Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War By Andrew J. Bacevich, Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Co., 2010, 290 pages. Hardcover, $25.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- For decades, American presidents have done little or nothing to challenge foreign policy decisions made and promoted by the Washington elite, becoming "little more than the medium through which power is exercised."

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a rare exception, when he warned the nation about the growing military-industrial complex in his January 1961 Farewell Address.

Today, most Americans pay little attention to foreign policy. They do so at their own risk.

Massive debts accumulated by ongoing military campaigns in places like Iraq and Afghanistan will plague the economic prosperity of future generations of Americans. 

"The curtain is now falling on the American Century," warns Boston University Professor Andrew C. Bacevich in his new book, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War."

Bacevich offers broad historical insights into how our foreign policies have been formulated during the past century and who benefits from those policies.

A major source of our problems, Bacevich points out, is that people in power in Washington, whether Republicans or Democrats, invariably depict every foreign policy "problem as appearing out of the blue, utterly devoid of historical context."

Meanwhile, millions of Americans are also at fault. Self-absorbed, they show "little interest in cultivating virtue, preferring instead the frantic pursuit of happiness, defined more often than not in terms of wealth, celebrity and personal license.

"Washington meanwhile concerns itself less with the well-being of the republican institutions than with feathering its own nest, relying on adventurism abroad to divert attention from chronic dysfunction at home," Bacevich writes."

After graduating from West Point in 1969, Bacevich served in Vietnam and retired as an Army colonel after serving for more than 20 years. Since then, he has taught at West Point, Johns Hopkins and Boston University.

Bacevich has already published five books, including: "The American Empire," "The New American Militarism" and "The Limits of Power". 

While serving in Iraq, his son Andrew Jr., 27, was killed by an improvised explosive device on May 13, 2007.

"Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008," Bacevich wrote in a "Washington Post" column two weeks later, in memory of his son.

"When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, and bellicose evangelical and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought."

In Washington Rules, Bacevich said his own views changed dramatically in the years after he left the military.

Bacevich has high praise for leaders such as Sen. William J. Fulbright, D-Ark., who headed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1960s.

In his 1966 book, "The Arrogance of Power," Fulbright wrote: "Maybe it would profit us to concentrate on our own democracy instead of trying to inflict our own particular version of it" on other countries.

Fulbright believed it to be "unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades for some principles or ideals while neglecting the needs of its own people."

Bacevich repeatedly stresses the impact past events have on the future, an impact the Central Intelligence Agency has called "blowback."

But Americans repeatedly fail to recognize the impact past policies have had on generating future hostilities.

Bacevich criticizes the role the U.S. played in the 1953 overthrow of the democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh, replaced by a dictatorial shah, in Iran; continuing U.S. deference to Israel since the 1960s; and funding jihadists to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Bacevich believes our invasion of Iraq, which began in April 2003, did not suppress, but further inflamed, insurgencies already destabilizing that country.

Yet American leaders repeatedly deny, or ignore, those relationships.

Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush rejected the possibility that aggression they approved against Vietnam and Afghanistan, respectively, "might itself render the United States more vulnerable."

In chronicling the rise of a "new militarism" after World War II, Bacevich quotes Marine Commandant David Shoup, appointed by Eisenhower.

The blame for growing militarism during the 1950s, Shoup believed, was shared by "pugnacious and chauvinistic" veterans groups, greedy defense contractors, a public duped by "manufactured images fostering a distorted understanding of combat," well-funded think tanks promoting militaristic philosophies and military generals "eager to try out new toys, test young officers or advance their own careers."

Despite questioning the growing military-industrial complex, Eisenhower backed CIA-led coups in Iran and Guatemala during his administration and supported "massive retaliation" as the centerpiece of his Cold War strategy.

Jimmy Carter, Bacevich writes, initiated our growing military presence in the Middle East, which today, is more massive than anywhere else in the world.

Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton all worked to overcome constraints imposed on the military during the years after the Vietnam War ended in May 1975.

Then, "as the Age of Bush gave way to the Era of Obama, little of substance changed. That was the greatest irony of all," Bacevich writes.

And political leaders who promote wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show "little concern for the inalienable rights of unfortunates beyond America's own borders."

Bacevich criticizes many current military leaders, such as Gen. David Petraeus, whose 2007-08 campaign in Iraq fell far short of success.

Petraeus and his cohorts "came to view war as commonplace, a quasi-permanent aspect of everyday reality."

During the 2008 presidential campaign, "no prominent figure in either party came within ten feet of questioning the logic of configuring U.S. forces for global power projection or the wisdom of maintaining a global military presence."

By the time Obama spoke at West Point as the end of his first year as president in December 2009, "saving" Afghanistan had "displaced all other issues atop the U.S. national security agenda. Whether or not Afghans wished to be saved and how exactly they viewed salvation were matters that attracted scant attention."

Obama asked for 30,000 more troops, set no clear withdrawal date from Afghanistan and did nothing to reign in military spending.

Withdrawing troops could attract an eager following at home, Bacevich believes, if money being used to rebuild Baghdad and Kabul were spent to rehabilitate other cities in need, like Detroit and Cleveland.

But Obama has continued in the tradition of the "imperial presidency."

Obama has made "at least one thing unmistakably clear: To imagine that Washington will ever tolerate second thoughts about the Washington rules is to engage in willful self-deception. Washington itself has too much to lose.

"If change is to come, it must come from the people," Bacevich concludes. "Yet unless Americans finally awake to the fact that they've been had, Washington will continue to have its way."               

Bacevich has questioned the impact of his own work recently.

But hopefully, anthropologist Margaret Mead was right when she said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Reach Paul J. Nyden at pjny...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5164.