Bacevich in Berkeley

Last month, May 7 to be precise, Andrew Bacevich appeared at Cody's Bookstore in Berkeley to promote his book The New American Militarism (2005).  He opened his talk by saying it was the first time he had been in Berkeley and that he knew it only by stereotype, which was that it was full of flaming liberals.  At which several in the crowd of 30 or so clapped.

So he said, "I just want you to know that I'm not a flaming liberal."  (It may serve as an illustration of this point that he has a current article on Paul Wolfowitz in Pat Buchanan's American Conservative magazine, Trigger Man 06/06/05, which among other things offers a more complex interpretation than we usually see of Wolfowitz's infamous criticism of Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki.)  Actually, he has quite an interesting viewpoint that is substantial without fitting neatly into the current liberal/conservative framework.

The audience was very receptive and interested.  He did get a few Berkeley moments.  At one point he said that he figured that it's safe to say that everybody in the room had seen the movie Top Gun at least once, and maybe three or four times.  At which several people started shaking their heads that, no, they hadn't seen it.  So he said, "Okay, so most of you have seen it."  More nodding heads.  Then he joked, "You're stepping on my lines!  Okay, so several people in America have seen Top Gun."

(Geek confession: I haven't seen it either.)

During the question period, he got an inevitable Berkeley question, or rather a challenge, when someone objected that the US had been a militarist nation for a long time, commenting that almost two hundred years ago the US was attacking the Barbary Coast of Africa.  Only in Berkeley would somebody come up with that one.  Actually, the conflict with the Barbary pirates was more than 200 years ago, but, hey, I guess it could be construed as imperialism against Muslim lands.  At least in Berkeley.

Bacevich responded by saying he disagreed with the point, but took some time to explain what he thought was new.  After every war for most of US history, the army that had been built up during the conflict was rapidly demobilized.  That also occurred after the Second World War although, he said, we tend to forget that now.

But the extended buildup of the military during the Cold War did not end with that conflict in 1989.  Intead, there was scarcely any public discussion of demobilization or significantly redefining the US role  As he mentioned during his main presentation, the US now spends more on the military than all other countries of the world put together.

Someone asked him if he would give his talk differently in a midwestern city.  He said that to a midwestern, "red state" crowd he would emphasize more how drastic a departure from traditional American democratic ideals the new militarism is.  He said he would use more "patriotic" themes to try to confront them with the problems he identifies in the book.

I got the sense that Bacevich may be a bit over-impressed by conservative stereotypes that hardcore liberals may be somewhat anti-patriotic.  All right, that notion might have been reinforced in some way by the young guy on the sidewalk outside the entrace to the store selling Revolutionary Communist Party pamphlets (and who surely wouldn't consider himself a "liberal"!) and reciting a rap-style harangue that had something to do with capitalism and imperialism.

But even in Berkeley, even those who consider themselves "radical" as distinct from "liberal" don't see themselves as unpatriotic.  They just tend to display bumperstickers that say "Peace is Patriotic" and things like that.

In his 30-minute presentation, Bacevich covered some of the main themes of his book.  He stressed that his focus was not on scapegoats, whether neoconservative intellectuals or the Republican Party.  Rather, he describes various tendencies that unintentionally - he said "and I triple-underline unintentionally" - led to the present-day situation that he calls militarism of a distinctly American kind.

As in the book, he described several ways in which this militarism manifests itself.  One is what I've already mentioned, the large size of the military and its expansive mission even after the Cold War ended.  Another is the tendency to define America's greatness primarily in terms of military strength, rather than economic or political qualities.

Another is  the sentimentalizing of the military and the soldiers who serve in it.  He thinks that it's particularly pernicious to define people in the military as radically diffferent and somehow morally superior to civilians.  This is a point that particularly impressed me.  (See my comments on the awful little poem "In the Presence of Angels" that embodies just that kind of attitude.)

During the question period, someone followed up on this point, asking how a regular person like Charles Graner gets to the point of committing acts like the Abu Ghuraib torture.  Bacevich, noting that he himself is a practicing Catholic who believes in Original Sin, said one reason is that some people are just bad people.  And Graner is one of them.  He also blamed the senior officers for not exerting adequate control to prevent those crimes from occurring.  He was quite adamant in saying that he thought the worst shame of Abu Ghuraib is that no senior officers had been held responsible, except for a female reservist general.

