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Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (American Empire Project)

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Five ENGROSSING Stars!! This is Andrew J Bacevich's outstanding, deeply researched, hard-hitting work of scholarship, assessing America's national and foreign policies as well as the personalities and groups that have led us into the business of confrontation, power projection, and war, time and time again. Essentially this book is the outgrowth of Mr. Bacevich's 20 year self-education, which began at the age of 41 as a military officer who began to see the international world in a new light based on an epiphany at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. Looking at well over six decades of wartime policy and actions in the "American Century", Mr Bacevich discloses the "Washington Rules" and the credo wherein the USA has assumed the mantle of attempting to "lead, save, liberate, and transform" the world to assure international order and peace. He takes us from the Truman-era administrations to the Obama administration, detailing how the "sacred trinity" of global military presence, global power projection, global interventionism is used to achieve those ends, using his "Washington Rules" as the template. The Jimmy Carter segment was particularly eye-opening. Mr Bacevich shows that regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in power, the US has had an attitude that we are uniquely qualified to take on the worldwide foes of peace and democracy, forgetting, revising, or ignoring the painful lessons of World War II, Vietnam, and beyond that might have taken the USA into periods of unprecedented peace, instead of numerous conflicts. Lessons that the author shows President Obama is clearly in the midst of learning, using a modified sacred trinity. Written in engaging prose, this is a very absorbing work of research with sections that some may find very troubling based on the decisions of our leaders. If I could recommend one book that President Obama and the Congress should read, this is it. But it should also be read by those who were and were not alive during our 20th Century to 21st Century wars and military encounters. My Highest Recommendation! Five ABSORBING Stars!! (This review is based on a Kindle download in iPhone mode and Kindle text-to-speech mode.)

Andrew Bacevich offers an explanation of what is putting our way of life at risk. If he is correct, the Afghan War has no end in sight as did the Iraq War (see Charles Ferguson's book: No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos). In fact, the Afghan War is now the longest war in U.S. history.

Retired U.S. military and intelligence personnel have written prolifically about the current wars and what they mean for the U.S. They educate the public about connecting foreign policy to war strategy to what our young enlisted men and women do in the wars. Examples include books by Wesley Clark (A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country), Michael Scheuer (Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq) and David Bellavia (HOUSE TO HOUSE: A TALE OF MODERN WAR). In the history of warfare, there has probably never been a population with as much access to information about their wars.

Washington Rules provides analysis of the considerations that President Obama faced when he made the decision to expand the military effort in Afghanistan. Whereas the consensus holds that this president grasps issues and is not primarily informed by ideology, there may have been a dominant domestic political calculation to this war decision. Bacevich identifies pressures imposed on our president by the "military industrial complex" and the "national security apparatus." These loaded terms summarize privileged powers within the U.S. that seek global military engagement in part to maintain the status quo within. This is the Status Quo argument that has been used to explain some U.S. motives in the wars.

Andrew Bacevich has patriotic credentials to state the Status Quo argument. He has been doing this for some time. (See his previous book: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (American Empire Project)). His son was killed in Iraq while serving as a 1st Lt. in the Army. Andrew Bacevich is a veteran of the Vietnam War, a graduate of West Point and he taught at both West Point and Johns Hopkins. He earned his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. He is a retired Army Colonel.

Bacevich is critical of George W. Bush and Barack Obama but for completely different reasons. Bacevich addresses the question debated from California to the New York Island, from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters: which is worse, the president who sends young people into harm's way due to misguided notions or the president who sends young people into harm's way because of political calculation? Of course, this question is framed in a simple way in order to introduce debate. Bacevich is more appalled by the latter, however.

Washington Rules traces America's overreliance on military power from the administration of Woodrow Wilson right up to that of Barack Obama. Over time the U.S. presidency morphed into an imperial presidency with a self-imposed mission to intervene in problems throughout the world irrespective of long-term U.S. interests. An exaggerated sense of what the military can accomplish went unquestioned until recently. Bacevich makes history come alive with applications of the lessons of the Vietnam War along with several other wars.

Washington Rules addresses the following questions. What did we get out of Desert Storm? What should our role be with regard to the Islamic World? What happens if we back down in Afghanistan? Bacevich asks tough questions and that's healthy. It's taking me time to digest his solutions to these issues although I'm excited about changes to the status quo. With regard to the Middle East, Bacevich says our role should be to demonstrate that liberalism can coexist with religion.

