Breach of Trust

Andrew Bacevich has written a series of blunt, scouring assaults on American foreign policy and the way we use our military. By the sound of Rachel Maddow’s NYTBR review , he was soft-pedaling. Now the gloves are off, in his latest, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country .

He goes after everyone. Maddow writes that Bacevich “assigns blame, mercilessly: the public (for our consumerist apathy); to the Pentagon (for its ‘generals who had slept undisturbed back when Warsaw Pact commanders had ostensibly been planning to launch World War III” but who ‘now fretted nervously over the prospect of their budget taking a hit’); to the contractors (whose profiteering steals honor from the soldiers they serve alongside); and, naturally, to the politicians. Even Fenway Park and the Red Sox come in for blame, for the staging of a sailor’s homecoming at a July 4 game that left Bacevich all but retching over the ‘convenient mechanism for voiding obligation, . . . a made-to-order opportunity for conscience-easing.’”

He “saves particular vitriol for pro-war writers of both the right and left . . . .

“Christopher Hitchens, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and the New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier all get filleted and neatly stacked in the corner, to make room for the unleashing of all hell on David Brooks for his commentary before, during and after the Iraq war — followed by what Bacevich sees as an unconscionable repeat of the same mistakes in the late phases of the war in Afghanistan. Bacevich’s scorching litany of what he sums up as ‘grotesque and contemptible irresponsibility’ is a bracing indictment of my profession, and how no one suffers consequences for even the most humiliating failures in prediction and analysis, as long as those failures favor the use of military force.”

What makes Bacevich so compelling is his own military experience (West Point grad, Vietnam vet, colonel) and his political leanings: “In his late 60s, he isn’t a daring, dashing, liberal magazine journalist; he’s a crusty conservative Catholic professor who now teaches at Boston University.” He relentlessly probes our tendency to “use the United States military against problems that have no military solution, and in ways that exacerbate our inclination to overuse it in the first place.”