Thursday, November 08, 2007

Andrew J. Bacevich.
The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.
Oxford University Press, August 2006 (paperback edition with a new Afterward).
(Originally published in March 2005.)

Book information: publisher, Amazon.com.

You can get a very good introduction to this book from Bacevich's appearance in the excellent "Conversations with History" series (Google Video link).

Andrew Bacevich:
  • Andrew Bacevich, Wikipedia.

  • Andrew J. Bacevich, Department of International Relations, Boston University.

  • Andrew J. Bacevich. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Harvard University Press, March 2004. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Andrew J. Bacevich, The Real World War IV, The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2005.

  • Chester, Blog Interview with Dr. Andrew Bacevich, The Adventures of Chester: War and Foreign Policy, 09 May 2005.

  • Tom Engelhardt, "Tomdispatch Interview: Bacevich on the Limits of Imperial Power and the Arrogance of American Power"
    Part 1: The Delusions of Global Hegemony, TomDispatch.com, 23 May 2006;
    Part 2: Drifting Down the Path to Perdition, TomDispatch.com, 25 May 2006.

    This interview also appears in the book:
    Tom Engelhardt. Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts & Dissenters.
    New York: Nation Books, 2006. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Andrew J. Bacevich, Warrior Politics, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2007.
    "The U.S. military is becoming more politically assertive. This is not a welcome development."

    Justine Isola, The Activist Soldier, TheAtlantic.com, 28 March 2007.
    "Andrew J. Bacevich, author of 'Warrior Politics,' talks about the increased politicization of the American military and its troubling potential consequences."

  • Tragically, Bacevich's son, Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, was killed in Iraq 13 May 2007.

    Andrew J. Bacevich, I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty., The Washington Post, B01, 27 May 2007.

    Excerpt:

    The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of the people."

    To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.

    To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

    Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

    Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month     [$100,000; Death Gratuity, About.com].

    Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

    This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.

    Webchat with Andrew Bacevich, WashingtonPost.com, 29 May 2007.
    Bacevich answers various questions, including this reply on the inefficacy of U.S. elections in ending the Iraq war:
    "I don't have any easy answers on this. But it does seem to me that we should no longer assume that 'democracy' provides the best one-word descriptor of our political system. In a superficial sense, we remain a democratic nation. But peer beneath the surface and the reality is something else again."

    David F. Burrelli & Jennifer R. Corwell, Military Death Benefits: Status and Proposals [PDF], 23 June 2005.

    Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, A failure in generalship, Armed Forces Journal, May 2007.

  • Adam Reilly, Bacevich’s war: The politics of personal tragedy, The Phoenix (Boston), 02 July 2007.

  • Andrew J. Bacevich, Vietnam's real lessons: The war is indeed relevant to Iraq -- but not the way Bush thinks, Los Angeles Times, 25 August 2007.

  • Andrew J. Bacevich, Sycophant Savior: General Petraeus wins a battle in Washington — if not in Baghdad, The American Conservative, 08 October 2007.

  • You can find articles by Andrew Bacevich at The Nation; The American Conservative; The New Republic; London Review of Books; Commonweal; The Los Angeles Times; The Washington Post; and elsewhere.


Online Video (Bacevich discussing The New American Militarism and U.S. Foreign Policy):
  • The Military and U.S. Foreign Policy, A Conversation with Andrew J. Bacevich, Conversations with History, Series Host Harry Kreisler, The Institute of International Studies, The University of California at Berkeley, 09 May 2005.
    Transcript here.
    Another link to the video is on this page.

  • The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, World Affairs Council of Northern California, May 2005.

  • The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, Books Of Our Times - Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, October 2005.

  • The Last Days of the American Republic: A Conversation with Chalmers Johnson, Conversations with History, 07 March 2007.

    Bacevich echoes the ideas of Chalmers Johnson (and others). One observation they share is that throughout the course of American history when a major conflict ended the armed forces were significantly cut back (e.g., Civil War, World War I, World War II). However with the end of the Cold War the United States continued to maintain a massive military force deployed around the world. Why? It has become clear that the purpose of this world-wide force is not a matter of self-defense but something else: the preservation of a distinct kind of overseas empire which the United States began acquiring in the late nineteenth century (for example: Hawaii; the territories acquired through the Spanish-American war - Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines; Panama) and expanding more vigorously after World War II under the guise of resisting communism, and with the decolonization movement as European nations dissolved their overseas empires. Maintaining an empire fundamentally contradicts the principles and traditions of the United States' domestic republican government and democracy, and perhaps threatens their continued existence.


Some Book Reviews:


Other Essays, etc.:

Some Related Books (most of which I have not yet read):
  • Note: The topic of American Militarism is of course inextricably inter-related with the topic of American Empire and Imperialism; the following list focuses on Militarism and excludes books mainly about Empire and Imperialism.

  • Alfred Vagts. A History of Militarism: Civilian and Military. Meridian Books, 1959; Free Press, 1967; Greenwood Press, 1981.