Finally, Washington Rules is entertaining because it's almost a horror story in real time. These issues affect our way of life right now. Teachers across the country are being laid off as the States struggle with their budgets, and I wonder how that might be related to federal debt accumulated to finance the wars. Bacevich is a Declinist in that he flatly states that the American Century is over and we have reached certain limits.

Time has expired on the 'American Century,' says retired Col. Bacevich, and this is the time to reject militarism and recognize that fixing Detroit takes precedence over Afghanistan. Bacevich's aim is to re-examine assumptions, habits, and precepts that have defined our foreign/military policy since the end of WWII. All well and good, but Bacevich devotes too many pages to recounting how we got to this point post-WWII, mostly focused on individuals such as Curtis LeMay, Allen Dulles, Maxwell Taylor, etc. Almost no attention is given to how support for Israel, Iraq War I and the subsequent stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, etc. brought us 9/11, a never-ending state of War on Terrorism, and the organizational monstrosity known as the Dept. of Homeland Security with its 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies consuming unknown billions of dollars.

Our self-appointed role of leading, liberating, and saving the world through activism, hard power, and negotiating from strength continues today - DOD has become the Department of Global Policing, and President Obama finds himself continuing the model laid down since 1945. The author also skims over too quickly how we have exhausted the authority and goodwill acquired immediately after WWII - via the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan I and II, the 2007 Recession, going from the world's largest creditor to debtor nation, decades of trade and government deficits, energy profligacy, decaying cities, manufacturing, and infrastructure, Katrina, supporting dictators and human rights abusers, etc.

DOD consumes $700 billion/year (I'm assuming that includes Iraq and Afghanistan), while stationing 300,000 troops abroad in 761 sites in 39 nations, plus 90,000 sailors and marines at sea. Our expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined. and are propelling us towards insolvency and perpetual war.

An excellent example of how we are digging ourselves into a hole occurred just this week when the U.S. announced the State Department is in advanced discussions with Vietnam to share nuclear fuels and technologies in a deal that would preserve Hanoi's right to enrich uranium indigenously. This obviously undermines our containment stance vs. North Korea and Iran, and is intended to somehow intimidate China. Similarly, the U.S. is also supporting India's enrichment and military-fuel capability efforts - again to somehow intimidate China. Meanwhile, we also parade a flotilla of ships nearby off South Korea to intimidate North Korea, and further irritate China.(They now have, or soon will have, supersonic missiles capable of raining down on our aircraft carrier task forces - a great example of asymmetric warfare that makes our Navy look obsolete and a near total waste.) And then we wonder why China is modernizing its military.

Col. Bacevich's conclusion - "It's time (for America) to choose."

Bacevich is a genius in his own right. He see's though the night like an infrared scope. I am going to read his book a second time to pick up what I missed. Bacevich takes us down the memory hole of the past and reminds us what was said as if all of it forgotten.

I think the most salient point he makes is that of the domino effect in reverse. He explains how we entered the Vietnam war at that time on this propaganda and how we fell for the reverse propaganda that we could create a new new domino effect of "democracy" by preemptive war, and most all of us fell for it, including me.

I however want to do this cursory review upon my first reading, but may edit it on the second as there is so much that he says that is not only prudent and relevant to our time, while simultaneously exposes the misjudgment, however one may see it.

Edit: It takes a while to fully Grok Bacevich, who tells us it is not Washington that makes us what we are it is us. And until we decide to stop the madness, the madness will not stop. Bacevich ends his book with these four words. "We too, must choose" And we must, shall we continue down this line and break ourselves or shall we become a great and prosperous country once again? It is up to us not Washington, it is up to me an you. A prophet is without honor in his own land. We can wish all we want, but practical realities define our position.

The brilliance of this piece is that it is not judgmental nor partisan, it is just the truth. He lays out the facts in such a succinct way that it mesmerized me. Bacevich will be remembered as a patriot and a true military man in search of truth, not unlike Smedley Butler.

First off, I agree with most of Bacevich's points. However, if you have read two of his previous books, "The New American Militarism" and "The Limits of Power," you'll notice something...that all three of his books basically say the SAME THING. Also, he doesn't really provide too many answers on how to fix the problem, other than to say that Americans need to consume less (good luck with that). Taken in isolation, this book would be 5 stars, but when you read his prior books, this current offering lacks enough originality to get more than 3 stars.

