20th Century Hero

[posted by Callimachus]

America has been losing propaganda battles since before most of us were born. It seems to have less to do with the sophistication of the propaganda than the will to believe among the easily led. Back in the early Cold War, plenty of Europeans and Americans were willing to believe Stalin's Kremlin when it swore it sought "unity with the peace-loving peoples everywhere."

In 1951, when America was goading the new NATO allies to contribute more to collective defense, a front group for the Soviet Union sponsored a "World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace" in East Berlin. The motto of the festival was "For Peace and Friendship – Against Nuclear Weapons." Pop music played between the speeches extolling the leadership of comrade Stalin. Wishful thinkers everywhere looked at the American policies, and the Soviet youth festival, and concluded the real threat to world peace was on this side of the Atlantic.

They got snowed by Stalin. They still do.

In brief, the story that Roberts tells goes like this: Josef Stalin, uncontested leader of the Soviet Union from 1927 until his death in 1953, deserves to be remembered as a great statesman — indeed, as the greatest of the age. Although Stalin made his share of mistakes, especially in the early phases of World War II, he learned from those mistakes and thereby grew in wisdom and stature. Among allied chieftains, he alone was irreplaceable. He, not Churchill and not Roosevelt, was the true architect of victory, "the dictator who defeated Hitler and helped save the world for democracy."

Even Andrew J. Bacevich, who can't resist his own cheap shot comparison of Stalin to Bush in this review, finds this all a bit excessive.

Cold War Warmed Over

[posted by Callimachus]

Interesting opinion piece by Andrew J. Bacevich, who generally falls into my personal "wrong-but-worth-reading" file. Here I find him less wrong than I usually do.

I've never been entirely persuaded by the short list of things we supposedly did wrong in Iraq that then caused all the trouble. Disbanding the Iraqi army, for instance, clearly caused a set of problems we were slow to address. But not disbanding it -- leaving the corrupt and incompetent brigades with their arms and their sadistic colonels in place amid the masses they had massacred a few months before -- would have led to another, and I suspect worse, set of problems.

Bacevich takes on another platitude: That the U.S. military is too small to meet current challenges. Here, though he never mentions the name, Bacevich agrees with Rumsfeld. He notes the way this issue has become a touchstone for reliability by the mainstream Democratic candidates trying to out-flank the GOP on defense:

Presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all promise, if elected, to expand our land forces. Clinton has declared it "past time to increase the end-strength of the Army and Marines." Edwards calls for a "substantial increase." Obama offers hard numbers: His program specifies the addition of 92,000 soldiers.

Bacevich takes a stick to this: "Any politician who thinks that the chief lesson to be drawn from the last five years is that we need more Americans toting rifles and carrying rucksacks has learned nothing." He says its the consequence of another failure of creative thinking: To see the current crisis in anything but "World War III" (or IV) terms.

This second consensus consists of two elements. According to the first element, the only way to win the so-called global war on terrorism, thereby precluding another 9/11, is to "fix" whatever ails the Islamic world. According to the second element, the United States possesses the wherewithal to effect just such a transformation. In essence, by employing American power, beginning with military power, to ameliorate the ills afflicting Islam, we will ensure our own safety.

I've had my own dalliance with the world war image, and certainly I've been enthusiastic for the transformative and elevating effects of freedom and popular control, as opposed to totalitarianism. But the depressing situation in Iraq and Afghanistan has me willing to look at alternative strategies.

Bacevich's prescription is another backwards-looker, however. Instead of World War II, this will be a new, multi-generational Cold War:

In fact, the great lesson of Iraq (further affirmed in Afghanistan) is that the umma — the Arabic name for the entire Muslim community — is all but impervious to change imposed from the outside. If anything, our ham-handed efforts to inculcate freedom and democracy, even if well-intentioned, have played into the hands of violent Islamic radicals. The Bush administration's strategy has exacerbated the problem it was designed to solve, while squandering American lives, treasure, moral standing and political influence to little avail.

Now I grew up in the Cold War, and I have no love for it at all. It was a necessary struggle, often brilliantly waged on our part, but just as often full of blunders, over-reactions, unwanted consequences, societal parasites, and crippling moral compromises. It warped this nation in ways that never will heal.

If Bacevich is going to go for that, he ought to honestly lay out the price to be paid, or some of the vicious policies of exclusion and endurance we will have to embrace. He doesn't. He goes no further than bland buzzwords like "limits of American power" ... coexistence without appeasement ... containment ... "quarantine."