  • Joseph Gerson & Bruce Birchard, editors. The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases. Boston: South End Press, An American Friends Service Committee Book, April 1991. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • William Greider. Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace. PublicAffairs, December 1999. (Amazon.com)

  • Chris Hedges. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. PublicAffairs, September 2002. (publisher, Amazon.com)

    Chris Hedges writes frequently on the topic of American militarism. See his articles at (the following links give the author's archive at the respective publications): The Nation; TruthDig.com; AlterNet.org.

  • Carl Boggs, editor. Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire. Routledge, 2003. (publisher, Amazon.com)

    Carl Boggs. Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., January 2005. (publisher, Amazon.com)

    Carl Boggs & Tom Pollard. The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture. Paradigm Publishers, September 2006. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Robert Higgs. Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11. Oakland, California: The Independent Institute, October 2005. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. Holt Paperbacks, December 2004. (publisher, Amazon.com)
    Bacevich's book prompted me to re-read Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire and I'm glad I'm doing so; Johnson very insightfully supplements and complements Bacevich.

    Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. Metropolitan Books, February 2007. (publisher, Amazon.com)

    See also the other books in the series The American Empire Project.

  • James Carroll. House of War: The Pentagon and the Disasterous Rise of American Power. Houghton Mifflin, May 2006. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Norman Solomon. War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. John Wiley & Sons, June 2006. (book website, Amazon.com)

    Norman Solomon. Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State. Polipoint Press, October 2007. (book website, Amazon.com)

  • Ismael Hossein-zadeh. The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism. Palgrave Macmillan, June 2007. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Nick Turse. The Complex: Mapping America's Military-Industrial-Technological-Entertainment-Academic-Media-Corporate Matrix. New York: Metropolitan Books, March 2008. (publisher, Amazon.com)

  • Preston C. Enright, Veterans for peace, Listmania, Amazon.com, 25 October 2007 (date as of the last time I saw that web page).


Additional Comments and Notes:

Bacevich's thesis is that the increased militarism of the United States, especially since the end of the Cold War, is not attributable to a single faction, political party, or President, but rather the confluence of many factors present in American society since the end of the Vietnam War, with support from all sides of mainstream politics regardless of political party. (Personally I think the key turing point(s) occurred much earlier, including World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, and the United States' filling the void left by the decline of the British Empire, but Bacevich focuses on events and trends since the Vietnam War. I also agree with Chalmers Johnson's analysis in The Sorrows of Empire that identifies events in the 1890s that led to the creation of an Army general staff after the Spanish-American War.)
Those factors include:
the U.S. Army's reforms in the 1970s and 1980s following its mistreatment by the civilian leadership during the Vietnam War;
the All-Volunteer Force (and the decline of the citizen-soldier);
the Neoconservative movement;
the military buildup of the Reagan administration;
popular culture in the Reagan years including, for example: Reagan's praise of individual service men and women in his speeches; films such as An Officer and a Gentleman, the Rambo series, and Top Gun; and techno-thriller novels such as those by Tom Clancey;
the rise of the Religious Right;
the theorizing of "defense intellectuals" beginning after World War II with the strategic problems of nuclear war, continuing with the advent of precision guided munitions in the last days of the Vietnam War, and several other developments in military technology since then, the 1990s discussion of a "Revolution in Military Affairs" prompted by developments in information technology, all of which acted to lower policymakers' threshold for using military force.

Bacevich refers to militarism in several meanings, not just the propensity of the U.S. government to approach its foreign policy problems with military force rather than other means.

In the first chapter Bacevich discusses four manifestations of increasing American militarism:
1. "the scope, cost, and configuration of America's present-day military establishment" (page 15);
2. "an increased propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the normalization of war" (page 18);
3. "the appearance in recent years of a new aesthetic of war" (page 20);
4. "an appreciable boost in the status of military institutions and soldiers themselves" (page 25).

Bacevich discusses his concept of the new American Militarism in the "Conversations with History" interview as a particularly American form of militarism, not the militarism of Japan or Germany of the World War I and World War II eras. Bacevich highlights:
1. "a greatly overstated confidence in the efficacy of force; that force is an eminently useful tool in American hands; and that therefore military power is an opportunity to be exploited, rather than something to be viewed skeptically";
2. "a conviction that military power has come to be the chief emblem of national greatness; its not the productivity of our factories or the quality of our education system, it's by golly that we've got twelve carrier battle groups and that's what makes America stand apart from other nations of the world;"
3. "a romanticization of soldiers; an inclination to at least give lip service to the notion of soldiers being America's best and brightest and a group of people morally, not simply set apart, but morally superior to the average citizen."

