from NYTimes, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Aug 2021- “Twenty years ago this Sept. 11, America suffered a horror that led to far larger disasters. Within little more than 18 months the United States had embarked on not one but two unneeded, unconstitutional and — as it proved — unwinnable wars. Today, after waging the longest war in their history, the Americans have scuttled from Afghanistan (as Churchill would have said), and from Iraq too, with President Biden announcing the withdrawal of the last combat troops. Both countries have been left to stew in their own juice, or in bloody chaos, with the real victors in one case the Taliban, and Iran in the other. Few great powers in history have suffered such humiliating failures.
These woes have at least led to a new mood of reflection, on America’s history and role in world affairs, and the most useful critiques have come not from the liberal left or the soggy center (which was implicated in the disasters). Few critics have been more penetrating than Andrew Bacevich, a conservative Catholic who made his career as an Army officer and saw active service in Vietnam and the first gulf war, a contrast indeed to the chickenhawks and armchair warriors of Washington. His first and easiest task in “After the Apocalypse” is to deride the failures — who now defends those wars? — and to give a rogues’ gallery of the politicians (including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) and journalists (including two New York Times columnists) who supported the Iraq war at the time.
But there is much more, and Bacevich looks back at the long and rather weird tradition of American exceptionalism, as it’s called. From Lincoln’s “last best hope of earth” to Wilson’s belief that America could “vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world,” the idea runs to Bill Clinton’s “the greatest nation on earth,” Madeleine Albright’s “we are the indispensable nation” and on to Hillary Clinton’s “America is great because we are good.” Other nations may have sometimes basked in their own self-esteem, but have the leaders of any other modern country ever spoken quite like that?
To make his point sharper, Bacevich compares his task with that of Marc Bloch, a great historian who served as a French Army officer in two wars and was later captured and shot by the Germans when serving in the Resistance. In his brilliant book “Strange Defeat,” Bloch tried to make sense of his country’s catastrophic collapse in 1940. France was ruled by men “brought up in mental bogs,” Bloch wrote, all their mistakes “engendered by the faulty teaching of history.” That is all too true of America, Bacevich observes, now, and for a long time past…”
The BOOK SPOTLIGHT at Wallace Books- We always link our Book Spotlight to Powells.com so you can order the book if you’re interested, but it’s also available Sellwood’s Wallace Books, in the “Tom Dwyer Book Spotlight” display. Check it out!
