[Toshi]

from "The Limits of Power". Andrew Bacevich, Metropolitan Books, NY 2008. quote from page 121. once i finish reading it i can send it in the mail to the next interested monkey within the 48 states who wants to read it.

The Iraq War—placed in the larger context of national security policy since 1945—should teach us the following.

First, the ideology of national security, American exceptionalism in its most baleful form, poses an insurmountable obstacle to sound policy. When American power was ascendant, the United States could pretend to interpret history's purpose or God's will. Today, it can no longer afford to indulge in such conceits. …

Second, Americans can no longer afford to underwrite a government that does not work. A condition of quasi-permanent crisis stretching across generations has distorted our Constitution with near-disastrous results. …

Yet if presidents have accrued too much power, if the Congress is feckless, if the national security bureaucracy is irretrievably broken, the American people have only themselves to blame. They have allowed their democracy to be hijacked. The hijackers will not voluntarily return what they have stolen.

One result of that hijacking has been to raise up a new political elite whose members have a vested interest in perpetuating the crises that provide the source of their power. These are the people who under the guise of seeking peace or advancing the cause of liberty devise policies that promote war or the prospect of war, producing something akin to chaos. …

The Wise Men may not be overtly or consciously malevolent. To charge them with inventing threats out of whole cloth would be manifestly unfair. Yet from the era of Forrestal and Nitze to the present, they have repeatedly misconstrued and exaggerated existing threats, with perverse effects.

No doubt today's Wise Men see themselves as devoted patriots. No doubt they even mean well. Yet that's not good enough. As Paul Wolfowitz himself wrote, "No U.S. president can justify a policy that fails to achieve its intended results by pointing to the purity and rectitude of his intentions." Much the same can be said of those who advise presidents and whose advice yields horrific consequences of the sort we have endured beginning on 9/11 and continuing ever since. They have forfeited any further claim to trust.

 

[Westy]

...and never fight a land war in Asia.