Taming the beast

The New American Militarism

How Americans are Seduced by War

Andrew J. Bacevich

Oxford University Press, $28, 270 pp.

No one was expecting Dwight D. Eisenhower to warn of the dangers of a "military-industrial complex" in his 1961 presidential farewell address; former generals are not supposed to sound like radical sociologists. But, then, maybe it takes a military officer to recognize when the military has gotten out of control.

Andrew Bacevich was a military officer. He did not become president later in life; his career choice was to teach international relations at Boston University. But like Eisenhower, he uses his insider knowledge of the military to write a powerful indictment of American militarism. Indeed, the only real difference Bacevich has with Eisenhower is that Bacevich has dropped the "industrial" from the complex. "Several decades after Vietnam, in the aftermath of a century filled to over-flowing with evidence pointing to the limited utility of armed force and the dangers inherent in relying on military power," he writes, "the American people have persuaded themselves that their best prospect for safety and salvation lies with the sword."

Some would blame the new American militarism on George W. Bush and his neo-conservative advisors. Others would point to September 11. Bacevich rejects both explanations. Militarism is like pollution, he argues. No one sets out deliberately to destroy rivers and streams; environmental damage happens as a byproduct of an uncountable number of individual and corporate decisions. In similar ways, a large number of discrete events--the Iranian hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan's popularity, the rise of the Christian Right, the oil crisis--came together to produce our current military ascendancy.

Bacevich is at his best when his focus is on what he knows intimately: the world of high-ranking officers, their civilian intellectuals, and their various plans and strategies. Among the treats he offers is a scathing treatment of Colin Powell's ability to link his own career advancement with military needs, a blunt dismissal of Wesley Clark for political grandstanding, an incisive analysis of the limits of game theory and other academically inspired strategic initiatives, and an informed treatment of the ways in which the sons of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz developed a "second generation" neoconservatism far more sophisticated, and dangerous, than the one they inherited from their fathers.

The advantage of Bacevich's sweeping approach is that no one can accuse him of partisanship; he is equally fair and unfair to all sides. In his moments of fairness, for example, he sees no reason to accuse Vice President Dick Cheney of being a "chicken hawk" for urging military solutions after having himself avoided military service; all civilians want the military to do the dirty work while ignoring it themselves, in Bacevich's view, so why single out one man? And when he goes on the attack, Jimmy Carter comes in for as much blame as Richard Nixon. Militarism has such "deep roots" in American culture that no leader can escape its dynamics.

An indictment this sweeping, though, carries with it the disadvantage of ignoring important differences. John F. Kerry (or Al Gore) did serve his country and Dick Cheney did not; instead of concluding that at least some politicians are less hypocritical than others, Bacevich attacks Kerry for his own militaristic pronouncements in 2004 (as if Kerry, in a post-9/11 world, had any choice). And while George W. Bush responded to September 11 by emphasizing military solutions to terrorism, there was nothing inevitable about the war in Iraq, or in the president's use of that war for his own political purposes. Of course Al Gore, had he been in office on September 11, would also have pursued a military solution to terrorism. But his solution might have been different and, in being different, could have avoided the unilateralism of George W. Bush.

Nor is Bacevich completely persuasive when he assigns to the category of the new American militarism all those who support a more aggressive foreign policy. Conservative Evangelical Protestants, for example, are unilateralist but not necessarily militarist; underlying their support for a stronger military budget is a not-well-disguised isolationism. The Republican Party for which they vote is now a war party, but it resisted deploying military force abroad when Bill Clinton was president, and will likely do so again under future Democratic presidents. Its stance is best described by Anatol Lieven's term "nationalist." Conservative Christians and some of their fervid Republican supporters are America-firsters in new guise.

Bacevich ends his book with a number of very sensible suggestions for rethinking the love of all things military in which so many Americans seem to be engaged. He would have us learn from the Founding Fathers the corruptions of power, strengthen our self-sufficiency, think about how much defense spending is enough, use our forces more for defense than offense, and consider other reforms to bring militarism under control. But if militarism is as deeply rooted as much of his book suggests, it is difficult to imagine such reforms being adopted anytime soon. His suggestions, in that sense, seem more obligatory than heartfelt.