BY ROGER ARMBRUST · APRIL 9, 2016
A retired Army colonel – who is also a Vietnam
veteran, military historian and best-selling author — has issued a clear,
concise condemnation of America’s four-decade foreign policy in the Middle
East, as well as ominous criticism of presidential candidates Donald Trump,
Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz.
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| Andrew J. Bacevich |
Andrew J. Bacevich, a 20-year Army veteran
and now a professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston
University, is author of the new book America’sWar for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. He was interviewed
Friday, April 8, on the TV program “Democracy Now” about the premise of his
book, and also his view of the current presidential hopefuls.
Endless Gulf Wars
Concerning Middle East involvement, Bacevich
said the U.S. has a “failed” policy which has “abused” the American military.
In his book, he observes:
From the end of World War II to 1980,
virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in that
region. Within a decade, a great shift occurred. Since 1990, virtually no
American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere except in the Greater
Middle East. President [Jimmy] Carter neither intended nor foresaw that
transformation — any more than European statesmen in the summer of 1914
intended or foresaw the horrors they were unleashing. But he, like they, can
hardly be absolved of responsibility for what was to follow.
Carter-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama
“Democracy
Now” host Amy Goodman played three brief clips quoting three presidents — George
H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama — all stating “we will prevail” in
the Middle East. She asked Bacevich, “Have we prevailed in any way?”
 |
| George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, George W. Bush (l-r) |
Bacevich responded:
Well,
we haven’t. And I have to say, those are exquisitely chosen clips, because they
really do illustrate what’s the point of my book. And that is that we have been
engaged militarily in the Greater Middle East, large parts of the Islamic
world, for going on four decades. We’ve engaged in innumerable
interventions—large, small, brief, protracted—and we have yet to come anywhere
close to achieving our aims. Whether we define our aims as restoring stability
or promoting democracy or reducing the prevalence of anti-Americanism, it’s not
happening. And arguably, our military efforts are actually making things worse.
In his interview, Bacevich concisely
described the four-decade evolution of America’s futile Gulf policy:
…prior
to the beginning of the Cold War, the United States was not a great military
power. We raised forces from time to time to deal with some particular issue,
but it was in the wake of the Cold War that we, as a nation, decided on a
permanent basis to maintain a large military establishment.
For
the first several decades of that Cold War, the United States had two priorities.
We were willing to fight for Western Europe. We were willing to fight—did
fight—in East Asia. We were not willing to fight for the Middle East. That
changes in 1980, specifically a particular moment in January of 1980, when
President Jimmy Carter, in his State of the Union address, promulgates what’s
known as the Carter Doctrine…
…Carter
himself had no understanding of the implications that would flow from that
statement. What happens, on an immediate basis, is that the national security
bureaucracy now redefines its priorities and begins to orient itself toward the
possibility of armed intervention by U.S. forces in the [Middle East] region.
And over the course of the next 10 years, that process begins: [Ronald] Reagan
sending peacekeepers into Lebanon, the initial jousting with Colonel Gaddafi in
Libya, support for Saddam Hussein, of all people, in what I refer to as the
first Gulf War—that’s
the Gulf War of 1980 to ’88, pitting Iraq against Iran, with the United States
coming to the aid of Iraq.
So,
Carter starts the process of militarizing U.S. policy, which, over time, deepens,
becomes more frequent, becomes more ambitious and becomes more costly, bringing
us to where we are today in 2016, where we continue to hear these speeches by presidents
insisting — insisting that we will prevail — when obviously we have not.