When you spend the better part of a balmy Sunday indoors engrossed in the fascination of wanting to find out what is on the next page, page after page, you know you have a great book that opens your eyes and your mind to fresh ideas, a book that makes you question your most basic assumptions of how you see things as an American and beckons you to look at yourself in a different light. Andrew Bacevich achieves this in just 250 pages.

His real education began where no NATO soldier had been previously free to roam. The place was East Germany and the time was after the Berlin Wall came down. It continued as he earned a Ph.D. at Princeton and with a professorship at Boston College where he teaches and writes today. From that education, Professor Bacevich made some startling discoveries.

He defines this discovery as the credo and the trinity. "The credo summons the United States--and the United States alone--to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world." The sacred trinity requires the United States to "maintain a global presence, to configure its forces for global projection, and to anticipate threats with a policy of global interventionism." This relationship is symbiotic, according to Bacevich. "The trinity adds plausibility to the credo, and the credo justifies the trinity's... exertions." Implicit in both is the government's and people's tacit acceptance that the U.S. is called upon to do this, is the only nation capable of doing this, and that other nations really want the United States to do it. This is how Washington rules and this is America's path to permanent war.

Such interventionism began with possessions obtained from the Spanish-American War and Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Following World War II, this became the American way of thinking, that protection of America's vital interests meant we had the right to interfere in the political or economic direction of other countries, and most importantly, that the United States "exempts itself from the norms with which it expects others to comply."

It also meant that the best way to protect America was to establish bases in far off lands where we could strike an enemy before it struck us. This also meant ratcheting up the fear. First it was the fear of communism, then the fear of nuclear annihilation, then it was the domino theory that would eventually reach our border, and finally, the war on terrorism, which like all the others, has become a drain of human and economic resources, and an abject failure.

Andrew Bacevich achieves something few other authors do. He speaks from his heart and his mind. From both you get a glimpse of the man's soul. I could almost sense an anger from trying to convince the deaf to listen and make the blind see. (He has spoken in front of Congress more than once). He recognizes what few Americans do, that we are not a nation of unlimited manpower and economic resources that can sustain a permanent state of war, that costs so much to so many, and benefits so few--politicians and profiteers. He is a man engaged who wishes that Americans would become engaged by not thinking about what they want, but how they can serve, by not just paying lip service to our servicemen, but making their own sacrifices, as he and his son did. Bacevich wants a fiscally responsible America that finds its spirit in renewing itself and revitalizing its own democratic ideals rather than imposing them on others.

That is the way America was meant to be.



"Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?"

George Washington in his Farewell Address.





Also Recommended:

Bacevich, Andrew, "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism," Metropolitan Books, 2008.

Fullbright, William, J., "The Arrogance of Power." Random House, New York, NY 1966.

Gore, Al, "The Assault on Reason." Penguin Books, 2008.

Moyers, Bill, "Moyers on America: A Journalist and his Times," Anchor Books, 2005.

Professor Andrew Bacevich's latest book describes the nature of the US national security elite as he sees it. Washington rules are the list of assumptions necessary to gain admittance to the leadership cadre of the US, that is "rules" functions as both a noun and verb. The rules are based on what Bacevich describes as the credo - essentially that the US alone among nations has the responsibility, morality, wisdom and power to not only lead, but change the world. This credo pertains to purpose, while the other componet of the rules, the "sacred trinity", pertains to the means. The trinity consists of "global military presence, global power projection and global interventionism". Together the credo and trinity provide the intellectual grounding of the Washington rules.

So far so good, but the problem arose with the Vietnam war which showed the rules - both purpose and means - to be highly questionable and even self-defeating, according to Bacevich, and in need of revision or even replacement. Instead of a national debate to decide how to go forward, our elite, which had nothing to gain by replacing the rules and much to gain with their retention, reduced the defeat in Vietnam to one of "tactics" and found a few scapegoats to take the blame. By 1982, the US was back on the same track it had been in 1965, as if Vietnam had never happened.

In all this book is an attempt by Bacevich to educate the American public as to the actual nature of what US national security/foreign policy has steadily become since its beginning in 1945. At this point in time the Washington rules drive not only these areas, but domestic US policy as well.

The time has come for the public to demand an actual accounting of the results of Washington rules, including especially the senseless wars since 2001. Whether that does in fact occur will define the future of this country. The book is well worth the cost and hopefully will achieve something along the lines that the author hopes.

