First a Soldier
Andrew Bacevich spent twenty-three years in the military. Now he’s rethinking the purpose of war.
By Chris Berdik
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| Photograph by John Goodman |
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In March 2003, as the Bush administration beat the drum for regime change in Iraq, pundits predicted a cake-walk military campaign, and Iraqi dissidents gave assurances that American soldiers would be greeted “with sweets and flowers.” Andrew Bacevich saw things differently. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, the College of Arts and Sciences professor of international relations offered this warning: “If, as seems probable, the effort encounters greater resistance than its architects imagine, our way of life may find itself tested in ways that will make the Vietnam War look like a mere blip in American history.”
Four years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Bacevich has even less hope for military victory. “Iraq is a train wreck,” he said in January. “There’s no putting the train back on track.” His early skepticism about transforming the Middle East through military might has turned to withering criticism of nearly every aspect of the war’s prosecution, and he’s making his case in opinion pieces, up to three a week, in major newspapers and periodicals, ranging from the conservative National Review to the Washington Post to the wonky World Policy Journal. He’s also quoted regularly on Iraq in major broadcast and print news media.
But Bacevich is no dove. Indeed, he defies easy categorization. A retired U.S. Army colonel, he generally votes Republican and espouses conservative values. But he also disdains neoconservative foreign policy. Most of all, he doesn’t believe that America is uniquely enlightened or righteous or that it is capable of transforming more troubled regions of the world with military force.
As a Midwestern boy in the 1950s, a West Point–trained soldier in Vietnam, a graduate student, and a professor and opinion leader, he has never feared self-reflection, no matter what personal failings it reveals or what core beliefs it shakes. Likewise, he states in his direct military style, “With regard to how you behave in the world as a nation state, first know who you are.”
Awash in Moral Ambiguity
Bacevich’s foreign policy creed crystalized when he read The Irony of American History, written in 1952 by the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The book, which proposes that statecraft be guided by moral realism, changed the way Bacevich looked at America.
“There is a tendency,” he says, “to view realism in foreign policy as simply cynical, calculating, and absent any kind of moral values.” But, he says, Niebuhr exemplifies a realist tradition that is, in fact, guided by conscience and an awareness of one’s own moral flaws. “Niebuhr had a profound aware-ness that there is evil in the world that must be resisted. But he wrote that to imagine that you yourself are innocent as you exercise power to resist that evil is a formula for disaster.”
Bacevich assigns Niebuhr’s book to his students every year, and “if I could get Americans to read one book today, to help us illuminate the way forward,” he says, “that would be it.”
When he discusses America’s role in history and current world affairs, he speaks of events, policies, and conflicts awash in moral ambiguity. America is no devil, oppressing the world’s poor and downtrodden, in his view, but neither are we a nation of bright-eyed innocents leading freedom’s march around the world.
“If you take the long sweep of American history,” he says, “we didn’t complete that journey without getting a certain amount of blood on our hands.”
To believe otherwise, to subscribe to the idea of American exceptionalism, he says, is both “silly and dangerous” and often steers us into catastrophe. In the 1990s, when Bacevich was a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, he criticized the idealistic military interventions of President Bill Clinton in places like Somalia and Haiti. But more recently, he has attacked the mind-set of neoconservative pundits and Iraq war architects, who, he wrote in the Montreal Gazette, frame history as a perpetual conflict between freedom and a totalitarianism that appears “in an ever-changing guise,” from Nazism to Communism to “Islamofascism.”
After September 11, 2001, when members of the Bush administration began to push for transforming the Middle East by force of arms, Bacevich recalls, “it seemed to me that efforts on the part of the United States to remake others in our image had more often than not produced all kinds of unexpected consequences.” He cites America’s “liberation” of Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish American War. “In both cases, the argument was that we were going to bring freedom to these poor, benighted, backward peoples,” he says. “And in both cases, the result was less than promised and in some respects simply ugly.”
