Tug of War

by ANDREW J. BACEVICH

This illuminating and wonderfully subversive book is, without a doubt, the most important contribution to the history of US national security policy to appear in the past decade. Nominally, Perils of Dominance reinterprets the origins of the Vietnam War, recounting the crucial decisions made between 1954 and 1965 culminating in the commitment of American combat forces. In retracing this familiar sequence of events Gareth Porter, an independent scholar who has published on the war for more than three decades, challenges and overturns conventional explanations of how the United States blundered into that conflict. But the revisionist interpretation that he puts forward is of far more than historical interest. Perils of Dominance demolishes our most fundamental assumptions about how national security policy is formulated. Perhaps of even greater significance, it undermines the very notion of the cold war as a construct that explains the postwar era and as a source of myth used to justify actions well into the present.

In the 1950s and '60s, the chief factor governing US policy, writes Porter, was not ideology--a fear of aggressive and monolithic Communism that seemingly left the United States with no alternative but to prop up tottering dominoes--but "strategic asymmetry." A pronounced imbalance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union, amounting from 1953 onward to "something approaching absolute strategic dominance," freed Washington of any perceived need to exercise self-restraint and created incentives for aggressive and even reckless action. In this sense, the United States wandered into the quagmire not grudgingly or against its will but because influential officials in the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations were convinced that the United States held all the cards and couldn't lose.

Striking at the cold war's conceptual definition, Porter dismisses the notion that the Soviet-American rivalry was a contest between two superpowers of more or less equal stature. Rather, he asserts that from the early 1950s onward the international order was "effectively unipolar."

(...)

Persuasive in its own terms, Porter's study raises several important second-order issues. The first issue poses the question: Who exactly is in charge? The second relates to what we might call the actual sources of American conduct. A third suggests the need to recast the entire narrative of the cold war.

Depending on whether or not their own guy happens to be in office, most Americans tend either to celebrate presidential leadership or to bemoan the excesses of an imperial presidency. In either case, at least since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, Americans have assumed that the occupant of the Oval Office actually runs the show--that Presidents command the loyalty of their subordinates, exercise effective control over their Administration and make decisions that others faithfully implement. Perils of Dominance suggests that this model is largely a fiction. All three Presidents considered in this study engaged in a continuous struggle to retain the reins of authority. Of the three, only Eisenhower achieved even a modicum of success. In each case, as Porter notes, "the national security bureaucracy acted as an independent power center within the US government with the right to pressure the president on matters of war and peace."

The political competition that gets all the ink is the visible one pitting Democrats against Republicans. competition that matters is the largely hidden one between Presidents ultimately accountable to the people and "unelected national security managers" accountable to no one. These national security chieftains constitute a sort of permanent war party. When hawking their wares, they speak movingly of their commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights. When they step away from the podium and the TV cameras, values take a back seat to considerations of power. For McNamara and the Bundy brothers in their day, as for Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz in our own, the prospect of gratification lay not in husbanding power but in using it. In fevered minds, the imagined risks of inaction loom large; the benefits of action loom larger still. Applied to a world not nearly as malleable as the national security elite imagines, this logic yields not only Vietnam but also Iraq.

Finally, there is the historical period remembered as the cold war. A bipolar order, West versus East, the United States committed to a defensive posture called "containment": Perils of Dominance calls all of these into question. Reality, this account suggests, was far more complex and ambiguous, certainly in the 1950s and '60s but by implication in the 1970s and '80s as well. Teasing out that more complex version of US policy in the postwar decades just might shed light on America's transformation from defender of the Free World to militarized global hegemon. Gareth Porter has gotten that project off to an exceptionally fine start.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050704&s=bacevich

It goes against everything I learned in IR about global power arrangements but recently declassified documents have indicated that the nuclear capability of the Warsaw Bloc was grossly overstated for political reasons, not unlike Iraq. The passages I bolded resonate with me. It doesn't excuse Bush. It only lends creedence to the contention that he is an incompetent bumbler who wasn't really in control. Another "useful idiot". -- L.W.M.

Hey knucklehead! Mind just providing a couple quotes and a link instead of post after post of damn near full articles? Quit spamming up the threads already. You post like ten of these space-eaters every thread. Seriously - people can follow a link.

Today, Congressman Hodes officially called on Chairman John Tierney of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs to hold a hearing on a recent New York Times story published on Sunday, April 20, 2008 blah blah blah blah blah...

-- sysprog

Somewhere in the bowels of Amerika, a certain demon is snickering - SO?

I am laughing too.