Page 1 of 2 BOOK EXCERPT How Washington rules From Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War by Andrew
Bacevich
This is an excerpt from Andrew Bacevich's bestselling new book, Washington Rules,
that focuses on how, as his army career was ending, his real education, which
would turn him into a leading critic of American war policy, began. What
follows below is the introduction to the book which stands on its own as a
political essay about a personal odyssey into recent history and the realities
of our moment; it also offers a powerful sense of the book itself.
Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry
is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he's headed; when it
comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the
time nor the
inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition
wanes does education become a possibility.
My own education did not commence until I had reached middle age. I can fix its
start date with precision: for me, education began in Berlin, on a winter's
evening, at the Brandenburg Gate, not long after the Berlin Wall had fallen.
As an officer in the army I had spent considerable time in Germany. Until that
moment, however, my family and I had never had occasion to visit this most
famous of German cities, still littered with artifacts of a deeply repellent
history. At the end of a long day of exploration, we found ourselves in what
had, until just months before, been the communist East. It was late and we were
hungry, but I insisted on walking the length of the Unter den Linden, from the
River Spree to the gate itself. A cold rain was falling and the pavement
glistened. The buildings lining the avenue, dating from the era of Prussian
kings, were dark, dirty, and pitted. Few people were about. It was hardly a
night for sightseeing.
For as long as I could remember, the Brandenburg Gate had been the preeminent
symbol of the age and Berlin the epicenter of contemporary history. Yet by the
time I made it to the once and future German capital, history was already
moving on. The Cold War had abruptly ended. A divided city and a divided nation
had reunited.
For Americans who had known Berlin only from a distance, the city existed
primarily as a metaphor. Pick a date - 1933, 1942, 1945, 1948, 1961, 1989 - and
Berlin becomes an instructive symbol of power, depravity, tragedy, defiance,
endurance, or vindication. For those inclined to view the past as a chronicle
of parables, the modern history of Berlin offered an abundance of material. The
greatest of those parables emerged from the events of 1933 to 1945, an epic
tale of evil ascendant, belatedly confronted, then heroically overthrown. A
second narrative, woven from events during the intense period immediately
following World War II, saw hopes for peace dashed, yielding bitter antagonism
but also great resolve. The ensuing stand-off - the "long twilight struggle,"
in president John F Kennedy's memorable phrase - formed the centerpiece of the
third parable, its central theme stubborn courage in the face of looming peril.
Finally came the exhilarating events of 1989, with freedom ultimately
prevailing, not only in Berlin, but throughout Eastern Europe.
What exactly was I looking for at the Brandenburg Gate? Perhaps confirmation
that those parables, which I had absorbed and accepted as true, were just that.
Whatever I expected, what I actually found was a cluster of shabby-looking
young men, not German, hawking badges, medallions, hats, bits of uniforms, and
other artifacts of the mighty Red Army. It was all junk, cheaply made and
shoddy. For a handful of deutsche marks, I bought a wristwatch emblazoned with
the symbol of the Soviet armored corps. Within days, it ceased to work.
Huddling among the scarred columns, those peddlers - almost certainly off-duty
Russian soldiers awaiting redeployment home - constituted a subversive
presence. They were loose ends of a story that was supposed to have ended
neatly when the Berlin Wall came down. As we hurried off to find warmth and a
meal, this disconcerting encounter stuck with me, and I began to entertain this
possibility: that the truths I had accumulated over the previous 20 years as a
professional soldier - especially truths about the Cold War and - foreign
policy - might not be entirely true.
By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in orthodoxy. In a
life spent subject to authority, deference had become a deeply ingrained habit.
I found assurance in conventional wisdom. Now, I started, however hesitantly,
to suspect that orthodoxy might be a sham. I began to appreciate that authentic
truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high -
whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops - is inherently suspect.
The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits
them. Even then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly
invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of
power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor.
I came to these obvious points embarrassingly late in life. "Nothing is so
astonishing in education," the historian Henry Adams once wrote, "as the amount
of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts". Until that moment I
had too often confused education with accumulating and cataloging facts. In
Berlin, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, I began to realize that I had been
a naif. And so, at age 41, I set out, in a halting and haphazard fashion, to
acquire a genuine education.
Twenty years later I've made only modest progress. What follows is an
accounting of what I have learned thus far.
