'Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War'

Bryant Jordan - Military.com

In speeches and finally a small book back in the 1930s, legendary Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler called war a "racket" for big business. Around the same time Fortune Magazine was saying pretty much the same thing in a series – also subsequently turned into a book – that detailed the who's who in the international arms industry up to, during and after The Great War, and reporting that some of the same interests already were rearming Germany for another go. Decades later Bob Dylan would sing out his own J’accuse with "Masters of War" and retired Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Shoup would decry interventions in Vietnam and elsewhere as America putting its "dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers"into other people’s business.

"Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War" is in the same vein, and like Butler and Shoup, author Andrew Bacevich knows firsthand about the military and war, having been a combat officer in Vietnam and serving more than 20 years in the Army. He taught at West Point – of which he is a graduate – and is currently a professor of international relations and history at Boston University.

But where his predecessors offer outright condemnation and see corporate power and greed behind America’s string of wars, Bacevich sees a misguided worldview that for 60 years has shaped U.S. politics, industry and society. Washington Rules is not a book that points fingers at one group – politicians, the military, defense contractors – and lays all blame at their feet. It is not conspiracy, but a post-World War II mentality puts the U.S. on a constant war footing and, with it, what he calls the permanent path to war.

Since the end of World War II, Bacevich argues, America’s leaders have operated under a largely unquestioned belief in what he calls a "sacred trinity" – that international peace requires a U.S. global military presence, that U.S. forces be configured for global power projection, and that it will intervene globally to counter existing or anticipated threats. Republican or Democrat, no matter who controls Congress or the White House, all abide by these Washington rules, Bacevich says.

In part this is a view born of the Cold War, when the U.S.’s pledge to defend allies and contain the spread of communism naturally translated into increased influence by military and intelligence officials charged with carrying out the mission, and an industry that only benefited from the government largesse that went with a commitment to have military forces second to none and capable of responding anywhere in the world. President Eisenhower, who knew both war and politics firsthand, certainly saw the danger of a national defense establishment shaped more by a "military-industrial complex" than by America’s actual needs, but his warning also fell on deaf ears. Nor did it help when a politically motivated Sen. John Kennedy used an exaggerated Air Force estimate of the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities to claim the U.S. needed to bridge a "missile gap" with the communist state, and that Republicans were weak on defense.

Since then, as Bacevich makes clear, anyone from either major party seeking national office has lived in fear of being called soft on national security. And that has meant no one questions the Washington rules that, by their very nature, tilt the U.S. toward war or proxy wars.

"Rhetoric plays well with the public. Fear mongering works in disciplining politicians," Bacevich said.

But Bacevich also argues it’s not only politicians that have a responsibility to questioning the Washington rules – or at least the assumptions or claims used to keep those rules in place. Both military leadership and the American public have failed in this area.

Many American military officers, especially in the most senior ranks, would have known the difference between real threats and illusions, between what assets were needed and what were based on spending for the sake of looking strong and or feeding the national defense industry. As voices that have the ear of power they may advise but they still have the job of carrying out whatever the civilian leadership decides. But in too many cases, their advice merely reinforces conventional thinking, says Bacevich.

"I myself believe that senior officers, people who have risen to the top in our military, who have 20, 30, 40 years [of service], have tended to be prisoners of convention, have lacked imagination," he said. "I’m sorry to say, in some cases, have lacked moral courage. So the quality of advice being rendered … has been disappointing."

The public also has largely abandoned questions of foreign policy and intervention to Washington, and generally responds to the same rhetoric and fear that narrows the thinking of political leaders. Bacevich especially finds this odd at a time when the public typically distrusts Washington on everything else.

"We live in a moment now when there is really a fierce anti-Washington sentiment in many parts of the electorate," Bacevich said. "People won’t take anything Washington does at face value on matters related to the economy or health care or immigration. And yet the vast majority of Americans are willing to take at face value whatever Washington says about our global military posture, of the extent of the threats posed by anti-western violent jihadists. So what I’d say is, some of the skepticism that really is a deep-seated tradition on the part of the American people needs to be directed at questions of national security."

"Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War"

By Andrew Bacevich

Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company

290 pages, $25

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