Bacevich is scathing regarding the national security apparatus: The “national security state” continues, he says, “because, by its very existence, it provides a continuing rationale for political arrangements that are a source of status, influence, and considerable wealth. Lapses in performance by this apparatus might logically raise questions about whether or not the United States would be better off without it. Instead, failures inspire new efforts to reorganize and reform, which almost invariably translate into further institutional expanson. The more... Read more

Bacevich notes the connection between premillennialism and support for Israel, and goes on to suggest that this leads in turn to support for American militarism: “as a result of the Religious Right’s fetish for the Jewish state, the distinctive Israeli strategic style – the way that Israelis conceive of military power and its uses – has colored conservative Christian thinking about these same subjects. By extension, this evangelical appropriation of Israeli strategic precepts has altered the terms of religious discourse... Read more

Amnesty International is complaining toda that “President Obama is reinstating the same deeply-flawed military commissions that in June 2008 he called an ‘enormous failure.’ In one swift move, Obama both backtracks on a major campaign promise to change the way the United States fights terrorism and undermines the nation’s core respect for the rule of law by sacrificing due process for political expediency.” It raises a question that Bacevich poses: “The present-day officer corps, writes historian Richard H. Kohn, is... Read more

Andrew Bacevich notes in his The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War that 9/11 did little to shift American foreign policy: “The shattered events of September 2001 challenged the Bush administration to build . . . a new world order, and it turned instinctively to Wilson. Indeed, the administration response demonstrates how little the unprecedented attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon affected the assumptions underlying U.S. foreign policy; the terrorists succeeded only in reinvigorating... Read more

Where does tyranny come from? Levinas and Simone Weil argue that it grows out of the decay of neighborliness and hospitality, and Hannah Arendt claims that it comes when the creative solidarity of political friendship and spontaneous political action are suppressed. True; but all these fail to deal with what Gillian Rose called the “question of law” and thus become complicit in totalitarianism. So argues Andrew Shanks in Against Innocence: An Introduction to Gillian Rose : “totalitarianism is also the... Read more