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September 8, 2013 Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Drama from Obama
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Andrew
Bacevich’s post on the congressional debate on Syria couldn’t be
timelier in two ways -- in terms of the debate itself, scheduled to
begin Monday, but also because his powerful new book, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, is officially published this Tuesday in the American Empire Project series that I run with Steve Fraser at Metropolitan Books. It just got a rave from Rachel Maddow in the New York Times Book Review and Bacevich has just appeared
on Moyers & Company. He is scheduled to be on the Colbert Report
as well. What a moment then to make you a hard-to-refuse offer: in
return for a $100 contribution, you can get a signed, personalized copy
of his dynamite new book. It’s a great way to support this site and get
something genuinely worth having in return. Check out the offer at our
donation page
and many thanks in advance to those of you who contribute. Your help
makes such a difference in our ability to stay afloat. Tom]
Here is the strangeness of our moment: the U.S. has no rival on the planet. Its global military stance is historically unparalleled and largely uncontested. And yet somehow, in crucial areas of the world, Washington’s power to do anything is significantly, visibly lessening. Consider this: In 1990, in the very last days of the Cold War, our former ally in the Persian Gulf, Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein (whom we supported in major ways when he was using chemical weapons against Iranian troops in the mid-1980s), invaded Kuwait. He may even have thought that he had gotten a green light from Washington to do so. President George H.W. Bush then formed what he called a “coalition of the willing” of 30 nations, got the backing of Congress, drove Saddam’s troops out of Kuwait, and invaded Iraq. Other countries, including the Gulf States, Japan, and Germany, were even willing to shoulder a significant part of the financial burden of the build-up to war and the actual campaign. Twenty-two years later, preparing to launch a far more limited missile and possibly air assault on Syrian military facilities, President Obama tried to do the same. His officials even resurrected the term. He instead found himself in a coalition of one -- and a half, if you count French President Hollande, two-and-a-half, if you count the Saudis. Much of the rest of the world proved to be a “coalition of the unwilling.” This could certainly be taken as a measure of waning American power in the Greater Middle East and, for that matter, Europe over the last two decades. Think of this Obama moment as one in which the chickens have literally come home to roost -- and by chickens I mean everything from the manipulations that led us into a “slam dunk” war in Iraq to the recent NSA revelations of Edward Snowden, which have left enough of the planet ticked off to make the formation of an American-sponsored coalition of anything that much harder. Today, Andrew Bacevich catches the strangeness of how all this is playing out domestically in the onrushing Syrian congressional debate (or perhaps “debate”). For the last 12 years, it has also played out in a military-first set of global initiatives that have turned what used to be called “foreign policy” into a kind of permanent war policy run by an ever more engorged national security state. The pressures on the actual military have been striking. In Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, his new book published this Tuesday, Bacevich lays out the ways in which that military has essentially been abandoned by a public that heaps endless praise on “the troops,” but leaves them to fend for themselves as something ever less like a citizen’s army and ever more like a foreign legion. Tom The Hill to the Rescue on Syria? |