His alternative: treat violent Islamic radicalism as a “dangerous, international criminal conspiracy,” one that “all nations should band together to thwart with a concerted, relentless police action.”
To the criticism that such a strategy is inadequate to the task and overly reactive and was the discredited approach of pre-9/11 terrorism fighters, Bacevich responds that previous failures were the result of poor implementation. “We need to work harder, get smarter, and invest more resources,” he says.
He acknowledges that America is not the first country to believe itself blessed with a special providence among nations, but he notes that the idea has particularly deep roots in American identity. The first reading for his Ideas in American Foreign Policy class is the sermon given in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in which he proclaimed, “We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us,” an echo of the Sermon on the Mount.
Winthrop’s line has been repeated throughout the centuries by American leaders, including Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. And when it comes to America’s response to September 11, Bacevich suspects that this belief in our innate righteousness as a nation has blinded us to the larger questions raised by the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq.
“Is a global war on terror the correct response to the threat that we identified on 9/11?” Bacevich asks. “Is it possible that the idea of a global war to change the way they live in the Middle East is a bad idea, one that, in fact, lies beyond our capability?”
What Obligation to Serve?
On a blustery, overcast January afternoon, Bacevich is standing in front of about sixty students in his Ideas in American Foreign Policy course. He doesn’t stay there for long, soon wading in between the rows of desks, asking questions about militias in colonial America.
Although the fifty-nine-year-old Bacevich retired from the Army after more than two decades of service, his pacing among the rows of students and his close-cropped silver hair echo a military career that began in the central highlands of Vietnam in 1970. His questions and explanations are direct, but he also mixes in some fairly un-military banter, lacing his speech with words like grandpappy and occasionally slipping into an impression of President Bush. Near the end of the class discussion, Bacevich stops beside a student and quietly asks him if he has enlisted yet. When the student says no, Bacevich feigns shock.
“Don’t you think you should?” he asks, incredulous, as the student reddens and giggles ripple through the classroom. “President Bush says the war in Iraq is the decisive conflict of the twenty-first century,” he booms. “Aren’t we called upon to somehow help the president out?”
Bacevich notes that in World War II, twelve million Americans were in uniform, including his father, which he compares with Bush’s recently ordered surge of 21,500 troops to Iraq. “World War II was the most important war of the twentieth century,” he says. “So, if Iraq is the most important war of this century, shouldn’t we kick in maybe two or three million?”
He then delivers his bottom line: unlike Americans from colonial times through the first half of the twentieth century, he says, “we no longer feel that an obligation to serve is part of what it means to be a citizen.”
It’s a point Bacevich has made in many an article about the post-Vietnam relationship between America’s civilian and military societies. Later, he expands on its implications for American foreign policy.
“The problems are twofold,” he says. First, because the all-volunteer military is a professional army “no longer rooted in the American people,” politicians are more able to use that military without the people’s express consent and support.
And second, he continues, “when politicians send this professional military off on a misguided war and get themselves into deep trouble, they’re unable to tap the sinews of American military power, which really lie with the people.”
From Duty to Questioning Duty
This discouraging analysis of the role of the military comes from someone with deep military roots, someone who grew up “absolutely subscribing” to the idea that America was a nation of exceptional moral standing, whose use of force was always on the side of righteousness.
Bacevich was born in 1947 in Normal, Illinois, where his father was attending college under the G.I. Bill.
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| First Lieutenant Andrew Bacevich (right) and Sergeant First Class James Wright in fall 1970 at An Khe in the central highlands of South Vietnam, while serving in D Troop, 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry. Photo courtesy of Andrew Bacevich |
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In 1961, he left for a Catholic boarding school in Illinois. From there he went to West Point, where his classmates knew him as “Skip,” a die-hard Cubs fan, a rugby player, and poetry magazine editor, singled out in the academy’s 1969 yearbook for his “craggy good looks and equally craggy good humor.”
