From After the Apocalypse (Andrew Bacevich, 2021) pp23-6
“Power,” John Adams once observed, “always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.” Those words apply to the United States as much as to any other great nation in modern times. Over the course of its national existence, the United States has done important and admirable things. It has also committed grave sins.
First among them is imperialism. Subjecting people deemed inferior to rule by those claiming to be superior is a great evil. Yet the United States has its own rich tradition of imperialism, both formal and informal, dating from the very founding of the Anglo-American colonies.
George Orwell once wrote that people “feel that a thing becomes different if you call it by a different name.”2 Americans have habitually relied on different names to cloak U.S. imperialism: Manifest Destiny, settling the frontier, converting the heathen, protecting American lives and property, and sharing the blessings of democracy. But the presumed beneficiaries of U.S. ministrations, be they Native Americans, Mexicans, Cuban, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Or, in more recent days, Iraqis and Afghans, have never been fooled.
Nor should we fool ourselves. In particular, Americans can no longer afford to overlook the consequences resulting from imperial meddling gone awry. Examples include overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, which permanently poisoned U.S.-Iranian relations; the epic miscalculation of the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, which set in motion the events leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following October; and complicity in the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, which destabilized that country and drew the United States ever deeper into a prolonged and ugly quagmire; and, of course, the misguided wars launched in the wake of 9/11 pursuant to a Freedom Agenda that produced dubious benefits while exacting very heavy costs.
Second comes militarism, which Americans are inclined to attribute to armed-to-the-teeth Europeans who rushed headlong into the inferno of the First World War, or to the Germany that emerged from that terrible conflict intent on having another go at it. Yet if militarism manifests itself in romanticizing soldiers, seeing military might as the truest measure of national greatness, and indulging in outsize expectations regarding the efficacy of force, then the United States in our time compares with Prussia during the heyday of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke.13 Numbers tell the story: a Pentagon budget easily surpassing that of any plausible combination of adversaries; some eight hundred military bases scattered in some 140 countries around the globe; and a penchant for armed intervention that finds U.S. forces perpetually at war. Militarism costs a lot; the payoff is negligible.
Third, and most troubling of all, is U.S. involvement in the intentional killing of noncombatants, which is always wrong and can never be justified by “military necessity.” The United States once held to this very position. On September 1, 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt sent an “urgent appeal” to the belligerents in the war that was just beginning in Europe. In it, he asked each government to affirm that it would “in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations.” Air attacks targeting civilians amounted to nothing less than “inhuman barbarism,” Roosevelt wrote.
Needless to say, the recipients of FDR’s note ignored his appeal. By 1942, Roosevelt himself effectively disowned it. Targeting civilians became a central component of the American way of war. The ensuing Anglo-American Combined Bomber Offensive killed an estimated 410,000 German civilians. !5 U.S. strategic bombing attacks on Japanese cities killed comparable numbers, including between 80,000 and 100,000 noncombatants during the March 9-10, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo and at least another 225,000 in early August resulting from just two atomic bombs.! During the Korean War, beginning in June 1950, a comprehensive campaign aimed at leveling North Korean cities exterminated a million or more noncombatants.17 And from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, U.S. air attacks across several Southeast Asian countries killed at least another half million.
The numbers are only estimates. In truth, we can no more tabulate how many civilians were killed by made-in-the-USA fragmentation, incendiary, cluster, or atomic munitions since the 1940s than we can calculate the number of people who died during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s or the Cultural Revolution that Mao Zedong launched in the mid-1960s. All we can say for certain is that the death toll exacted by U.S. bombing was massive and correlated imperfectly at best with intended political outcomes.
Sadly, the U.S. policy of maintaining at the ready a large nuclear arsenal means that even today a further recurrence of “inhuman barbarism” remains a frightening possibility.
The point of offering this interpretation of America’s past is not to wallow in our failings or to suggest that we owe the world an apology. Nor am I hinting at a moral equivalence between our transgressions and the horrendous crimes of others.
Yet to know where the nation needs to position itself in the Next Order requires first a clear-eyed account of how it got to where it finds itself today. As Americans consider their future role in the world, they can ill-afford to flinch from a past that includes both much to celebrate and much to regret.
Sadly, no political figure of national stature is likely to subscribe to such a balanced assessment of America’s past. Honesty doesn’t win elections. Artful hedging in the case of someone like Joe Biden – or crude duplicity in the case of Donald Trump-does. Yet absent honesty, it is hard to see how Americans will arrive at an adequate understanding of their present predicament.
Tgk1946's Blog 