"The Limits of Power" by Andrew Bacevich

Andrew Bacevich has become a hero to me! I take some pride that he lives in Walpole and teaches at Boston University, but he is distinguished by his realism and common sense that flows from the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. “The Limits of Power” is an extraordinarily succinct articulation of the pitfalls of our current (and recent past) military interventions with the recognition that the American public has got what it wanted because they avoided doing what was necessary.

Bacevich portrays the steady and relentless pursuit of executive governmental power as the price the American public was willing to pay so that they could continue living out the dream of selfish consumerism. The privileges of “freedom” were commensurate with our being capable of sustaining a life-style without moderation or, surely, sacrifice. We allowed the government and military to expand its scope in the name of extending freedom to others without seeing the real purposes of extended hegemony designed to ensure “our way of life”.

When focusing on the military itself, he starts from the premise that no war ever works out as planned. Surely, this was evident in our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. What was supposed to be a quick overthrow of Hussein as a pathway to seeing democracy flourish, we saw extended years and deaths precipitated not by commensurate force but by the small but effective IEDs. We used no knowledge of the politics and history of the countries we invaded to think clearly about what would happen next.

Bacevich never sees the ideal since it does not and will not exist. He knows that any government will be limited by necessity. While recognizing the truth embedded in the Just War Theory, war must remain a defensive strategy of last resort. For our government to do better, the American public needs to reconsider its role. We have to become citizens who are willing to live within a world that is threatened by its own misuse of fossil fuels and other scarce resources. We have to ameliorate our desires to avoid interventions designed to secure our perceived needs.