Visiting a Third-World version of Germany
In October 1990, I'd gotten a preliminary hint that something might be amiss in
my prior education. On October 3, communist East Germany - formally the German
Democratic Republic (GDR) - ceased to exist and German reunification was
officially secured. That very week I accompanied a group of American military
officers to the city of Jena in what had been the GDR. Our purpose was
self-consciously educational - to study the famous battle of Jena-Auerstadt in
which Napoleon Bonaparte and his marshals had inflicted an epic defeat on
Prussian forces commanded by the Duke of Brunswick. (The outcome of that 1806
battle inspired the philosopher Hegel, then residing in Jena, to declare that
the "end of history" was at hand. The conclusion of the Cold War had only
recently elicited a similarly exuberant judgment from the American scholar
Francis Fukuyama.)
On this trip we did learn a lot about the conduct of that battle, although
mainly inert facts possessing little real educational value. Inadvertently, we
also gained insight into the reality of life on the far side of what Americans
had habitually called the Iron Curtain, known in - military vernacular as "the
trace". In this regard, the trip proved nothing less than revelatory. The
educational content of this excursion would - for me - be difficult to
exaggerate.
As soon as our bus crossed the old Inner German Border, we entered a time warp.
For - troops garrisoned throughout Bavaria and Hesse, West Germany had for
decades served as a sort of theme park - a giant Epcot filled with quaint
villages, stunning scenery, and superb highways, along with ample supplies of
quite decent food, excellent beer, and accommodating women. Now, we found
ourselves face-to-face with an altogether different Germany. Although commonly
depicted as the most advanced and successful component of the Soviet Empire,
East Germany more closely resembled part of the undeveloped world.
The roads - even the main highways - were narrow and visibly crumbling. Traffic
posed little problem. Apart from a few sluggish Trabants and Wartburgs - East
German automobiles that tended to a retro primitivism - and an occasional
exhaust-spewing truck, the way was clear. The villages through which we passed
were forlorn and the small farms down at the heels. For lunch we stopped at a
roadside stand. The proprietor happily accepted our D-marks, offering us
inedible sausages in exchange. Although the signs assured us that we remained
in a land of German speakers, it was a country that had not yet recovered from
World War II.
Upon arrival in Jena, we checked into the Hotel Schwarzer Bar, identified by
our advance party as the best hostelry in town. It turned out to be a rundown
fleabag. As the senior officer present, I was privileged to have a room in
which the plumbing functioned. Others were not so lucky.
Jena itself was a mid-sized university city, with its main academic complex
immediately opposite our hotel. A very large bust of Karl Marx, mounted on a
granite pedestal and badly in need of cleaning, stood on the edge of the
campus. Briquettes of soft coal used for home heating made the air all but
unbreathable and coated everything with soot. In the German cities we knew,
pastels predominated - houses and apartment blocks painted pale green, muted
salmon, and soft yellow. Here everything was brown and gray.
That evening we set out in search of dinner. The restaurants within walking
distance were few and unattractive. We chose badly, a drab establishment in
which fresh vegetables were unavailable and the wurst inferior. The adequacy of
the local beer provided the sole consolation.
The following morning, on the way to the battlefield, we noted a significant
Soviet military presence, mostly in the form of trucks passing by - to judge by
their appearance, designs that dated from the 1950s. To our surprise, we
discovered that the Soviets had established a small training area adjacent to
where Napoleon had vanquished the Prussians. Although we had orders to avoid
contact with any Russians, the presence of their armored troops going through
their paces riveted us. Here was something of far greater immediacy than
Bonaparte and the Duke of Brunswick: "the other," about which we had for so
long heard so much but knew so little. Through binoculars, we watched a column
of Russian armored vehicles - BMPs, in NATO [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization] parlance - traversing what appeared to be a drivers' training
course. Suddenly, one of them began spewing smoke. Soon thereafter, it burst
into flames.
Here was education, although at the time I had only the vaguest sense of its
significance.
An ambitious team player assailed by doubts
These visits to Jena and Berlin offered glimpses of a reality radically at odds
with my most fundamental assumptions. Uninvited and unexpected, subversive
forces had begun to infiltrate my consciousness. Bit by bit, my worldview
started to crumble.
