Review: Washington Rules America's Path to Permanent War

Abstract

WASHINGTON RULES America's Path Permanent War Andrew J. Bacevich New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2010. 286 pp, US$25.00 cloth. ISBN 978-0-8050-9141-0Among leading American foreign policy intellectuals who have emerged during the decade since 9/11, Andrew Bacevich occupies a distinctive niche. Anti-imperialist, anti-militarist, and a trenchant critic of the policies of George W Bush and Barack Obama alike, Bacevich is today a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. position gives him a platform write works of high-level popularization combining scholarship and polemic for a general audience. But what gives Bacevich his peculiar public authority, finally, is his unique background: Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich, United States army (retired), spent his first career in the military service of his country. His son, following in his footsteps, recently gave his life in the line of duty in Iraq. So even the Sunday talk-show warriors in cannot dismiss Bacevich out of hand. Nor could the likes of Sarah Palin in Republican Party ranks dare say, as she famously did in a low blow against Obama, that has no cojones.In his most recent trade book, Bacevich argues that there is a Washington about foreign and military policy akin the Washington undergirding the policies of the international financial institutions based in that city. In the mindset of the plutocracy - and this has been true for most of the period since the late 1940s - there is a set of assumptions about America's proper role in the world, i.e., empire, just as there is a set of assumptions about the right kind of international political economy, i.e., the free market. Not only do these assumptions underlie the ebb and flow of particular policies and the periodic rotation of governing parties in congress and the White House, but any attempt by intellectually honest senior officials question or challenge those assumptions is quickly and if need be ruthlessly suppressed. This book aims take stock of conventional wisdom in its most influential and enduring form, Bacevich writes, namely the package of assumptions, habits, and precepts that have defined the tradition of statecraft which the United States has adhered since the end of World War II (12).These Washington centre on the necessity of a permanent standing army and other military forces held in a permanent state of mobilization, ready be deployed globally, and the inherent right intervene anywhere in the world in order perpetuate American hegemony or advance the righteous cause of the pax Americana. Nor are the rules and their assumptions confined only the blighted imagination and self-serving interests of the grandees of the Capitol beltway. The rules - and the policy consensus they constitute - are accepted as well, formally or informally, among the hangers-on of the governing class: big banks and other financial institutions, defense contractors and major corporations, television networks and elite publications like the New York Times, even quasi-academic entities like the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (15). Bacevich's purpose is shine a little light on those rules and thus to argue for readmitting of disreputable (or 'radical') views our national security debate, in effect legitimating alternatives the status quo (16).With telling invective that rarely misses its mark, Bacevich, who is in private life a prominent liberal Catholic layman, writes with the zeal of a highly informed apostate. In five brisk chapters he dispatches Allen Dulles and the CIA, General Curtis LeMay and the strategic air command, the Kennedy brothers and their assassination plots, the unspeakable Nixon, Reagan and his Contras, Bush the elder and the scandalous Clinton set (Bacevich is notably unforgiving of Madeleine Albright), and finally Bush the younger and his commitment global war without end against radical political Islam. …