"The candidate who can articulate such ideas might well merit respect and popular support," he writes. And I write, the candidate who tells you honestly what that will cost you, what you will have to accept in the name of your security, what your children will have to be taught to fear, what the people of the Declaration of Independence will have to take to bed with them -- the one who will tell you what even Bacevich blanches to spell out -- is going to make you sick.

Andrew J. Bacevich

[posted by Callimachus]

Andrew J. Bacevich, military historian and critic of the Bush Administration's war policies, has lost his son and namesake in Iraq.

Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich has been a persistent, vocal critic of the Iraq war, calling the conflict a catastrophic failure. This week, the retired Army lieutenant colonel received the grim news that his son had been killed on patrol there.

First Lieutenant Andrew J. Bacevich , 27, of Walpole, died Sunday in Balad of wounds he suffered after a bomb explosion, the military said yesterday. The soldier, who graduated from BU in 2003 with a degree in communications, is the 56th service member from Massachusetts to be killed in Iraq.

His father, a veteran of the Vietnam and Gulf wars, has criticized the war in his writings and described President Bush's endorsement of such "preventive wars" as "immoral, illicit, and imprudent."

... Katy Bacevich, 22, one of the soldier's three sisters, recalled her brother as a born leader who answered a calling to serve his country. Andrew Bacevich joined the Army in July 2004 and had been stationed in Iraq since October with the Third Brigade Combat Team, First Cavalry Division.

"He felt it was an important thing to do, regardless of the war that was going on," she said. Despite her father's strong feelings about the conflict, Katy Bacevich said, "he never would discourage my brother from doing what he wanted to do."

This is an important angle to the story, certainly. But I could wish for an article in which the son's life and personality was given more prominence than the father's. Just because it's that young man's last chance to get his story told. Does the fact that he was the 56th casualty from Massachusetts really matter more, inverted-pyramid style, than the narrative of his service or his reasons for being there?

Quibbles with journalism. The fact is, another brave and true-hearted young man is gone and we all rightly mourn. "How sleep the brave, who sink to rest by all their country's wishes bless'd."

Jules Crittenden gave himself the unlucky assignment that often was mine in my days as a cop reporter: Call the dead man's family and try to get a comment. He writes about it here:

I haven’t had to make that kind of call much since I became an editor, but tonight when it needed to be done, I preferred to be the one to do it. Andy Bacevich answered the phone but was brusque, just said he couldn’t talk about it right now. Later, he sent me an email. “He joined the Army to serve his country in time of need. We love him and mourn his loss.” And a photo of his beloved son, who looks exactly like him, smiling, with bright eyes, at Patrol Base Love, Iraq.

Anti-war father loses his beloved son to the war he opposed. The family's tragedy wrapped into deeper tragedy. It reminds me of the Quaker boys I wrote about who snuck off and joined the Civil War and never came home, or Nick Berg, who went to do the right thing even though his father bitterly opposed it.

On the car in the driveway of the Berg home is a bumper sticker with a red slash through a "W" and the slogan, "Let's not elect him in 2004, either."

Yet this father, who is of the age of the '60s youth movement, taught his son to think and to make his own choices. And the son grew up to see a world that could be made better, even by Americans. Among those who sent the family condolences this week were Kenyan tribesmen young Berg had helped improve their village. He went to Iraq with the same vision: to bring democracy and a good life to people who knew little of either.

He supported the war, for humanitarian reasons. This, more than any accident of geography, is what makes me feel identified with him.

In the Vietnam War, the old held that American power was a force for good and believed in the spread of freedom as a patriotic virtue. Their children spit bile at the administration. In this war, the natural order is reversed. And the war itself, we can only hope, is fought with more wisdom, and more vision, than was Vietnam. I hope this for the sake of the growing list of men and women who have given their lives believing that it is so.

Steven C. Clemons has an elegy. "By all their country's wishes bless'd." Would that it were so. Stop here if you don't want to feel your blood boil. But within the space of two comments, the thread on Clemons post turned to this:

I feel terrible for any person who has lost a family member in this stupid war. And yet, why would anyone volunteer for this madness? Did they think it could not come to this terrible end?

Should I feel worse for someone whose son volunteered to be part of this conflict, to be part of the problem and the cause, more than than for some Iraqi who wonders why his son or daughter was killed by being at the wrong place and the wrong time in their own country?

I'm terribly terribly sorry to say that his son was part of the problem. Surely someone like Bacevich's son had other options in life. Why did he choose this one?

He chose to be part of America's military empire building, and he paid with his life. But it was still his choice.

