Hard-hitting 'Limits of Power' focuses on arrogance of a nation
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Metropolitan Books, 206 pp., $24
Six weeks after the US invasion of Iraq, President Bush proudly proclaimed, "Major combat operations . . . have ended." Yet five years later the war drags on with no end in sight.
How did that happen? The answer involves a grievous misunderstanding of what military power can accomplish, according to Andrew J. Bacevich in his timely new book about US foreign policy since World War II.
Relying on previously reported raw material, Bacevich argues that political and military leaders have bungled the job of ensuring national security. But the real culprits, he argues, are the American people, who stood by while insiders "hijacked" the federal government.
Since World War II, Bacevich writes, national leaders have asserted without challenge that superior military power would guarantee US security. The American people assented, as long as they were free to embark on a "relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge." The not-surprising result was skyrocketing personal debt, increased reliance on imported oil, and a mushrooming trade deficit, all of which made America more dependent on outsiders and, ultimately, more vulnerable.
When President Jimmy Carter suggested that Americans tended "to worship self-indulgence and consumption," he was ridiculed. His successor, Ronald Reagan, slashed taxes, increased military spending, ran up the federal deficit and, Bacevich writes, "gave moral sanction to the empire of consumption." Like Reagan, the current President Bush also hiked military spending, cut taxes and, after 9/11, told the American people to "get down to Disney World."
Afghanistan and Iraq have not affected the lives of most Americans. People are satisfied, Bacevich says, if they can continue to spend and if the military continues to protect the flow of oil, though this month's economic crisis is finally changing some of those attitudes.
For decades Washington has embraced four core convictions, Bacevich writes: History is an epic struggle between oppression and freedom; the United States is freedom's chief advocate; it's America's God-given task to ensure freedom's triumph; and for the American way of life to endure, freedom must prevail everywhere.
That hubristic thinking led directly to Afghanistan and Iraq. Each was sold as a quick and necessary foray after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but years later the United States is spending $3 billion a week in Iraq alone in a war seemingly without end.
"How is it," Bacevich writes, "that our widely touted post-Cold War military supremacy has produced not enhanced security but the prospect of open-ended conflict?"
For starters, warfare is unpredictable, a lesson made abundantly clear during the Vietnam War. A telling example in Iraq is the wide use of roadside bombs. US forces have been sitting ducks for the homemade explosive devices, which can be built for about the cost of a pizza. As measured by US casualties, the insurgents "consistently outperformed the Pentagon in this contest," writes Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who served in Vietnam and who teaches history at Boston University. The author dedicates "The Limits of Power" to his son, Andrew John Bacevich, an Army first lieutenant killed last year in Iraq, the victim of a roadside explosive. (The text does not mention the son or recount the circumstances of his death.)
Bacevich is a fluid, economical writer with an obvious passion for his subject, though he sometimes weakens his case when he engages in rhetorical overkill, saying, for example, "Hubris and sanctimony have become the paramount expressions of American statecraft."
In the end, the thoughtful Bacevich does not offer readers much hope. The United States will continue to believe it is "unique among history's great powers" and will believe, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that overwhelming military power will always ensure victory.
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. 