All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm happy to welcome Andrew Bacevich back to the show.
He's a professor of international relations at Boston university and a retired career officer in the U S army.
He's the author of American empire, the realities and consequences of U S diplomacy.
The new American militarism, how Americans are seduced by war, the limits of power, the end of American exceptionalism.
And as well as, uh, his most recent book, Washington rules America's path to permanent war.
He's got a brand new one up at Tom dispatch.com, which certainly will be running under Tom's name tomorrow at anti-war.com, uh, war fever subsides in Washington on the mend.
Welcome back to the show, Andrew.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thanks for having me on your program.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us and I, I want to believe, but I'm not quite there, but it, could it really be true, sir, that in Washington, DC, they're beginning to recognize that there's a limit to, uh, how much of the world that they can conquer at any one time, I'm actually probably right where you are.
I want to believe too.
And I think there are some hopeful signs, uh, and I tried to lay them out, uh, in this, this little piece.
I think one hopeful sign is that, uh, this guy, Robert Gates, uh, about to leave office granted, uh, but a truly respected figure, whether you like him, whether I like him in a sense is irrelevant, he's probably the most respected figure in Washington today.
And he says that we can't afford any more war.
He says that our military is exhausted.
He says that the concept of wars of choice is absurd.
Uh, so he's not somebody coming from the libertarian, right.
Or from the radical left, but somebody from the national security central.
Um, we've got military officers who now are increasingly willing to say things that five or six years ago, uh, would have been considered heresy.
Uh, they recognize perhaps more acutely than the rest of us, the limits of American military power.
And now we've even got members of Congress who are actually speaking up and questioning whether open-ended war is such a good thing.
So those are the hopeful signs, whether they're conclusive or not.
I don't know.
You know, it's funny.
I guess I'm just, after all these years, I'm still so naive.
I always just think these people are liars, but really, uh, you know, kind of the truth revealed by the contrast in your article is that up until now, the consensus has been that we can do anything in the whole world that we want forever.
And it's not that they're dishonest with us.
It's that they're dishonest with themselves.
They really all believe this stuff.
Well, I think they have.
And, and certainly there are still people in Washington who will, uh, recite the standard lines about the importance of American global leadership and that we are the indispensable nation.
Uh, so we shouldn't think that, uh, uh, the victory in this, the victory of returning to common sense is one.
But I'm just struck by the fact that, I mean, and I think, you know, opinion is lagging behind reality.
Uh, I think it has been apparent for many years that it's absurd to think that, uh, we can run the world the way we want to, but I think opinion is in fact, catching up to reality.
And, and that's at least one hopeful sign at a time when there aren't a heck of a lot of hopeful signs to go around.
Well, you know, I think we can be, uh, grateful in a sense for Barack Obama, Barack Obama's blundering on this Libya thing.
Uh, we're just talking right before this segment about Daniel Larrison's, uh, new blog entry at the American conservative magazine blog, where he just talks about how Obama completely failed to even try to make his case for this war.
He completely failed to go to the Congress and get the authorization that they would have handed him on a silver platter.
And he, the politics of the thing, the way he handled it in DC is such that he's really created a lot of political opposition.
And then of course, attitude follows behavior.
You know, once you're against this war, now you got to come up with even more and more reasons why you are.
And so all these right-wing Republicans are coming up with all these fiscal reasons and, and sanity reasons, I think about, you know, the limits of American power.
The Libya thing I have to say is the mishandling of the Libya issue by the white house is really puzzling.
And the president's not a dumb guy.
I think president's pretty smart guy.
And presumably at least some of his advisors in the white house are supposedly smart guys.
So why they have chosen to so flagrantly, you know, blow off any sort of requirement to consult Congress on this matter is really quite puzzling.
But that's what the president has done.
And I think that that miscalculation has helped in a small way to reinforce this growing skepticism about our military misadventures.
Well, you know, it's funny it's, it's such a good thing really that Chalmers Johnson's legacy is that it's now common knowledge and commonly cited that we have you know, over 900 bases in more than 130 countries.
They say I think Ron Paul really did a lot to help popularize that kind of statistic.
But I wonder if you could paint a picture for the listeners about what that really means.
We have bases in every one of the stands in Central Asia, all throughout Europe, everywhere.
We do.
I think, I mean, among the many excellent things that Chalmers did was to coin this phrase empire of bases, which I think is evocative in part because it helps to express the broad expanse of our military presence.
But it also makes the point that whether or not Americans will fess up to it or not, we have those bases because we are an imperial nation engaged in an imperial enterprise.
For too long, we have taken it for granted that that kind of a global presence makes sense because that's what we do.