I've just finished this holiday reading while cycling up the eastern seaboard of the United States. Having started my journey eight weeks ago in Washington DC, I picked up this book in an independent book shop in Brookline, near Boston, Mass. It seemed to stand out.

It is an incredibly well written, fluid and perceptive review of post WWII foreign policy escalation from the dropping of "Little Boy" on Hiroshima through to the current state of never-ending war that the US occupies itself with.

The author is a very good story teller. His narrative starts from the first page and does not stop or delay in delivering an insightful and meaningful history and commentary on what is fundamentally wrong with foreign policies pursued by the US.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and read it in just over 100 miles on a bike, or about four days. I'd happily recommend this book. Indeed, because I only have space for one book on my bicycle, I gave this book to a teacher I met in Biddeford, MA on his way to Acadia National Park on holidays.

He said he had nothing to read and was looking for a decent book. I gave it to him and told him if he liked politics (he did), he would love this book.

I hope he reads it and I'm sure he will love it if he does. You will too.

Andrew Bacevich has authored another excellent book on American foreign policy that effectively explains the thinking that led us since World War II.

There is a lot of history involving the CIA and SAC.

Some of the topics Mr. Bacevich covers are:

*The definition of semiwarriors.
*How Obama has conformed on military global leadership.
*How Viet Nam became irrelevant in foreign policy decisions due to revision.
*Explains who benefits from the perpetuation of Washington Rules.

On the Viet Nam war the author states that the war was fought to "sustain the Washington consensus".

He's correct also in his view that fixing Afghanistan and Iraq has taken priority over domestic problems.

On page 237 Mr. Bacevich writes "The proper aim of American statecraft, therefore, is not to redeem humankind or to prescribe some specific world order, nor to police the planet by force of arms."
Our government has returned to a failed ideology that we can make other nations in our image by force.

He cautions that the Washington Rules rather than delivering on promises of peace and prosperity, will ruin the United States economically and give us never ending wars.
Another great foreign policy book from one of the best authors on the subject!

Other books that I recommend on the subject of American foreign policy are:

American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (American Empire Project)

Bacevich's book summarizes two decade's thinking and writing about America's self-inflicted geopolitical dilemmas. It assails a frame of mind (or climate of opinion that is so pervasive that its assumptions are considered beyond criticism or even analysis) that has been responsible since 1945 for the creation of the many institutions and interest groups that prosper as organs of the "national security state" that the US has become. The assumptions underlying the conventional wisdom of the security state are: American exceptionalism and its corollary that we have a historical duty and mission to spread freedom and democracy across the globe (i.e., we are the world's necessary and indispensable policeman - sometimes propped up by the risible idea that this is a divinely appointed mission); the notion of "global power projection" (or "forward defense") that requires U.S. armed forces to be ready at any time for any thing in any place; and the consequent militarization of U.S. foreign policy. At the present time our leaders are telling us that we must be prepared to take on a variety of vague "threats" to US security for the indefinite future, in other words that we will be (and should be) at war on a more or less permanent basis. The latest collective fantasy of the national security establishment is that we must somehow play the key role in resolving the political and cultural problems of the Mid-East, from Israel through Iran to Pakistan (let's be clear about one thing - though we dabble, meddle, and invade all over this portion of the map, we don't have the slightest chance of long-term success in any one of these arenas of conflict, especially if we chose to follow the path of military intervention, which has only exacerbated instability and recruited bodies for various fanatical organizations).

One simple truth that contradicts the implications and assumed responsibilities of the above notions is that the "mission" has been fabricated and fine-tuned over the past seventy years by the multifold agents of the "military-industrial complex" of Eisenhower's valedictory warning and is at stark odds with the wisdom and restraint of our founding fathers and their successors for most of the 19th century. We started to think imperially in the 1890s and to act imperially after WWII. Almost all the "threats" since 1945 have been ginned up in ideological dress or through hysterical fear-mongering by our national security establishment. We've been advised of nonexistent "gaps" with respect to our alleged enemies' abilities or told that the fall of a friendly regime (read "compliant and bribable" regime, usually corrupt and locally detested) somewhere 10,000 miles away will have dire consequences. (I remember the days when a communist take-over of Laos was touted as a major security threat to the US and the Western World - does anyone even mention that country's name today, much less its political system and its key role in world? The notion was fanciful from the beginning, as was the "domino theory" of which it was a part. Every potential domino that was about to fall was really just one more indigestible client state that became a drain on the resources of Moscow and Beijing, presumably our real enemies at the time. And we also willfully ignored the fact that communist movements in third-world countries were the vehicle of nationalism, leading to tragic-farcical experiments that failed and to splits within the so-called "monolithic" communist block. Our intelligence on these matters was so bad that we even missed the signs of the Russian-Chinese break-up.)