As a young lieutenant commanding an armored cavalry platoon in Vietnam, Bacevich says, he remained politically unaware. “I knew that the war was essentially a lost cause, but I really didn’t have much of a feel for how we had gotten in there and what the consequences of the war were for American society,” he explains. “I think, in some respects, I consciously wanted to keep that at some remove so I could just pay attention to my duties.”
The reckoning came after the war, when Bacevich read about the French experience in East Asia and earned master’s and doctoral degrees in history at Princeton, working on the latter while teaching American history at West Point.
“I was very slow to develop an awareness of how complex and conflicted the world really was,” he says.
For example, he admits to embarrassment at having had no real grasp of the civil rights movement as it unfolded in the 1950s and 1960s. “I didn’t understand what all these people were out there marching about,” Bacevich says. “I mean, I was just kind of inert when it came to that central political issue of our time.”
But he remains conflicted about the impact of the Vietnam era, which he sees as a turning point in American culture, when freedom began to be redefined — from the left, as unfettered self-indulgence and moral relativism, and from the right, as conspicuous consumption. Indeed, it’s Bacevich’s ability to think through complex matters that colleagues most often cite when discussing his thinking and writing. “He is able to take a difficult military or political situation, lay it out in precise terms, and come to a decision,” says Bob Ivany, a retired major general and current president of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, who attended West Point with Bacevich.
Steve Lagerfeld, editor of the nonpartisan Wilson Quarterly, describes Bacevich as “a first-class thinker, a true original.” In 2005, Bacevich contributed an article to Lagerfeld’s journal arguing that President Jimmy Carter initiated a new era of American foreign policy that made control of the Persian Gulf and its oil a paramount objective of American foreign policy. Reverberations of that interventionist stance, Bacevich writes, include 9/11 and the conflict in Iraq.
Yet, the same article declares that this Carter Doctrine was formulated only after the failure of Carter’s prescient “crisis of confidence speech,” in which he called for achieving energy independence by restricting oil imports, investing in alternative energy sources, and promoting public transportation and some life-style sacrifices by the American public.
“Jimmy Carter had learned a hard lesson,” Bacevich writes. “It was not the prospect of making do with less that sustained American-style liberal democracy, but the promise of more. That abundance depended on assured access to cheap oil — and lots of it.”
“Andy’s a straight-talking guy, and he’s not afraid to let his scholarship go where it goes, rather than being a proponent of any political paradigm,” says Ivan Eland, director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. Bacevich sits on the institute’s board of advisors.
Nevertheless, hardly anyone who knows Bacevich would call him a maverick, even those who disagree with him on Iraq, such as Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic studies department at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Inter-national Studies. “He’s original,” says Cohen, who is much more supportive of the war’s democracy-promoting mission. “He’s highly independent, but he is not random. He has some very powerful core convictions and a core identity.”
Strangers to Ourselves
To Bacevich, a willingness to confront the moral failings of those people, institutions, and nations with which you most closely identify doesn’t endanger your allegiance to them; it deepens it.
Patriotism and responsible citizenship, in Bacevich’s opinion, should not shun the tough questions, but invite them. This is why, in a recent Christian Science Monitor piece, he wrote critically of the eagerly anticipated Iraq Study Group report, which he termed a “gambit” allowing Americans to delegate their own deep questioning of America’s global ambitions to “Beltway luminaries.” The group’s “implicit message to Americans,” he writes, “is this: We’ll handle things — now go back to holiday shopping.”
The tough questions, Bacevich insists, encompass the war in Iraq, but go well beyond. For instance, he says later in an interview, “We Americans know that we value freedom above all. But what is the true meaning of freedom? Is it possible that freedom really has become an excuse for conspicuous consumption and radical individualism?”
And second, “whatever the American way of life has come to be, is it sustainable? And here you get into all kinds of questions of economics, and resources, and the environment, and who the hell’s going to pay the bills twenty years from now, fifty years from now.”
“I have come to believe,” he says, “that perhaps the greatest failing to which American political leaders are prone, and perhaps to which we as a people are prone, is an inability to see our-selves as we really are.”
