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One-Sided History

Review: Andrew J. Bacevich, ‘America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History’

A U.S. Marine patrol walks across the charred oil landscape near a burning well during perimeter security patrol near Kuwait City in 1991
A U.S. Marine patrol walks across the charred oil landscape near a burning well during perimeter security patrol near Kuwait City in 1991 / AP
July 10, 2016

Barack Obama "has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about America’s role in it," Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in an essay earlier this year based on his extensive interviews with the commander in chief. He continued:

The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be little an American president could do to make it a better place. The third is that the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power.

For these reasons, Goldberg believes, Obama has chosen to disengage the United States from the Middle East, drawing criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for not showing more leadership in the region. The conventional wisdom of the day holds that George W. Bush did too much in the region and Obama has done too little, the latter overlearning the lessons of the 2003 Iraq invasion and hurling the pendulum back too far in the other direction.

But for Andrew J. Bacevich, a 23-year Army veteran and professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University, Obama has actually been too belligerent in the Middle East, expanding a decades-long military effort by Washington to control the region and shape it in America’s image. Obama’s policies are therefore a continuation of Bush’s vision, not a reversal.

In his new book, Bacevich argues that America has waged a "war for the Greater Middle East" since around April 1980, when U.S. troops failed in an attempt to rescue the 52 Americans held hostage in Tehran. The war had been justified by Jimmy Carter’s statement three months earlier identifying the free flow of Middle East oil through the Persian Gulf as a vital interest of the United States. In an approach known as the Carter Doctrine, America was now going to prevent a hostile takeover of the Persian Gulf.

America’s role in the region, according to Bacevich, only grew to become more involved and ambitious over time. He discusses virtually all episodes of American military involvement in the Islamic world from 1980 through the present day, including places as wide-ranging as Somalia, the Balkans, and Pakistan. Bacevich’s thesis is that all of these seemingly disparate military operations throughout the broader Middle East have been part of a grand plan to shape the region into part of an American empire. This military-driven effort, Bacevich argues, has completely failed, as it has lacked strategic coherence and led to destabilization and anti-American sentiment.

Here’s the problem. Bacevich forces every American engagement with Muslims in the vicinity of the Near East into his pre-conceived interpretive box, seeing Ron Paul-like connections between wildly disparate issues: for example arguing that American intervention in the Balkans, meant to stop mass slaughter, shore up Washington’s credibility, and give NATO a purpose after the Cold War, is relevant to the younger Bush’s administration toppling Saddam Hussein and the Obama administration toppling Muammar Gaddafi. The book, while not without interesting moments, comes off less as balanced analysis and more as an often ill-coordinated rant against American interventionism. Any successes in American policy are written off as short-sighted, tactical victories that are ultimately strategic blunders. Yet Bacevich criticizes the United States several times, including in the Iraq War, for not providing sufficient resources to the military to do its job. One can make an argument that, if the United States is going to intervene, it should either go all in or stay out. But, considering everything else he writes, would he really be okay with Washington going all in anywhere in the Islamic world?

Underlying the book is the idea that the United States believes it is on a messianic mission to bring an end to history with an American-led liberal democratic utopia. Bacevich speaks disparagingly of this notion and chastises American leaders and citizens for being arrogant and self-entitled. This "hubris" creates "a nearly insurmountable barrier to serious critical analysis," writes Bacevich. He echoes the sentiments of those on the far Right, like Ron Paul, and those on the far Left, like Noam Chomsky, who blame America for causing so many of the world’s problems, serving as a modern day imperialist force that has made Middle Eastern societies worse off by being there with a military presence.

Bacevich saves his harshest criticisms for George W. Bush’s freedom agenda, comparing its "fanaticism" to the beliefs of Osama bin Laden. "Bush’s expectations of ending tyranny by spreading American ideals mirrored Osama bin Laden’s dream of establishing a new caliphate based on Islamic principles," writes Bacevich. "As adversaries, truly they were made for each other." Regardless of how one feels about the merits of Bush’s foreign policy, to compare the desire to spread democracy with the desire to spread totalitarianism is to posit a ridiculous moral equivalence.

Not at center-stage in the argument, but quietly permeating the book is the belief that Israel is a liability for the United States that violently oppresses the Palestinians. He argues that Israel no longer wanted a two-state solution during the Obama presidency and was to blame for the stall in the peace process, but never mentions that Israel offered the Palestinians a comprehensive peace deal in 2000 and 2008, both of which the Palestinian Authority rejected.

Bacevich does make some worthwhile points, for example in his criticism of U.S. policymakers for too often failing to correctly assess the role of Islam as an important factor in the Middle East. He is also of course right to point out that many of America’s military undertakings have ultimately not fostered more peace and stability in the Middle East. But he offers few recommendations for what Washington can do differently, besides his constant implication that we should get the heck out—and he fails to properly assess the damage that such a withdrawal would cause.

America has important interests in the Middle East that it must protect: preventing a hostile hegemon from emerging (i.e., Iran), stemming the threat of global Islamic terrorism, preventing nuclear proliferation, ensuring the security of allies, and ensuring the free flow of oil from the region. It should also concern U.S. foreign policy if hundreds of thousands of people are being slaughtered and millions more are being driven from there homes, triggering a destabilizing refugee crisis.

America has made terrible mistakes in securing these interests, but withdrawal is no solution. Bacevich may disagree, but history shows that strong U.S. engagement and leadership has forged a better world in the wake of the horrors of World War II. Without a benign security guarantor like America, God knows where the world would be today.

Published under: Book reviews