That was the habit we fell into during the course of the Cold War.
But I think that there, too, there may be at least the beginnings of a realization that some of those bases are unnecessary and some of those bases are actually counterproductive.
I have to say, I'm in the camp where it's not all or nothing.
I mean, I don't believe that, you know, by next Thursday, every American soldier who is deployed abroad should be returned to the continental United States.
I think that what we need is a careful, comprehensive, realistic assessment.
Where does it make sense for us to have forces abroad?
And if there are such places, keep them there.
But where the forces have become redundant, I think Europe would be a good example.
And where they actually are counterproductive, like in the Islamic world, that's where some kind of effort should be made to to draw down that presence.
And I think maybe in a small way, people are coming around to that idea.
Well, you know, when we talk about Central Asia, not just Afghanistan, but into all the other stands, especially, it seems like those are the definition of far flung and really extremely vulnerable, right?
Far flung, vulnerable, likely to play into Iranian suspicions that we're trying to surround Iran, likely to feed Chinese concerns that we are establishing positions that are so we're going to try to contain China.
You know, there's all kinds of negative consequences.
What about the Russians?
And the Russians, exactly.
Why?
And the thing is, these are all really tripwires for war, right?
Some crisis breaks out in Uzbekistan that nobody can predict.
And it all of a sudden involves our guys.
We could have a major crisis out of a little one.
Well, also, then it also sort of feeds the ambitions of the contingency planners who are told to get ready for this kind of a conflict against that kind of a country.
And the existence of these bases helps to persuade people that wars on the far side of the earth can actually be winnable.
And we lose sight of the fact that wars on the far side of the earth may actually be unnecessary.
So why be there in the first place?
All right, hold it right there.
It's Andrew Bacevich.
Everybody's got a new one at TomDispatch.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio, I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Andrew J.
Bacevich.
He teaches international relations at Boston University, and he's the author of a great many books, including The New American Militarism and Washington Rules, and his new piece at Tom Dispatch is called On the Mend.
America comes to its senses and the world is in a state of war.
It senses and it's way overdue.
I think the American people have been way ahead of Washington, D.C. on this, but we're talking about how in Washington, D.C., the lesson is finally starting to sink in that maybe if not, it's time to scale back.
But maybe we need to not expand too much further anyway.
And let's see where we left off.
We're talking about unnecessary provocation of other major powers in the world with the bases in Central Asia.
But I wanted to ask you, Andrew, you said that, you know, you're not for bringing all the troops home tomorrow immediately or whatever.
There should be a comprehensive review and we should decide where it does make sense to keep them.
But I wonder, in your estimation, where does it make sense to keep them?
I think I think East Asia.
And the argument I would make is this one, that were we not to have the presence we have in places like Japan and South Korea, I think there'd be a very high likelihood that a major arms race between China and Japan would result, with South Korea probably feeling obliged to join in.
And the result could be to have East Asia really become destabilized.
My guess is that in their heart of hearts, at least for the moment, the Chinese and the Japanese and the South Koreans all actually want us to stay there.
And and I think it does serve the interests of the United States and of the world generally to have that that stability.
So that would be the place I would be least likely to want to see a major change.
To my mind, the place that we should have begun moving toward a drawdown a decade ago is Europe.
We've got this situation in which with minimal threats to Europe and the Europeans more than able to handle those threats if they chose to do so.
Our presence in NATO and in Europe provides them with a ready excuse to behave irresponsibly, to to count on Uncle Sam to defend them.
And I think that's totally absurd at this point.
And now in terms of the Muslim world, which you mentioned, you think we should just call these wars off and get out of the Arabian Peninsula and everything else?
Well, again, none of this is something that needs to that should happen overnight or frankly could happen overnight.
But my overall assessment of our military activities in the Islamic world, with the Carter Doctrine of January 1980, in a sense, as the start date, that since 1980, our military presence has grown by leaps and bounds in the Islamic world.
We've had just about so many wars, big and small, that we almost lost count of them.
Always with the expectation that if we try a little bit harder, the result will be stability in that region.
And yet, if we look back over the course of 30 years of testing that proposition, it seems to me pretty clear that American military exertions actually create more instability and they foster more anti-Americanism and they cost us a ton of money and they also consume the lives of American men and women in uniform.
So why keep trying harder?
Why not evaluate a different approach to securing our interests in the region, one that could be perhaps more effective and certainly would be more affordable?
So I think the whole military project of trying to stabilize or control or liberate or transform, you know, you pick your verb here, using American hard power has failed.
Now, I do want to get back to the change in Washington, D.C., Mr.
