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

276 Pages·2010·0.99 MB·English

by  Andrew J. Bacevich

Also by Andrew J. Bacevich

The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since
World War II

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by
War

American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S.
Diplomacy

The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of
American Empire
AMERICA'S PATH TO PERMANENT WAR

ANDREW J. BACEVICH

METROPOLITAN BOOKS HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY NEW YORK

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Copyright © 2010 by Andrew J. Bacevich All rights reserved. Distributed in
Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company
Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bacevich, Andrew J.
Washington rules : America's path to permanent war / Andrew J.
Bacevich.—1st ed. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-O-8050-9141-O
1. United States—Foreign relations—Decision making. 2. United
States—Military policy—Decision making. 3. Consensus (Social
sciences)—United States. I. Title.
JZ1480.B335 2010 355'.033573-dc22

2010006302
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First Edition 2010
Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi
Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
TO MY DARLING DAUGHTERS

Jennifer Maureen
Amy Elizabeth Kathleen Therese

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood.

T. S. ELIOT, "ASH WEDNESDAY" (1930)
CONTENTS

Introduction: Slow Learner
1. The Advent of Semi war
2. Illusions of Flexibility and Control
3. The Credo Restored
4. Reconstituting the Trinity
5. Counterfeit COIN
6. Cultivating Our Own Garden
Notes
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION: SLOW LEARNER

Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young
man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and
where he's headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining
heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All
that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes
does education become a possibility.
My own education did not commence until I had reached middle
age. I can fix its start date with precision: For me, education began
in Berlin, on a winter's evening, at the Brandenburg Gate, not long
after the Berlin Wall had fallen.
As an officer in the U.S. Army I had spent considerable time in
Germany. Until that moment, however, my family and I had never
had occasion to visit this most famous of German cities, still littered
with artifacts of a deeply repellent history. At the end of a long day
of exploration, we found ourselves in what had, until just months
before, been the communist East. It was late and we were hungry,
but I insisted on walking the length of the Unter den Linden, from
the River Spree to the gate itself. A cold rain was falling and the
pavement glistened. The buildings lining the avenue, dating from
the era of Prussian kings, were dark, dirty, and pitted. Few people
were about. It was hardly a night for sightseeing.
For as long as I could remember, the Brandenburg Gate had been
the preeminent symbol of the age and Berlin the epicenter of
contemporary history. Yet by the time I made it to the once and
future German capital, history was already moving on. The Cold
War had abruptly ended. A divided city and a divided nation had
reunited.
For Americans who had known Berlin only from a distance, the
city existed primarily as a metaphor. Pick a date—1933, 1942, 1945,
1948, 1961, 1989—and Berlin becomes an instructive symbol of
power, depravity, tragedy, defiance, endurance, or vindication. For
those inclined to view the past as a chronicle of parables, the
modern history of Berlin offered an abundance of material. The
greatest of those parables emerged from the events of 1933 to 1945,
an epic tale of evil ascendant, belatedly confronted, then heroically
overthrown. A second narrative, woven from events during the
intense period immediately following World War II, saw hopes for
peace dashed, yielding bitter antagonism but also great resolve. The
ensuing stand-off—the "long twilight struggle," in John Kennedy's
memorable phrase—formed the centerpiece of the third parable, its
central theme stubborn courage in the face of looming peril. Finally
came the exhilarating events of 1989, with freedom ultimately
prevailing, not only in Berlin, but throughout Eastern Europe.
What exactly was I looking for at the Brandenburg Gate? Perhaps
confirmation that those parables, which I had absorbed and
accepted as true, were just that. Whatever I expected, what I
actually found was a cluster of shabby-looking young men, not
German, hawking badges, medallions, hats, bits of uniforms, and
other artifacts of the mighty Red Army. It was all junk, cheaply
made and shoddy. For a handful of deutsche marks, I bought a
wristwatch emblazoned with the symbol of the Soviet armored
corps. Within days, it ceased to work.
Huddling among the scarred columns, those peddlers—almost
certainly off-duty Russian soldiers awaiting redeployment
home-constituted a subversive presence. They were loose ends of a
story that was supposed to have ended neatly when the Berlin Wall
came down. As we hurried off to find warmth and a meal, this
disconcerting encounter stuck with me, and I began to entertain
this possibility: that the truths I had accumulated over the previous
twenty years as a professional soldier—especially truths about the
Cold War and U.S. foreign policy-might not be entirely true.
By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in
orthodoxy. In a life spent subject to authority, deference had
become a deeply ingrained habit. I found assurance in conventional
wisdom. Now, I started, however hesitantly, to suspect that
orthodoxy might be a sham. I began to appreciate that authentic
truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down
from on high—whether by presidents, prime ministers, or
archbishops—is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see,
reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even then, the
truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly invisible
filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of
power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to
candor.
I came to these obvious points embarrassingly late in life.
"Nothing is so astonishing in education," the historian Henry
Adams once wrote, "as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in
the form of inert facts."- Until that moment I had too often
confused education with accumulating and cataloging facts. In
Berlin, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, I began to realize that I
had been a naif. And so, at age forty-one, I set out, in a halting and
haphazard fashion, to acquire a genuine education.
Twenty years later I've made only modest progress. This book
provides an accounting of what I have learned thus far.
In October 1990, I'd gotten a preliminary hint that something
might be amiss in my prior education. On October 3, communist
East Germany—formally the German Democratic Republic
(GDR)—ceased to exist and German reunification was officially
secured. That very week I accompanied a group of American
military officers to the city of Jena in what had been the GDR. Our
purpose was self-consciously educational—to study the famous
battle of Jena-Auerstadt in which Napoleon Bonaparte and his
marshals had inflicted an epic defeat on Prussian forces
commanded by the Duke of Brunswick. (The outcome of that 1806
battle inspired the philosopher Hegel, then residing in Jena, to
declare that the "end of history" was at hand. The conclusion of the
Cold War had only recently elicited a similarly exuberant judgment
from the American scholar Francis Fukuyama.)
On this trip we did learn a lot about the conduct of that battle,
although mainly inert facts possessing little real educational value.
Inadvertently, we also gained insight into the reality of life on the
far side of what Americans had habitually called the Iron Curtain,
known in U.S. military vernacular as "the trace." In this regard, the
trip proved nothing less than revelatory. The educational content of
this excursion would—for me—be difficult to exaggerate.
As soon as our bus crossed the old Inner German Border, we
entered a time warp. For U.S. troops garrisoned throughout Bavaria
and Hesse, West Germany had for decades served as a sort of theme
park—a giant Epcot filled with quaint villages, stunning scenery,
and superb highways, along with ample supplies of quite decent
food, excellent beer, and accommodating women. Now, we found
ourselves face-to-face with an altogether different Germany.
Although commonly depicted as the most advanced and successful