Andrew J. Bacevich > Quotes

“I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high-whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops-is inherently suspect.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

“The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended 'global war on terror' without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

“In measured doses, mortification cleanses the soul. It's the perfect antidote for excessive self-regard.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

“As a turning point, the Bay of Pigs deserves comparison with 9/11 - a moment that created an opening to pose first-order questions, but elicited instead an ill-conceived, reflexive response. As would Johnson, Carter, and George W. Bush, Kennedy in 1961 squandered an opportunity to rethink and reorient U.S. policy, with fateful implications.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

“Call it habit or conditioning or socialization: The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

“In war-as-spectacle, appearances could be more important than reality, because appearance often ended up determining reality.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

“The approach this nation has taken to waging war since Vietnam (absolving the people from meaningful involvement), along with the way it organizes its army (relying on professionals), has altered the relationship between the military and society in ways that too few Americans seem willing to acknowledge. Since 9/11, the relationship has been heavy on symbolism and light on substance, with assurances of admiration for soldiers displacing serious consideration of what they are sent to do or what consequences ensue. In all the ways that actually matter, that relationship has almost ceased to exist.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich

“Far more accurately than Jimmy Carter, Reagan understood what made Americans tick: They wanted self-gratification, not self-denial. Although always careful to embroider his speeches with inspirational homilies and testimonials to old-fashioned virtues, Reagan mainly indulged American self-indulgence.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“The actual legacy of Desert Storm was to plunge the United States more deeply into a sea of difficulties for which military power provided no antidote. Yet in post–Cold War Washington, where global leadership and global power projection had become all but interchangeable terms, senior military officers like Sullivan were less interested in assessing what those difficulties might portend than in claiming a suitably large part of the action.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

“In this way, the bravery of the warrior underwrites collective civic cowardice, while fostering a slack, insipid patriotism.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

“What is most striking about the most powerful man in the world is not the power that he wields. It is how constrained he and his lieutenants are by forces that lie beyond their grasp and perhaps their understanding.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

“If you will the end, you must will the means.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East

“Like the present-day GOP, the Northern Alliance was a loose coalition of unsavory opportunists, interested chiefly in acquiring power.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East

“as the Age of Bush gave way to the Era of Obama, little of substance changed. That was the greatest irony of all.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

“the United States military did not fight a decade-long war to preserve South Vietnam; rather, it fought a one-year war ten times over.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

“For a democracy committed to being a great military power, its leaders professing to believe that war can serve transcendent purposes, the allocation of responsibility for war qualifies as a matter of profound importance.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

“American warriors may not win wars, but they do perform the invaluable service of providing their countrymen with an excuse to avoid introspection. They make second thoughts unnecessary. In this way, the bravery of the warrior underwrites collective civic cowardice, while fostering a slack, insipid patriotism. In”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

“The Weinberger Doctrine created a series of tests, in essence preconditions for any policy decision that might put American troops into harm’s way.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

“In short, Vietnam had demonstrated that when it came to deciding when to go to war and how to fight, civilians were not to be trusted.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

“If they believe war essential to preserving their freedom, it’s incumbent upon them to prosecute war with the same seriousness their forebears demonstrated in the 1940s. Washington’s war would then truly become America’s war with all that implies in terms of commitment and priorities. Should Americans decide, on the other hand, that freedom as presently defined is not worth the sacrifices entailed by real war, it becomes incumbent upon them to revise their understanding of freedom.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

“Carter then proceeded to kill any chance he had of securing reelection. In American political discourse, fundamental threats are by definition external. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or international communism could threaten the United States. That very year, Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries had emerged to pose another such threat. That the actions of everyday Americans might pose a comparable threat amounted to rank heresy. Yet Carter now dared to suggest that the real danger to American democracy lay within.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“One result has been to contrive a sentimentalized version of the American military experience and an idealized image of the American soldier.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

“Yet implicit in this consensus were two notable assumptions: first, that the advantages enjoyed by the United States at the end of the Cold War were insuperable and sure to endure; second, that the great majority of Americans, along with any would-be challengers abroad, would comply with the terms of this consensus, coming to the inescapable realization that no real alternative existed.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory

“As it turned out, Clark’s shortcomings as a strategist—particularly failing to accurately take the measure of Milosevic—were as nothing in comparison to his deficiencies as a battlefield general.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

“The war that the officer corps prepared itself to fight was the war in which the prospects of actually having to fight were most remote. This made perfect sense.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

“The liberation of Kuwait in 1991 that seemingly redeemed the military profession was also the event that vaulted Powell to the status of national hero.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

“In its quest to control an unruly world, the Pentagon—acting in the name of the American people—slices and dices that world into smaller and smaller segments, while neglecting to assess the actual costs and benefits of the persistent meddling that it terms engagement. In this way, the regionalization of U.S. military policy serves to perpetuate sterile thinking.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

“The line in the sand that Carter drew along Iran’s Zagros Mountains now stretches from Central Asia through the Middle East and across the width of Africa. That the ongoing enterprise may someday end—that U.S. troops will finally depart—appears so unlikely as to make the prospect unworthy of discussion. Like the war on drugs or the war on poverty, the War for the Greater Middle East has become a permanent fixture in American life and is accepted as such.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East

“Ethnic cleansing, genocide, failed states, civil war, terror: these became the defining characteristics of the decade-long interval between Desert Storm and the events of 9/11.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

“effort to rebuild American military power while restricting its use, initiated by Creighton Abrams and carried to its fruition by Colin Powell, failed.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War