Wai and the Congress and the war in Libya, but on Japan and China and Korea and all that, I wonder if there's not another way where we could withdraw our troops and negotiate, help negotiate a lasting peace.
That seems like a role befitting for America, in my view.
And then, you know, maybe negotiate a solution to the Taiwan problem as well as we go.
Because I worry that, you know, these are tripwires where if we ever got in a war with China, they could nuke us, you know?
Well, I'm not...
The purpose of maintaining a presence in the in East Asia in the near term is not, to my mind, so that we can gear up for a war with China, which, as you are correct, would be catastrophic beyond belief.
My argument is simply that the status quo, for the moment, tends to enhance stability and change in the status quo carries a high risk of destabilizing things.
So in that one particular case, I'm arguing it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Now, you're absolutely correct.
If we could negotiate some kind of a comprehensive lasting peace between the major powers of East Asia, clearly that would be highly desirable.
I'm not persuaded that the basis for that peace actually exists, given the historical animosities between Japan and China, for example, and given the current tensions between Japan and China.
But heck, yes, if we could figure out how to make peace, that would enable us to get out and I'd be all in all in favor of it.
I just I'm not seeing that in the cards at the moment.
OK, fair enough.
And now back to D.C. and what you said, this heresy of, hey, there's limits to what we can do here in the in the nicest terms, you know, way of putting it, that this is no longer the case that even high level military officers are saying this.
I wonder if you could tell the people a little bit about Mr.
Y and this report that came out a couple of months back.
Mr. Y is a pseudonym for two serving military officers, one a Marine colonel and one a Navy captain.
And they published a long essay, I think it must be about 20 pages long, put out by the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington about six, eight weeks ago.
I think it's called a a national security or national strategy narrative.
And what's interesting about the essay is not, frankly, that it contains ideas that are going to snap your head back and you're going to say, boy, I never thought of that.
Rather, what's interesting is that this is coming from two military professionals.
And the argument in this document, which is worth reading, is that we've overemphasized hard power, that the notion that we can shove American values down the throats of other people is an illusion.
There is a greater need to invest at home, to nation build at home, rather than trying to nation build in places like Afghanistan.
So to my mind, it suggests that within the officer corps, there are currents in favor of change that will look toward a more modest military posture, perhaps a reprioritization of resources, a little bit less money, the Pentagon, a little bit more money to try to rebuilding infrastructure or perhaps investing in education back here at home.
And the fact that these ideas now find expression in the military is something that, to my mind, is one more indicator of the fact that things may be changing.
Well, hopefully it'll only take a few things like that to really break the surface tension of the argument kind and get people talking about these things in real terms again, or maybe for the first time.
I hope so.
I hope so.
And now I want to ask you about Libya here real fast, Andrew, it seems to me, and I'm no military strategist like you, but it seems like they've really got us in a terrible mess here that walked us into a real trap where if they don't, even if they do get a lucky shot and kill Gaddafi and all of his sons and get, therefore, some form of regime change, that the path that they're on is going to lead to an army occupation and purple-fingered elections and training up a new army to secure the state of Libya and the rest of this.
And I don't see how they can get out of there short of that, because even if they win for the rebels now, they're helping al-Qaeda dudes from the Afghan and Iraq war, you know, win.
And so they can't let them take power.
So now they've got to keep messing around ad infinitum.
And so I wonder, is there any other way out of there other than just saying, oops?
I think you've described the president's predicament pretty well.
And I have to say, I'm glad I'm not the guy in the White House that, you know, is responsible for the Libya portfolio at this point, because it's a real mess.
I do think that, and again, partly because of these changing attitudes that I was trying to describe in that little piece, I really think that the president would run into a buzzsaw of opposition if he announced any intention to put U.S. troops on the ground in Libya.
I really think that's not going to happen.
Now, the Brits and the French and the Italians, they may wish to do that and may, in a sense, be forced by the pressure of events to do something like that.
But my guess is that, in particular, as the presidential race here comes more and more to the fore, the president is really not going to want to have another protracted, nasty occupation to explain to the American people as he runs for reelection.
Or a pair of pigs, either.
You and I could have a bet.
My bet is that the level of involvement of the United States right now kind of is as far as we're going to go in.
Oh, man, I hope that's right.
All right, well, and with that, I'll let you go.
Thank you very much for your time.
Thanks very much for having me on the program.
Everybody, that's Andrew J.
Bacevich.
He's the author of The New American Militarism, The Limits of Power, and Washington Rules.
And he's got a brand new one at TomDispatch.com.
War fever subsides in Washington on the mend, and it'll be running on Antiwar.com under Tom Englehart's name tomorrow, for sure, as well.