Bacevich’s view basically coincides with our
analysis stated in our Oct. 18, 2015 reality column headlined “Obama Widens Carter’s, Bush’s Global-Rule Policies”. In that column we detailed the
Brzezinski Plan under President Carter and the Wolfowitz Doctrine under George
W. Bush.
Presidential Candidates as Dangerous Hawks
Cruz-Trump-Clinton
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| Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump (l-r) |
Bacevich expressed grave concern about the
hawkish views of presidential candidates Trump and Cruz on the Republican side
and Clinton on the Democratic. He described Trump as having an infantile
personality unfit for the role of commander in chief, and slapped Cruz for surrounding
himself with “Islamophobes”:
I
have a five-year- old grandson, who I love dearly, and he’s a wonderful boy. He
also has a tendency to blurt out whatever happens to be passing through his
mind. And it seems to me that Donald Trump, who is not five years old, suffers
from the same sort of inclination. And it suggests that he would be an
enormously dangerous commander-in- chief. And I think we all recognize people
say things on the campaign trail that may not actually reflect their intentions
were they to be in office, but there does come—there are moments when the gap
between what’s being said and what ought to be done by any responsible person,
when that gap is so broad
that the rhetoric itself, I think, becomes a disqualifying factor.
But
let me quickly add, it’s not clear to me that Senator Cruz, who is the apparent
alternative, is, by any inclination, any better. And if you take a look at the
people Cruz is surrounding himself with as foreign policy advisers, that, to my
mind, is deeply troubling…we’ve got Islamophobes. We’ve got General—retired
Lieutenant General Boykin, who, for all practical purposes, sees the war for the
Greater Middle East as an exercise in Judeo-Christian jihad. I mean, he is keen
to go slay the Muslims and, clearly, views Islam itself as the enemy.
Of Clinton, Bacevich stated:
…Secretary
Clinton is an unreconstructed hawk. Now, in terms of the rhetoric, she comes
across as more reasoned than the Republican opposition, but the fact of the
matter is, if we elect her to be our next commander-in- chief, we are voting
for the continuation of the status quo with regard to U.S. national security
policy, and specifically U.S. national security policy in the Greater Middle
East. So, for people for whom that is an important issue, who want to see change
in U.S. policy, she’s not going to be the vehicle for change.
Bacevich’s statement was in response to Goodman’s
quoting Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s Democratic opponent, who criticized the
former Secretary of State as having a pro-war stance. Other than that, Bacevich
did not discuss Sanders. Nor did he speak of third-party candidates. But
Bacevich did explain his own stance on supporting the renewal of a military
draft:
I
think that one of the unintended consequences of ending the draft, creating a
professional military, was to create a gap between the military and society.
Now, we don’t acknowledge that gap. Matter of fact, we deny the existence of
that gap by all of the rhetorical tributes that are paid to the troops and the
obligation that we all have to, quote-unquote, “support the troops.”
The
reality, I think, is that when it really comes down to it, the American people
don’t pay much attention to how the troops are being used. And because they’re
not paying attention, the troops have been subjected to abuse. That is to say,
they’ve been sent to fight wars that are unnecessary. The wars have been mismanaged.
The wars go on far longer than they ought to.
And
we respond by letting people in uniform be the first to board airplanes. And I
think, frankly, that that is disgraceful and that it actually ought to be one
of the things that gets discussed in a presidential campaign, but tends not to,
sadly.
We expressed a similar frustration regarding
the American public’s lack of concern for our troops in a 2012 column in The Clyde Fitch Report: “Memorial Day: Recalling and Caring for Our Constant Brave”.
Goodman asked Bacevich, who lost a son
serving in Iraq in 2007, “What do you want these presidential candidates—what
do you want to hear from them? What do you want them to say to you?”
Bacevich answered:
What
they ought to say to us, not simply to me because of my personal
circumstances—what they ought to say is:
‘I
understand that we, as a nation, have been engaged in this war for going on
four decades now, and I have learned something from that experience. I have
taken on
board
what the United States tried to do militarily and what it actually ended up
doing and what the consequence is that resulted. And here’s what I’ve learned,
and here’s how I’m going to ensure, if you elect me commander-in- chief, that
we will behave in ways that are wiser and more prudent and more enlightened in
the future.’
In
other words, they have to look beyond simply the question of how many more
bombs are we going to drop on ISIS. That is a secondary consideration. They
have to have some appreciation of the history, that I try to lay out in this book.
(This column originally ran in reality: a world of views.)