Another simple truth is that in spite of our bloated and gargantuan military establishment (the maintenance of which does have dire implications for our economy), we do not have the capacity to succeed in our numerous foreign misadventures -- we are, from our bi-partisan political leadership right down to the military battalion or company operational level, ineffective and incompetent (this incompetence, which allows military-political theories and theorists to constantly "fail upward" is the big elephant in the room that is a taboo subject in American political life). Illustrative of this, Bacevitch points to media complicity and public acceptance of instantly fabricated "larger than life figures" such as Generals Petraeus and McChyrstal whose pronouncements about "the way forward" in unwinnable conflicts are eagerly parsed for genius and insight, when they are in fact nothing but standard-issue bloviation and pablum. But, for the most part, the real villains in this sorry recent history of military misadventures have been civilians, the "big thinkers" of national security fancies and nostrums, men like Kahn, McNamara, the Bundy brothers, Rostow, J. Alsop, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Boot, et al. (Bacevich's "semi-warriors"). None of their predictions have been accurate, and all of their approaches have failed, because their goals were often purely rhetorical or incapable of being achieved.

So we have a cast of the usual suspects who feather their career nests and bank accounts at the expense of the rest of the nation (as do their benefactors and beneficiaries, the vast web of defense contractors). But Bacevitch does not let the rest of us off the hook just because we've been misled, deliberately deceived, and generally conned into co-operation with the overall program of the national security establishment. As he points out, both by omission and commission, we choose to be misled because the program demands so little of us in terms of thought and effort. When actual sacrifice is demanded (e.g., through conscription, as during the Korean and Vietnamese wars) the public soon tires of the inconsistencies and false justifications for our military adventures abroad. Recognizing our impatience and querulousness in the face of failure or prolonged effort, the defense establishment no longer demands any sacrifice from us - as long as we consent and pay our taxes we'll be left alone, and the professionals (the volunteer-based armed forces, assorted think tanks, and talking heads who pose as "defense intellectuals", an oxymoron if ever there was one) will handle our problems for us. We even have mercenaries ("private security firms" such as Blackwater, literally a den of thugs and war-profiteers) to pick up the slack when manpower runs short. Bacevich supplies a post-1945 genealogy of the most important formulators of our current national defense doctrines, starting with those two "Dr. Strangeloves", Allen Dulles and General Curtis Le May, whose agencies, the CIA and the Strategic Air Command, mushroomed and were considered sacrosanct in their budgetary claims during the 1950s and 60s.

It's a sorry picture - and, I believe, a very accurate one - that Bacevich paints of the U.S.A. His suggested remedies are both social and political. With respect to the former he realizes that a much larger proportion of the citizenry has to become active and engaged with these issues. We need a large and loud collective public voice to move our rather spineless politicians toward supporting practical and affordable (rather than "global" and limitless) solutions of our problems. I have no optimism on this point because we live in a land of bread, circuses, and maximal self-indulgence, which implies minimal private commitments to public welfare (the sheer vapidity and phony "significance" of enterprises such as Facebook and Twitter point in this direction, with a large portion of society now "empowered" to dwell in the land of Narcissus). Politically we need a very sudden and drastic reversal - a president (and a Congress), for instance, who would initiate a program of cutting our overseas military bases and the overall military budget by 50%. (Then we could, as Bacevich often puts it, "fix Cleveland and Detroit" and many similar places where our national priorities should be placed.) We could afford to cut even more of our stupendous military budget without jeopardizing our real ability to defend the nation - rather than "project global power" -- since it exceeds that of the rest of the world's military budgets combined. We can kill anyone ten times over but this always seems insufficient to our national security gurus and mavens. Such cuts also seem politically unlikely and would immediately give rise to hysteria, conspiracy theories and witch-hunting. As a matter of fact our political leadership (including President Obama, a terrible disappointment in this respect) doesn't have the nerve for it, or even the intelligence for it. The sad truth seems to be that, like Imperial Rome during its period of maximal extension, our system will implode due to the draining of our resources by these completely nugatory geopolitical pursuits.