which first appeared in the Global Public Square blog, and were distributed by Readers News Service yesterday. The original is titled After Iraq, War is US. They were, as the editor note, "Bacevich's response to a question posed by the Council on Foreign Relations to four commentators:'Was the Iraq War worth it?'" The other responders, if you are curious, were Max Boot, Michael Ignatieff, and Michael O'Hanlon.
I will stick with Bacevich, who writes
Recalling that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda both turned out to be all but non-existent, a Churchillian verdict on the war might read thusly: Seldom in the course of human history have so many sacrificed so dearly to achieve so little.
There is more.
Bacevich discusses the costs, but argues that a narrow cost-benefit analysis seriously understates what the "debacle" (his word) has truly cost. For example,
The disastrous legacy of the Iraq War extends beyond treasure squandered and lives lost or shattered. Central to that legacy has been Washington's decisive and seemingly irrevocable abandonment of any semblance of self-restraint regarding the use of violence as an instrument of statecraft. With all remaining prudential, normative, and constitutional barriers to the use of force having now been set aside, war has become a normal condition, something that the great majority of Americans accept without complaint. War is US.
His criticism starts with the war's architects, those in the previous administration. He notes the continuing lack of self-restraint in the use of force abroad, and wonders if that was not the intent of those self-same architects.
His criticism does not end there.
By leaving intact and even enlarging the policies that his predecessor had inaugurated, President Barack Obama has handed these militarists an unearned victory. As they drag themselves from one "overseas contingency operation" to the next, American soldiers must reckon with the consequences. So too will the somnolent American people be obliged to do, perhaps sooner than they think.
To which I find I must add, if the President does not follow through on his original threat to veto the National Defense Authorization Act, we will be already at the point where either we act forcefully or find that while we might nominally be in a republic, it will no longer be a democracy, it will be lacking constitutional protects for the rights of dissent and criticism. It will not matter whether Obama ever exercises such power, we fully well recognize that future presidents will, be they Democratic or Republican, as history far to well documents - we should not authorize the use of power we do not wish to be used, for it will be.
If Obama does not veto, I do not know why we should support him or expect him to act any better with this power than he has on so many issues where his statements during the campaign have now been abandoned.
And do not expect the current Supreme Court, which has moved the nation in the direction of the original notion of fascism, domination by the corporations, to find the provision of NDAA that is so obnoxious to be unconstitutional.
In writing these words I fully acknowledge that when the provision is enacted into law I will be in jeopardy. So will most of those here if they continue to express as they have in the past. So be it. At least in my case it will not silence me.
the somnolent American people - who should have by now received multiple wake-up calls
sooner than they thing - if we do not act NOW, then the word of Pogo looking over the devastation of the swamp are applicable to to us - We have met the enemy, and he is us.
And now I am supposed to go and teach American government to teenagers. Do I by completing my responsibilities for this academic year function as a hypocrite? Or do I say what I think, raise the issues for them to consider, and risk being disciplined or even discharged before i can retire?
I will think long and hard, but my inclination is, as it always has been, to refuse to remain silent, to challenge my students to think about the reality, because while I may be approaching the end of my own life, theirs have barely begun.
What about you?