A Military History By Andrew J. Bacevich Illustrated. 453 pp. Random House. $30. In the opening chapter of his latest book, the military historian Andrew J. Bacevich blames Jimmy Carter, a president commonly viewed as more meek than martial, for unwittingly spawning 35 years of American military intervention in the Middle East. Bacevich argues that three mistakes by Carter set precedents that led to decades of squandered American lives and treasure.
First, Carter called on Americans to stop worshiping “self-indulgence and consumption” and join a nationwide effort to conserve energy. Self-sacrifice, he argued in what is now widely derided as Carter’s “malaise speech,” would free Americans from their dependence on foreign oil and “help us to conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country.”
The president came across as more hectoring pastor than visionary leader, Bacevich argues in “America’s War for the Greater Middle East.” His guileless approach squandered an opportunity to persuade Americans reeling from high foreign oil prices to trade “dependence for autonomy.”
Carter’s second mistake was authorizing American support to guerrillas fighting a Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan, a move that eventually helped fuel the spread of radical Islam. Finally, in a misguided effort to counter views that he was “too soft,” Carter declared that the United States would respond with military force to any outside effort to seize Persian Gulf oil fields. “This statement, subsequently enshrined as the Carter Doctrine, inaugurated America’s war for the greater Middle East,” Bacevich writes.
This book, Bacevich’s eighth, extends his string of brutal, bracing and essential critiques of the pernicious role of reflexive militarism in American foreign policy. As in past books, Bacevich is thought-provoking, profane and fearless. Assailing generals, journalists and foreign policy experts alike, he links together more than a dozen military interventions that span 35 years and declares them a single war. Bacevich analyzes each intervention, looking for common themes from Carter’s late 1970s missteps to Barack Obama’s widespread use of assassination by drone strike today.
Washington’s penchant for intervention, Bacevich contends, is driven by more than America’s thirst for oil or the military-industrial complex’s need for new enemies. In addition to these two factors, he argues that “a deeply pernicious collective naïveté” among both Republicans and Democrats spawns interventions doomed by “confusion and incoherence.”
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The ultimate responsibility for the United States’ actions lies with an “oblivious” American public engrossed in “shallow digital enthusiasms and the worship of celebrity,” Bacevich writes. Americans support freedom, democracy and prosperity in other nations, he tells us, as long as they get the lion’s share of it. “Ensuring that Americans enjoy their rightful quota (which is to say, more than their fair share) of freedom, abundance and security comes first,” Bacevich says. “Everything else figures as an afterthought.”
Bacevich’s argument is heavy-handed at times, but when he writes about military strategy, he is genuinely incisive. Citing numerous examples, he convincingly argues that destructive myths about the efficacy of American military power blind policy makers, generals and voters. The use of overwhelming lethal force does not immediately cause dictators or terrorists to turn tail and run, even if that’s what politicians in Washington want to believe. Rather, it often leads to resentment, chaos and resistance.
A presumption that using military power signified to friends and foes that Washington was getting serious about a problem diminished the role of diplomats and diplomacy. “ ‘Getting serious’ also implied a preference for uniforms over suits as the principal agents of U.S. policy,” Bacevich writes. “Henceforth, rather than military power serving as the handmaiden of diplomacy, the reverse would be true.”
In another repeated mistake, triumphalist American commanders prematurely declare victory without realizing that their opponent has simply withdrawn to fight another day as a guerrilla force, as occurred in Afghanistan in 2001. They also personalize the enemy, wrongly assuming that the removal of figures like Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi will instantly end conflict.
From Somalia in 1993 to Yemen today, American commanders and policy makers overestimated the advantage American military technology bestows on them. And most crucially of all, the United States has failed to decide whether it is, in fact, at war.
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“In the war for the greater Middle East, the United States chose neither to contain nor to crush, instead charting a course midway in between,” Bacevich writes. “Instead of intimidating, U.S. military efforts have annoyed, incited and generally communicated a lack of both competence and determination.” The historical forces at work in the Middle East are different from the dynamics that led to American victories in World War II and the Cold War. American officials have failed to understand that. What’s more, a deluded Washington foreign policy establishment believes that an American way of life based on “consumption and choice” will be accepted over time in the “Islamic world.”
But it is here, in his description of the “Islamic world,” that Bacevich stumbles. What is missing in this book about “the greater Middle East” are the people of the greater Middle East. Bacevich’s most highly developed Muslim character in these pages is Saddam Hussein. The former Afghan president Hamid Karzai is a distant second. Beyond those two, the rest of the world’s estimated 1.6 billion Muslims come across as two-dimensional caricatures.
And so Bacevich lumps together vastly different nationalities — from Bosnians to Iraqis to Somalis — often referring to all of them primarily as “Muslims.” The dizzying complexities of each country’s history, politics, culture, resources and rivalries are missing. And when it comes to how “Muslims” view the world, Bacevich veers into the simplistic essentialism that he accuses Washington policy makers of following.
Bacevich suggests that in the “Islamic world” lifestyles based on “consumption and choice” might not work. Such broad-brush statements might well be considered simplistic and even bigoted if applied to other faiths. Can one contend that a “Christian world,” “Hindu world” or “Jewish world” exists? Are such generalizations analytically useful? Do the world’s hundreds of millions of Muslims practice their faith identically?
As a result of this essentialism, Bacevich glosses over a vital point about the Middle East today: A historic and brutal struggle between radicals and modernists for the future of the region is underway. One can argue that the United States has no place in that fight, but making sweeping generalizations about Muslims as Bacevich does limits our understanding of the forces at work in the region. It also plays into the hands of extremists who seek to divide the world by faith.
In the most troubling passage of the book, Bacevich breezily questions pluralism itself. “According to one of the prevailing shibboleths of the present age, this commingling of cultures is inherently good,” he writes. “It fosters pluralism, thereby enriching everyday life. Yet cultural interaction also induces friction, whether spontaneously generated or instigated by demagogues and provocateurs.”
We do live in a dangerous world, but it is also an inevitably interconnected one. The commingling of cultures cannot be stopped. Nor should it be.
For all that, Bacevich is right that the United States’ reflexive use of armed intervention in the Middle East is folly. An unquestioning faith in military might and an underinvestment in diplomacy has tied Washington in a policy straitjacket. Bacevich’s call for Americans to rethink their nation’s militarized approach to the Middle East is incisive, urgent and essential.
David Rohde is the national security investigations editor for Reuters and a contributing editor for The Atlantic.