Great Reads: "The Limits of Power"

Andrew J. Bacevich, political science professor at Boston university and Colonel, US Army (ret.), discussed his new book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism on Bill Moyers' Journal this week.

ANDREW BACEVICH: The point is to say that the reality of war is always a heck of a lot more complicated than you might imagine the day before the war begins. And, rather than looking to technology to define the future of warfare, we ought to look - really look at military history.

BILL MOYERS: And what do we learn when we look to the past?

ANDREW BACEVICH: What we should learn from history is that preventive war doesn't work. The Iraq War didn't work (to defeat terrorism by transforming the Middle East). And, therefore, we should abandon notions, such as the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. We should return to the just war tradition. Which sees force as something that is only used as a last resort. Which sees war as something that is justifiable for defensive purposes.

BILL MOYERS: How, then, do we fight what you acknowledge, in the book, is the perfectly real threat posed by violent Islamic extremism?

ANDREW BACEVICH: I think we need to see the threat for what it is. It is a real threat. It's not an existential threat. The 19 hijackers that killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11 didn't succeed because they had advanced technology, because they were particularly smart, because they were ten feet tall.

They succeeded because we let our guard down and we were stupid. We need to recognize that the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism, by terrorist organizations, al Qaeda, really is akin to a criminal conspiracy, a violent conspiracy, a dangerous conspiracy. But it's a criminal enterprise. And the primary response to a criminal enterprise is policing.

Policing as in organizations like the FBI, intelligence organizations, some special operations forces. That would undertake a concerted campaign to identify and root out and destroy this criminal conspiracy. But that doesn't require invading and occupying countries. Again, one of the big mistakes the Bush Administration made, and it's a mistake we're still paying for, is that the President persuaded us that the best way to prevent another 9/11 is to embark upon a global war. Wrong. The best way to prevent another 9/11 is to organize an intensive international effort to root out and destroy that criminal conspiracy.

A recent study by the RAND Corporation reaches the same conclusion.

Bacevich makes it clear in the interview and book that this is no partisan rant. He sees both parties falling prey to the same things: the abdication by the Legislative branch of all goals but getting re-elected and the assumption of imperial power by the Executive.

--Ballard Burgher