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T o day as n e v e r b e f o r e in their history Americans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys—and is bent on perpetuating—has become central to our national identity. More than America’s matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation’s arsenal of high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for.

When it comes to war, Americans have persuaded themselves that the United States possesses a peculiar genius. Writing in the spring of 2003, the journalist Gregg Easterbrook observed that “the extent of American mili- tary superiority has become almost impossible to overstate.” During Oper- ation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. forces had shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that they were “the strongest the world has ever known, . . . stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power.” Other nations trailed “so far behind they have no chance of catch- ing up.”1 The commentator Max Boot scoffed at comparisons with the Ger- man army of World War II, hitherto “the gold standard of operational excellence.” In Iraq, American military performance had been such as to make “fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison.”2 Easterbrook and Boot concurred on the central point: on the modern battlefield Americans had located an arena of human endeavor in which their flair for organizing and deploying technology offered an apparently decisive edge. As a consequence, the

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Bacevich, Andrew J.. New American Militarism : How Americans Are Seduced by War, Oxford University Press, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucr/detail.action?docID=273069. Created from ucr on 2019-01-11 03:28:49.

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United States had (as many Americans have come to believe) become mas- ters of all things military.

Further, American political leaders have demonstrated their intention of tapping that mastery to reshape the world in accordance with American interests and American values. That the two are so closely intertwined as to be indistinguishable is, of course, a proposition to which the vast majority of Americans subscribe. Uniquely among the great powers in all of world history, ours (we insist) is an inherently values-based approach to policy.

Furthermore, we have it on good authority that the ideals we espouse represent universal truths, valid for all times. American statesmen past and present have regularly affirmed that judgment. In doing so, they validate it and render it all but impervious to doubt. Whatever momentary setbacks the United States might encounter, whether a generation ago in Vietnam or more recently in Iraq, this certainty that American values are destined to prevail imbues U.S. policy with a distinctive grandeur. The preferred lan- guage of American statecraft is bold, ambitious, and confident.

Reflecting such convictions, policymakers in Washington nurse (and the majority of citizens tacitly endorse) ever more grandiose expectations for how armed might can facilitate the inevitable triumph of those values. In that regard, George W. Bush’s vow that the United States will “rid the world of evil” both echoes and amplifies the large claims of his predecessors going at least as far back as Woodrow Wilson.3 Coming from Bush the war- rior-president, the promise to make an end to evil is a promise to destroy, to demolish, and to obliterate it.

One result of this belief that the fulfillment of America’s historic mis- sion begins with America’s destruction of the old order has been to revive a phenomenon that C. Wright Mills in the early days of the Cold War described as a “military metaphysics”—a tendency to see international problems as military problems and to discount the likelihood of finding a solution except through military means.4

To state the matter bluntly, Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a ten- dency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.5

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Already in the 1990s America’s marriage of a militaristic cast of mind with utopian ends had established itself as the distinguishing element of contemporary U.S. policy. The Bush administration’s response to the hor- rors of 9/11 served to reaffirm that marriage, as it committed the United States to waging an open-ended war on a global scale. Events since, notably the alarms, excursions, and full-fledged campaigns comprising the Global War on Terror, have fortified and perhaps even sanctified this marriage. Regrettably, those events, in particular the successive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, advertised as important milestones along the road to ultimate victory, have further dulled the average American’s ability to grasp the significance of this union, which does not serve our interests and may yet prove our undoing.

The New American Militarism examines the origins and implications of this union and proposes its annulment.

Although by no means the first book to undertake such an examination, The New American Militarism does so from a distinctive perspective.

The bellicose character of U.S. policy after 9/11, culminating with the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, has, in fact, evoked charges of militarism from across the political spectrum. Prominent among the accounts advancing that charge are books such as The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, by Chalmers Johnson; Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, by Noam Chomsky; Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of Ameri- can Empire, edited by Carl Boggs; Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions, by Clyde Prestowitz; and Incoherent Empire, by Michael Mann, with its concluding chapter called “The New Militarism.”