That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power manifested
a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and
affirmed the nation's enduring devotion to its founding ideals. That American
power, policies, and purpose were bound together in a neat, internally
consistent package, each element drawing strength from and reinforcing the
others, was something I took as a given. That, during my adult life, a penchant
for interventionism had become a signature of - policy did not - to me, at
least - in any way contradict America's aspirations for peace. Instead, a
willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the
seriousness of those aspirations. That, during this same period, the United
States had amassed an arsenal of over 31,000 nuclear weapons, some small number
of them assigned to units in which I had served, was not at odds with our
belief in the inalienable right to life and liberty; rather, threats to life
and liberty had compelled the United States to acquire such an arsenal and
maintain it in readiness for instant use.
I was not so naive as to believe that the American record had been without
flaws. Yet I assured myself that any errors or misjudgments had been committed
in good faith. Furthermore, circumstances permitted little real choice. In
Southeast Asia as in Western Europe, in the Persian Gulf as in the Western
Hemisphere, the United States had simply done what needed doing. Viable
alternatives did not exist. To consent to any dilution of American power would
be to forfeit global leadership, thereby putting at risk safety, prosperity,
and freedom, not only our own but also that of our friends and allies.
The choices seemed clear enough. On one side was the status quo: the
commitments, customs, and habits that defined American globalism, implemented
by the national security apparatus within which I functioned as a small cog. On
the other side was the prospect of appeasement, isolationism, and catastrophe.
The only responsible course was the one to which every president since Harry
Truman had adhered.
For me, the Cold War had played a crucial role in sustaining that worldview.
Given my age, upbringing, and professional background, it could hardly have
been otherwise. Although the great rivalry between the United States and the
Soviet Union had contained moments of considerable anxiety - I remember my
father, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, stocking our basement with water and
canned goods - it served primarily to clarify, not to frighten. The Cold War
provided a framework that organized and made sense of contemporary history. It
offered a lineup and a scorecard. That there existed bad Germans and good
Germans, their Germans and our Germans, totalitarian Germans and Germans who,
like Americans, passionately loved freedom was, for example, a proposition I
accepted as dogma. Seeing the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil
answered many questions, consigned others to the periphery, and rendered still
others irrelevant.
Back in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, more than a few members of my
generation had rejected the conception of the Cold War as a Manichean struggle.
Here too, I was admittedly a slow learner. Yet having kept the faith long after
others had lost theirs, the doubts that eventually assailed me were all the
more disorienting.
Granted, occasional suspicions had appeared long before Jena and Berlin. My own
Vietnam experience had generated its share, which I had done my best to
suppress. I was, after all, a serving soldier. Except in the narrowest of
terms, the military profession, in those days at least, did not look kindly on
nonconformity. Climbing the ladder of career success required curbing maverick
tendencies. To get ahead, you needed to be a team player. Later, when studying
the history of - foreign relations in graduate school, I was pelted with
challenges to orthodoxy, which I vigorously deflected. When it came to
education, graduate school proved a complete waste of time - a period of
intense study devoted to the further accumulation of facts, while I exerted
myself to ensuring that they remained inert.
Now, however, my personal circumstances were changing. Shortly after the
passing of the Cold War, my military career ended. Education thereby became not
only a possibility, but also a necessity.
In measured doses, mortification cleanses the soul. It's the perfect antidote
for excessive self-regard. After 23 years spent inside the army seemingly going
somewhere, I now found myself on the outside going nowhere in particular. In
the self-contained and cloistered universe of regimental life, I had briefly
risen to the status of minor spear carrier. The instant I took off my uniform,
that status vanished. I soon came to a proper appreciation of my own
insignificance, a salutary lesson that I ought to have absorbed many years
earlier.
As I set out on what eventually became a crablike journey toward a new calling
as a teacher and writer - a pilgrimage of sorts - ambition in the commonly
accepted meaning of the term ebbed. This did not happen all at once. Yet
gradually, trying to grab one of life's shiny brass rings ceased being a major
preoccupation. Wealth, power, and celebrity became not aspirations but subjects
for critical analysis. History - especially the familiar narrative of the Cold
War - no longer offered answers; instead, it posed perplexing riddles. Easily
the most nagging was this one: How could I have so profoundly misjudged the
reality of what lay on the far side of the Iron Curtain?
Head
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11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
For as long as I could remember, the Brandenburg Gate had been the preeminent
symbol of the age and Berlin the epicenter of contemporary history. Yet by the
time I made it to the once and future German capital, history was already
moving on. The Cold War had abruptly ended. A divided city and a divided nation
had reunited.
