Andrew Bacevich waves good riddance to the American Century and its destructive myths:
In one pithy phrase, [the American Century] captures (or at least seems to capture) the essence of some defining truth: America as alpha and omega, source of salvation and sustenance, vanguard of history, guiding spirit and inspiration for all humankind.
In its classic formulation, the central theme of the American Century has been one of righteousness overcoming evil.
According to the myth, since WWII America has saved the world from a series of threatening totalitarianisms and acted as the model for what freedom is supposed to look like.
As Bacevich points out, this is self-aggrandizing nonsense, and in fact dangerous nonsense, because it has led the country into the state of illusion that underlies many of its current problems, foreign and domestic.
He tries to set the record straight about some of the most persistent myths:
When it came to defeating the Third Reich, the Soviets bore by far the preponderant burden, sustaining 65% of all Allied deaths in World War II...
[I]n determining [the outcome of the Cold War], the brilliance of American statesmen was far less important than the ineptitude of those who presided over the Kremlin...
Cuba. In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain for the proclaimed purpose of liberating the so-called Pearl of the Antilles. When that brief war ended, Washington reneged on its promise. If there actually has been an American Century, it begins here, with the U.S. government breaking a solemn commitment, while baldly insisting otherwise. By converting Cuba into a protectorate, the United States set in motion a long train of events leading eventually to the rise of Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even today's Guantanamo Bay prison camp...
The Bomb...The United States invented the bomb. The United States -- alone among members of the nuclear club -- actually employed it as a weapon of war. The U.S. led the way in defining nuclear-strike capacity as the benchmark of power in the postwar world, leaving other powers like the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China scrambling to catch up. Today, the U.S. still maintains an enormous nuclear arsenal at the ready and adamantly refuses to commit itself to a no-first-use policy, even as it professes its horror at the prospect of some other nation doing as the United States itself has done...
Iran. Extending his hand to Tehran, President Obama has invited those who govern the Islamic republic to "unclench their fists." Yet to a considerable degree, those clenched fists are of our own making...For most Iranians, the story of U.S.-Iranian relations begins...in 1953, when CIA agents collaborated with their British counterparts to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and return the Shah of Iran to his throne... The Americans got oil, along with a lucrative market for exporting arms. The people of Iran pretty much got screwed. Freedom and democracy did not prosper. The antagonism that expressed itself in November 1979 with the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran was not entirely without cause...
Afghanistan. President Obama...has yet to confront the role played by the United States in creating the Taliban in the first place. Washington once took pride in the success it enjoyed funneling arms and assistance to fundamentalist Afghans waging jihad against foreign occupiers... U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen caused the Soviets fits. Yet it also fed a cancer that, in time, exacted a most grievous toll on Americans themselves -- and has U.S. forces today bogged down in a seemingly endless war.
There's no way to know whether different choices at the time might have led to vastly different results, like a free, peaceful, and democratic Cuba and Iran, with consequent positive effects on the rest of Latin America and the Middle East.
But the way to deal with the place these policies have left the country in is not to retreat into the myths but to face the hard truths and try to acknowledge where things have gone wrong.
Only through the exercise of candor might we avoid replicating such mistakes.
Indeed, we ought to apologize. When it comes to avoiding the repetition of sin, nothing works like abject contrition. We should, therefore, tell the people of Cuba that we are sorry for having made such a hash of U.S.-Cuban relations for so long. President Obama should speak on our behalf in asking the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for forgiveness. He should express our deep collective regret to Iranians and Afghans for what past U.S. interventionism has wrought.
The United States should do these things without any expectations of reciprocity.
This is what torture apologists like Richard Cohen can't seem to understand. He and those like him can't seem to see that use of torture under any circumstances as U.S. policy must be repudiated. Not because it's not effective. Not because it will produce blowback. Not because it puts U.S soldiers at greater risk. But because it's wrong.
Cohen thinks repudiating torture will not make the country safer, because suicide bombers like the one a few days ago in Baghdad care nothing about America's "moral authority."
As if your "moral authority" arises from what others think of you instead of what you are and what you do.
Repudiating torture under any circumstances and prosecuting those who ordered it are just more of those things the United States needs to do without any expectations of reciprocity. Because wrongs have been done that go against the deepest values of the country, and they need to be put right.