Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country by Andrew J. Bacevich

Author:Andrew J. Bacevich [Bacevich, Andrew J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, American Government, General, History, Military, United States, 21st Century
ISBN: 9781250055385
Google: jYymngEACAAJ
Amazon: 1250055385
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2014-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

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TRAHISON DES CLERCS

Those who sit at the high table of American intellectual life pride themselves on their capacity to detect inconsistencies, contradictions, and hypocrisy. Yet that instinct does not encompass the nation’s military system or the relationship between the military and society. There, complacency reigns. The prospect of a particular war may arouse attention, but Washington’s penchant for war more generally largely escapes notice. So do the assumptions, ambitions, and arrangements—especially relating to the issue of who serves and sacrifices—which undergird that penchant.

One should take care not to overstate the role ideas play in the formulation of statecraft. Ideas as such—whether a strategy like “containment,” a policy like “flexible response,” or the vision of benign global hegemony to which neoconservatives swear fealty—rarely determine policy per se. Circumstances (however imperfectly understood) combined with expediency and a dollop of politics, partisan and bureaucratic, do. Yet ideas frame the environment in which statesmen interpret circumstances and justify their decisions. Out of the clash of theory and opinion, whether advanced by sober academics or inflammatory talk show hosts, come cues that policy makers consciously exploit or to which they subconsciously respond. Barack Obama did not invent the Obama Doctrine of counterterrorism any more than Bill Clinton invented the Clinton Doctrine of humanitarian intervention or George W. Bush the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. In each case, a president was merely adopting a concept that others had already devised, vetted, and promoted.

So it is no small thing that leading members of America’s chattering classes find nothing objectionable in the way Washington parcels out responsibility for fighting the nation’s wars. When it comes to military matters, what intellectuals care about is not how America raises its armed forces but when, where, and how to employ them.

In December 2002, for example, the journalist George Packer wrote a long essay for the New York Times Magazine, sampling opinion among liberal intellectuals—for Packer, a phrase synonymous with persons of enlightened sensibility—regarding the impending invasion of Iraq. Why among liberal thinkers he admired, Packer wondered, was there no deeply felt antiwar sentiment? None of the notables answering Packer’s question—“the ones who have done the most thinking and writing about how American power can be turned to good ends as well as bad, who don’t see human rights and democracy as idealistic delusions”—even mentioned U.S. military capacity or prowess as factors worthy of consideration. None paused to consider the possibility that the coercive propagation of liberal values abroad might undercut liberal values at home, especially given the fact that the chosen means of propagation was an army largely divorced from the American people. The bellicose Christopher Hitchens, more Trotskyist than liberal, declared that “Americanization is the most revolutionary force in the world” and expressed his enthusiasm for seeing U.S. forces unleash that revolution in Iraq. Hitchens, Packer reported, had “plans to drink Champagne with comrades in Baghdad.” Lacking comparable revolutionary zeal, Leon Wieseltier, longtime literary editor of the New Republic, was on the fence. He feared that Saddam Hussein’s reputed weapons

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