities. Ignoring that, the book was excellent.

It was surprising for Bacevich to throw in "global warming" as a security threat. It would be if it was the threat that Bacevich thinks he sees. But he presents no evidence and my own study of the issue says to me it is overblow. It is a minor worry, but not the catastrophe that doomsayers would have you believe. Similarly, nuclear weapons are a threat, but one we've lived with for 60+ years. Bacevich seems to think that downsizing stockpiles by Russia and the US is absolutely urgent. This is bizarre because we are in an era of proliferation with India, Pakistan, China, and North Korea busily adding to their stockpiles. What possible advantage is there to unilateral disarmament by two of the 9 nuclear power, especially with a 10th, Iran, is eager to join the ranks. I don't get the "strategic vision" and Bacevich gives none. This was a bizarre throwaway item in a couple of paragraphs at the end of the book which marred it for me. I especially didn't appreciate this blunt assertion that the US was "unjustified" in using nuclear weapons on Japan. That is simply a position that I find ridiculous. History showed that those bombs finally forced the Emperor to do the "unthinkable" and force his generals to accept peace.

Back to happier thoughts... the rest of the book was excellent. It reviews history and looks in depth at the "national security" apparatus and how it has failed the American people. Bacevich is retired military, a colonel, so he knows the military and served in Vietnam. He has the knowledge and the right to examine the post-9/11 policies of the US. His son was killed by an IED serving as a first lieutenant in the US Army. What he has to say about IEDs and the foolish "strategic thinking" of shock-and-awe, highly mobile RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) which ran up against IEDs is well worth reading.

Here's a bit about the evolution of American society post WWII:

Pick the group: blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, working stiffs, gays, the handicapped -- in every case, the impetus for providing equal access to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution originated among the pinks, lefties, liberals, and bleeding-heart fellow travelers. When it came to ensuring that every American should get a fair shake, the contribution of modern conservatism has been essentially nil. Had Martin Luther King counted on William F. Buckley and the National Review to take up the fight against racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, Jim Crow would still be alive and well.

He passes judgements that should get the American public to sit up and pay attention:

Yet if presidents have accrued too much power, if the Congress is feckless, if the national security bureaucracy is irretrievably broken, the American people have only themselves to blame. They have allowed their democracy to be hijacked. The hijackers will not voluntarily return what they have stolen.

One result of that hijacking has been to raise up a new political elite whose members have a vested interest in perpetuating the crises that provide the source of their power. These are the people who under the guise of seeking peace or advancing the cause of liberty devise policies that promote war or the prospect of war, producing something akin to chaos.

To attend any longer to this elite would be madness. This is the third lesson that the Iraq War ought to drive home.

There is an interesting section of the book where he looks at the two side of whether to have a citizen army or a professional army:

Furthermore, to the extent that an army composed of regulars is no longer a people's army, the people have little to say in its use. In effect, the professional military has become an extension of the imperial presidency. The troops fight when and where the commander in chief determines.

Finally a reliance on professional soldiers eviscerate the concept of civic duty, relieving citizens at large of any obligation to contribute to the nation's defense. Ending the draft during the waning days of the Vietnam War did nothing to heal the divisions created by that conflict; instead, it ratified the separation of army from society. Like mowing lawns and bussing tables, fighting and perhaps dying to sustain the American way of life became something that Americans pay others to do.

So the third lesson of the Iraw War focuses on the need to repair the relationship between army and society.

And this:

For those distressed by the absence of a politically meaningful antiwar movement despite the Iraq War's manifest unpopularity, the appeal of conscription differs somewhat. Some political activists look to an Iraq-era draft to do what the Vietnam-era draft did: animate large-scale protest, alter the political dynamic, and eventually shut down any conflict that lacks widespread popular support. The prospect of involuntary service will pry the kids out of the shopping malls and send them into the streets. It will prod the parents of draft-eligible offspring to see politics as something other than a mechanism for doling out entitlements. As a consequence, members of Congress keen to retian their seats will define the wartime responsibilities as something more than simply rubber-stamping spending bills proposed by the White House. In this way, a draft could reinvigorate American democracy, restore the governmental system of checks and balances, and constrian the warmongers inhabiting the executive branch.

Bacevich looks into the closed world of the national security elite and its deceptions of the American people as well as its self-deceptions:

Time and again, for example, President Bush insisted that in Iraq, the United States was fighting not simply to protect itself or its interests, but to ensure the spread of democracy and human rights. There are two ways to interpret this so-called freedom agenda. The first interpretation took the president's words at face value: He saw war as a vehicle for deliverance and liberation. Through violence, either threatened or employed outright, the United States aimed to bring entire nations into conformity with Western liberal values. This was Bush channeling Woodrwo Wilson, via Paul Wolfowitz.

The alternative was to see the freedom agenda as purely cynical, providing a tissue of moral legitimacy to a strategy of naked aggression. Here, the belief was that force would produce hegemony. Coercion, starting with Iraq (but not ending there), would enable the United States to subjugate the Greater Middle East. This was Bush channeling Theodore Roosevelt, as interpreted by Dick Cheney

The above is a real hoot! He makes a point but at the same time he makes his point memorable by showing how absurd these machinations of the national security elite truly are.

Here's Bacevich's bottom line:

America doesn't need a bigger army. It needs a smaller -- that is, more modest -- foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capabilities. Modest implies 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. When it comes to suporting the troops, here lies the essence of a citizen's obligation.

He wrote this book in early 2008. Here is his prescient comment on Obama:

Victorious in snowy Iowa, the candidate proclaimed -- to wild applause -- that "our time for change has come." If elected president, he vowed to break the power of the lobbyists, provide affordable health care for all, cut middle-class taxes, end both the war in Iraq and the nation's dependence on foreign oil, and "unite America and the world against the common threats of the twenty-first century." In an earlier age, aspirants for the highest office in the land ventured to promise a chicken in every pot. In the present age, candidates like Senator Barack Obama set their sights on tackling "terrorism and nuclear weaopns, climate change and poverty, genocide and disease."

The agenda is an admirable one. Yet to imagine that installing a particular individual in the Oval Office will produce decisive action on any of these fronts is to succumb to the grandest delusion of all. The quadrennial ritual of electing (or reelecting) a president is not an exercise in promoting change, regardless of waht candidates may claim, and ordinary voters believe. The real aim is to ensure continuity, to keep intact the institutions and arrangements that define present-day Washington. ...

... The same Americans who profess to despise all that Washington represents look to -- depending on partisan affiliation -- a new John F. Kennedy or a new Ronald Reagan to set things right again. Rather than seeing the imperial presidency as part of the problem, the persist in the fantasy that a chief executive, given a cledar mandate, will "change" the way Washington works and retore the nation to good health. Yet to judge by the performance of presidents over the past half century, including both Kennedy and Reagan (whose legacies are far more mixed than their supporters will acknowledge), a citizenry that looks to the White House for deliverance is assured of disappointment.

Bacevich proposed an alternative to the Bush agenda of perpetual war against "terrorism" and evil. He proposes going back to the successful policy of containment which was practiced during the Cold War:

One possible alternative is to pursue a strategy of containment. Such a strategy has worked before, against a far more formidable adversay. It can work again as a framework for erecting effective defenses. The main purpose of containment during the Cold War was to frustrate the Kremlin's efforts to extend Soviet influence. The purpose of containment today should be to prevent the sponsors of radical Islam from extending their influence.

This is an excellent book. It well deserves everybody taking the time to read it. It will help understand the events of today as well as the post WWII history. It is written by a guy with the background in the military and a knowledge of the "national security elite" sufficient to expose the folly of the current path America is following.