Each of these books appeared in 2003 or 2004. Each was not only writ- ten in the aftermath of 9/11 but responded specifically to the policies of the Bush administration, above all to its determined efforts to promote and jus- tify a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As the titles alone suggest and the contents amply demonstrate, they are for the most part angry books. They indict more than explain, and what- ever explanations they offer tend to be ad hominem. The authors of these books unite in heaping abuse on the head of George W. Bush, said to com-

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bine in a single individual intractable provincialism, religious zealotry, and the reckless temperament of a gunslinger. Or if not Bush himself, they fin- ger his lieutenants, the cabal of warmongers, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and senior Defense Department officials, who whispered persua- sively in the president’s ear and used him to do their bidding. Thus, accord- ing to Chalmers Johnson, ever since the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991, Cheney and other key figures from that war had “wanted to go back and finish what they started.” Having lobbied unsuccessfully throughout the Clinton era “for aggression against Iraq and the remaking of the Middle East,” they had returned to power on Bush’s coattails. After they had “bided their time for nine months,” they had seized upon the crisis of 9/11 “to put their theories and plans into action,” pressing Bush to make Saddam Hussein number one on his hit list.6 By implication, militarism becomes something of a conspiracy foisted on a malleable president and an unsus- pecting people by a handful of wild-eyed ideologues.

By further implication, the remedy for American militarism is self-evi- dent: “Throw the new militarists out of office,” as Michael Mann urges, and a more balanced attitude toward military power will presumably reassert itself.7

As a contribution to the ongoing debate about U.S. policy, The New American Militarism rejects such notions as simplistic. It refuses to lay the responsibility for American militarism at the feet of a particular president or a particular set of advisers and argues that no particular presidential elec- tion holds the promise of radically changing it. Charging George W. Bush with responsibility for the militaristic tendencies of present-day U.S. for- eign policy makes as much sense as holding Herbert Hoover culpable for the Great Depression: whatever its psychic satisfactions, it is an exercise in scapegoating that lets too many others off the hook and allows society at large to abdicate responsibility for what has come to pass.

The point is not to deprive George W. Bush or his advisers of whatever credit or blame they may deserve for conjuring up the several large-scale campaigns and myriad lesser military actions comprising their war on ter- ror. They have certainly taken up the mantle of this militarism with a verve not seen in years. Rather it is to suggest that well before September 11, 2001, and before the younger Bush’s ascent to the presidency a militaristic predisposition was already in place both in official circles and among Americans more generally. In this regard, 9/11 deserves to be seen as an

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event that gave added impetus to already existing tendencies rather than as a turning point. For his part, President Bush himself ought to be seen as a player reciting his lines rather than as a playwright drafting an entirely new script.

In short, the argument offered here asserts that present-day American militarism has deep roots in the American past. It represents a bipartisan project. As a result, it is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, a point obscured by the myopia and personal animus tainting most accounts of how we have arrived at this point.

The New American Militarism was conceived not only as a corrective to what has become the conventional critique of U.S. policies since 9/11 but as a challenge to the orthodox historical context employed to justify those policies. In this regard, although by no means comparable in scope and in richness of detail, it continues the story begun in Michael Sherry’s masterful 1995 book, In the Shadow of War, an interpretive history of the United States in our times. In a narrative that begins with the Great Depression and spans six decades, Sherry reveals a pervasive American sense of anxiety and vulnerability. In an age during which war, actual as well as metaphorical, was a constant, either as ongoing reality or frightening prospect, national security became the axis around which the American enterprise turned. As a consequence, a relentless process of militarization “reshaped every realm of American life—politics and foreign policy, economics and technology, culture and social relations—making America a profoundly different nation.”8

Yet Sherry concludes his account on a hopeful note. Surveying condi- tions midway through the post–Cold War era’s first decade, he suggests in a chapter entitled “A Farewell to Militarization?” that America’s preoccupa- tion with war and military matters might at long last be waning. In the mid- 1990s, a return to something resembling pre-1930s military normalcy, involving at least a partial liquidation of the national security state, appeared to be at hand.