I'm sorry if that sounds cold. But that's the reality of the situation.

When enough people start refusing this immoral madness, then maybe it will stop. Until then... more deaths like Andrew Bacevich, 27, Walpole MA, and the un-named Iraqis he probably helped kill.

Noam Envy

The rest of the America-haters are whining.

No one is more bewildered or, frankly, bummed by all of the attention suddenly being paid to Noam Chomsky than Andrew Bacevich.

"I've written a few books critical of US foreign policy, too," said Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University. "Why couldn't Hugo Chavez hold up one of my books?"

Boston! Christ almighty it's like the last car of the circus train up there.

The Tables Are Turning

So says this Boston Globe thumbsucker by anti-militarist professor Andrew J. Bacevich.

Despite a massive American and Israeli technological edge, including nuclear arsenals, mounting evidence suggests that the age of Western military ascendancy is coming to an end. Muslim radicals have evolved an Islamist way of war that is as complex as it is cunning. As a consequence, in and around the Persian Gulf the military balance is shifting. The failures suffered by the United States in Iraq and by Israel in southern Lebanon may well signify a turning point in modern military history, comparable in significance to the development of blitzkrieg in the 1930s or of the atomic bomb a decade later.

I'm treating him seriously because he actually offers an alternative. But his five-point plan for an alternative to the "War on Terror" is oddly contradictory and incomplete.

First, terminate actions that are self-evidently counterproductive, above all by extricating ourselves in an orderly way from Iraq.

Ignores the enormous psychological boost that would give to the jihadis. Ignores the oil wealth and power they would derive from taking control of most of Iraq. Ignores the many friends and allies we still have there; people who have staked their lives and families on us meaning what we said and intending to deliver on our promises. Who ever would trust us again? The only thing worse for us than being stuck in Iraq now is getting out now.

Second, revive in modified form the Cold War principles of containment and deterrence, incorporating explicit security guarantees for Israel, much as the United States has long guaranteed the security of Europe, Japan, and South Korea.

Security guarantees against what? Containment of what? The Soviet Union was a geographically defined nation state, with a conservative leadership and a population that could be held hostage by nuclear terror. I've been to West Berlin. The Eastern Block had a "there" to it. On this side of the street, you're in it; on that side, you're not. Where's the "there" to Islamist jihad? It's in an apartment in Madrid or Paterson. It's not in the apartment next door. How do you "contain" something as fluid as air?

Bacevich seems to be guilty of the same offense he accuses the U.S. administration of committing: Failing to adjust its thinking to account for a new kind of enemy.

Third, initiate a new Manhattan Project to develop alternative sources of energy, thereby increasing US freedom of action and reducing the flow of wealth to the Persian Gulf, wealth that ends up subsidizing the Islamist cause.

How I wish. But we're not at the point where that would do any good. Science just doesn't work like that. Manhattan Project came along when the new energy source had been discovered and described and defined, and all that left was a massive motivation of money and manpower to bring it to fruition. That's the point at which a government push can be helpful. That's not where we stand with alternative energies.

Fourth, through police action, in collaboration with our allies, redouble efforts to dismantle the organizations comprising the radical Islamist network.

Hard to know what he means here. Does he mean international military "police actions," a la Afghanistan? Or Interpol type work? Either way, there are formidable unaddressed problems. Taking him to mean the second, there are vastly different rules of evidence and procedure between, say, Britain and America. And the inevitable entanglement of terror-prevention police work and civil liberties already is an open can of worms.

Fifth, patiently nurture liberalizing tendencies within the Islamic world, not by preaching or threats of regime change, but by demonstrating at home and inviting Muslims abroad to witness, the manifest advantages of freedom and democracy.

Ah, idealism! But the most bitter and committed Islamists, from Qutb to Atta, have been exactly those who lived and studied in the West and observed its triumphs and temptations up close.

Bacevich dodges the difficult problem of the role of mass-media in the terrorists' strategies. He gets as close to it as he dares when he writes, "But resistance also includes ... propaganda designed for internal consumption and propaganda intended for foreign audiences." And then at once veers away from this central component of the Islamist war against the West.

I agree with Bacevich that the water we're all in probably is a lot hotter than we realize. We've got what the Japanese of the 1940s later ruefully termed "Victory Disease." We might lose. And the consequences of that would be terrible. Anti-war people seem to think this push-back against Islamism all could be done better and smarter with less work, less sacrifice, less difficulty, fewer ugly pictures in the nightly news. Unfortunately, the opposite likely is more true.