He also touched on one of the major themes of the book which he develops much more fully there: the lessons that the officer corps, especially in the Army, learned from Vietnam.  Instead of adjusting to be more prepared to fight counterinsurgency wars, the Army refocused on conventional-style warfare, hoping to avoid ever having to fight another Vietnam-style war.  (Long-time readers of Old Hickory's Weblog will not be surprised that this is one of the lines of argument that I most liked about his book.)  Bacevich believes that the conventional-war reorientation was in no small part meant to restore the prestige and perogatives of the officer corps.

He stayed to autograph books, and seemed to enjoy chatting with people afterwards.  When I got to the table, he noticed my crutches - they're hard to miss - and asked how I had been injured.  I commented to him on his book that I was particularly impressed by his account of how ideas that were developed in the context of nuclear strategy by the defense intellectuals specializing in that - he calls them the "nuclear priesthood" - evolved in one strand of its development into the doctrine of preventive war now officially enshrined as US policy.  He said that I was the first one to bring  that up, presumably meaning the first on his book tour.

That really suprised me, because this seems to me to be the most innovative analysis in the book.  The "nuclear Jesuits," as John Kenneth Galbraith called them, were constantly wrestling with ways to actually fight a nuclear war without endles escalation.  As Fred Kaplan describes in The Wizards of Armageddon (1983), they never found the answer to that question, how do you fight a nuclear war and "win" at anything like an acceptable cost?  Every new strategic scenario came back to the same dilemma.  There was simply no reliable way to keep a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union limited.  And given the destructive power of nuclear weapons, the potential destructive power means in practice that virtually any possibility of an all-out nuclear exchange calculates as an unacceptable risk.

Bacevich relies heavily on Kaplan for his historical account of the "nuclear Jesuits."  And he comments in the notes, "Although dated, Kaplan's book remains the best introduction to the leading lights of nuclear strategy."

With preventive war now enshrined as American policy, the Richard Perles and Paul Wolfowitzes and other neoconservative defense intellectuals have a new enthusiasm for "mini-nukes," the so-called bunker-busters.  The development of mini-nukes is another dangerous profileration risk.  But some of those who still dream of making nuclear war "fightable" no doubt hope that this is the technology that will finally make it possible.

For instance, Jonas Siegel writes in his short article In Harm's Way Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists May/June 2005 (*.pdf file):

But most experts say that new nuclear weapons designs are unlikely to improve how deep earth penetrators can burrow, and they warn that these warheads would still produce significant amounts of fallout, a fact recently confired by Linton Brooks, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, in congressional testimony. Additionally, certain factors - like weather - will always be beyond the control of war planners, but will play a large part in determining the extent of damage a nuclear weapon does.

What would actually happen if  the United States were to strike a buried target with an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon?  Recent research gives an idea of the answer - and it might give pause to those who see bunker-busters as the answer to underground [targets].

I'll probably be quoting Bacevich's book here on the blog quite a bit.

But I wanted to put in a comment about his particular perspective.  Although he was more identified with a more conservative perspective a few years ago, at the moment both conservative and liberal critics of the Iraq War find some of his ideas compatable.  But in many ways his arguments in The New American Militarism are as much a challenge to Democratic thinking as to Republican.

Because he's identifying problems in the strategic orientation of the services that are not ideological in the liberal/conservative sense.  And he also points to habits of thinking in society that have seemingly become deeply-rooted that also constitute a democratic deficit, an unhealthy deference to generals and war advocates.  And he challenges the notion that is at the core of the current official National Security Strategy, of maintaining overwhelming military dominance in the world to the degree the US holds it today.

But he is not making a radical critique either, or one that is idealistic in a way that makes it entertaining and thought-provoking, but effectively irrelevant to policy debates.  Because he's focusing on trends that have produced some very real and damaging problems for the United States.  I hate to use a phrase like "thinking out of the box."  So I'll put it that he's looking at some long-term trends, making some surprising connections among them and taking a fresh approach in analyzing them.

And while Bacevich in his presentation and in his book doesn't seem to "wear his religion on his sleeve," as the saying goes, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that his general perspective is heavily influenced by his Catholic Christianity.  His comment about believing in Original Sin suggested to me that his religious perspective may make him more willing than his more conventional colleagues to ask whether things that are widely accepted might not be more deeply flawed than we would like to assume.

Tom Engelhardt has made available two long excerpts from the book (presumably with the author's permission):  The Normalization of War and The Neocon Revolution and American Militarism.