Events since In the Shadow of War appear to have swept away these expectations. The New American Militarism tries to explain why and by extension offers a different interpretation of America’s immediate past. The upshot of that interpretation is that far from bidding farewell to militariza- tion, the United States has nestled more deeply into its embrace.

Briefly told, the story that follows goes like this. The new American

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militarism made its appearance in reaction to the 1960s and especially to Vietnam. It evolved over a period of decades, rather than being sponta- neously induced by a particular event such as the terrorist attack of Septem- ber 11, 2001. Nor, as mentioned above, is present-day American militarism the product of a conspiracy hatched by a small group of fanatics when the American people were distracted or otherwise engaged. Rather, it devel- oped in full view and with considerable popular approval.

The new American militarism is the handiwork of several disparate groups that shared little in common apart from being intent on undoing the purportedly nefarious effects of the 1960s. Military officers intent on reha- bilitating their profession; intellectuals fearing that the loss of confidence at home was paving the way for the triumph of totalitarianism abroad; reli- gious leaders dismayed by the collapse of traditional moral standards; strategists wrestling with the implications of a humiliating defeat that had undermined their credibility; politicians on the make; purveyors of pop cul- ture looking to make a buck: as early as 1980, each saw military power as the apparent answer to any number of problems.

The process giving rise to the new American militarism was not a neat one. Where collaboration made sense, the forces of reaction found the means to cooperate. But on many occasions—for example, on questions relating to women or to grand strategy—nominally “pro-military” groups worked at cross purposes. Confronting the thicket of unexpected developments that marked the decades after Vietnam, each tended to chart its own course.

In many respects, the forces of reaction failed to achieve the specific objectives that first roused them to act. To the extent that the 1960s upended long-standing conventions relating to race, gender, and sexuality, efforts to mount a cultural counterrevolution failed miserably. Where the forces of reaction did achieve a modicum of success, moreover, their achievements often proved empty or gave rise to unintended and unwelcome conse- quences. Thus, as we shall see, military professionals did regain something approximating the standing that they had enjoyed in American society prior to Vietnam. But their efforts to reassert the autonomy of that profession backfired and left the military in the present century bereft of meaningful influence on basic questions relating to the uses of U.S. military power.

Yet the reaction against the 1960s did give rise to one important by-prod- uct, namely, the militaristic tendencies that have of late come into full flower.

In short, the story that follows consists of several narrative threads. No

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single thread can account for our current outsized ambitions and infatua- tion with military power. Together, however, they created conditions per- mitting a peculiarly American variant of militarism to emerge. As an antidote, the story concludes by offering specific remedies aimed at restor- ing a sense of realism and a sense of proportion to U.S. policy. It proposes thereby to bring American purposes and American methods—especially with regard to the role of military power—into closer harmony with the nation’s founding ideals.

The marriage of military metaphysics with eschatological ambition is a misbegotten one, contrary to the long-term interests of either the American people or the world beyond our borders. It invites endless war and the ever-deepening militarization of U.S. policy. As it subordinates concern for the common good to the paramount value of military effectiveness, it promises not to perfect but to distort American ideals. As it concentrates ever more authority in the hands of a few more concerned with order abroad rather than with justice at home, it will accelerate the hollowing out of American democracy. As it alienates peoples and nations around the world, it will leave the United States increasingly isolated. If history is any guide, it will end in bankruptcy, moral as well as economic, and in abject failure.

“Of all the enemies of public liberty,” wrote James Madison in 1795, “war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”9 The purpose of this book is to invite Americans to consider the continued relevance of Madison’s warning to our own time and circumstances.

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