Lest we forget how busy the U.S. military has become, consider this paragraph from pages 18-19:
"The new American militarism also manifests itself through an increased propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the normalization of war. There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. troops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, however, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared. During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totaled a scant six. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events. [endnote 23: Cold War episodes included Korea, Lebanon (twice), Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and Grenada. By some calculations, the U.S. confrontation with Libya culminating in the bombing of Tripoli in 1986 might also qualify.] The brief period extending from 1989's Operation Just Cause (the overthrow of Manuel Noriega) to 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom (the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) featured nine major military interventions. [endnote 24: Panama, the Persian Gulf (twice), Kurdistan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.] And that count does not include innumerable lesser actions such as Bill Clinton's signature cruise missile attacks against obscure targets in obscure places, the almost daily bombing of Iraq throughout the late 1990s, or the quasi-combat missions that have seen GIs dispatched to Rwanda, Colombia, East Timor, and the Philippines. Altogether, tempo of U.S. military interventionism has become nothing short of frenetic."

The "Albright Question": Madeline Albright asked General Colin Powell in the early 1990s "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

In Chapter Seven "Blood for Oil" Bacevich discusses the Carter Doctrine originating in President Carter's January 1980 State of the Union address: "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." See also Carter's Presidential Directive/NSC-63 [PDF], 15 January 1981. Bacevich goes so far as to characterize this as World War IV which began in 1980 ("World War III" was the Cold War, 1947-1989) and has seen a steady increase of American attention and overt military force in that region, culminating (so far) in the current occupation of Iraq and the building of several permanent U.S. military bases there (Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, A Nation At War: Strategic Shift; Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access To Key Iraq Bases, The New York Times, 20 April 2003; Tom Englehardt, Can You Say "Permanent Bases"? The American Press Can't, TomDispatch.com, 14 February 2006).

I found this chapter especially insightful. President Carter enunciated that Doctrine after the failure of his policy that encouraged the U.S. to conserve energy and seek alternatives to imported oil. It seems clear that U.S. efforts to maintain access to relatively cheap oil through military means will not end soon; that this policy is supported by the party establishments of both the Democrats and Republicans - I think the huge capital investment in the current petroleum economy explains much of this policy inertia; and this policy will be prolonged by the U.S.' continuing failure to develop and implement alternative energy sources and, as Bacevich describes, while the U.S. continues to define freedom as affluence based on cheap oil. This chapter also appears as: The Real World War IV, The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2005.

Bacevich describes World War IV as the implementation of the Carter Doctrine since 1980 in rebuttal to the Bush administration's "global war on terror" neologism and in particular against neoconservative Norman Podhoretz's concept of World War IV as a struggle against "Islamofascism" [How to Win World War IV, Commentary, February 2002; World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win, Commentary, September 2004; The War Against World War IV, Commentary, February 2005; World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Doubleday, September 2007 (publisher, Amazon.com)].

For additional rebuttals of Podhoretz see:

John Brown, The Return Of The World Warriors, TomPaine.com, 07 October 2004.

Tom Englehardt, Are We in World War IV?, TomDispatch.com, 10 March 2005.

John Brown and Tom Englehardt, Why World War IV Can't Sell, TomDispatch.com, 30 March 2005.

The publication of Podhoretz's 2007 "Islamofascism" book has probably prompted many more rebuttals in book reviews.

If the U.S. continues to follow the Bush policy of using military force to seek control over natural resources, then it would not surprise me to see additional U.S. attempts to militarily dominate other oil and gas exporting regions, especially in Africa (i.e., Nigeria) and South America (i.e. Venezuela), over the next ten to twenty years; currently the nations of Central Asia are too close geographically / culturally / diplomatically to Russia and China. Southeast Asian oil & gas production would probably be marketed mainly to industrial nations closer to that region (i.e., India, China, Japan, South Korea) and the U.S. seems to have that region well enough covered by bases. However the U.S. government clearly needs to reorient its policy back to the natural American focus on innovation in science and technology in order to satisfy its energy and other natural resource needs.

Digression on Central Asia:

(Note: Kazakhstan has significant oil & gas reserves; NYT 06 May 2006.)

The U.S. has been attempting to establish itself in Central Asia; for much of the first 4 years of the Afghanistan war the U.S. had access to air bases in both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, but there was/is strong and continuing diplomatic pressure from China, Russia and other Central Asian nations to evict the Americans (NYT 05 Nov 2001; NYT 09 Jan 2002; NYT 20 Apr 2003; NYT 23 Sept 2003; NYT 28 Mar 2004; NYT 06 July 2005; NYT 08 July 2005; NYT 14 July 2005; NYT 21 Oct 2005; NYT 15 July 2006; NYT 10 Sept 2006; NYT 17 Oct 2007).

Uzbekistan finally ordered the U.S. to leave in July 2005 (NYT 27 July 2005; NYT 31 July 2005; NYT 01 Aug 2005).

The U.S. has retained Manas Air Base (U.S. Air Force, Manas Air Base; Wikipedia; GlobalSecurity.org) in Kyrgyzstan (NYT 12 Oct 2005; NYT 15 July 2006; NYT 17 Oct 2007) in the face of continuing pressure against it especially from Russia.

Tajikistan allows NATO to refuel airplanes on Afghanistan-related missions in its territory but there is no NATO or American base (NYT 01 Aug 2005; NYT 14 Nov 2006).

Details on U.S. bases in Iraq:

The U.S. "super-bases" / "mega-bases" in Iraq may include:
Posted by at