Welcome Andrew J. Bacevich, and Host Gareth Porter.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War

Andrew J. Bacevich has emerged in the early years of this century as the country’s most widely read and widely respected critic of U.S. militarism and empire. He has addressed this issue with unprecedented intensity for an academic. With the appearance of Washington Rules, he has produced six books addressing illuminating these themes in the span of a single decade, writing three major books American Empire (2002), The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits of Power (2008), and editing two other volumes, The Imperial Tense (2003) and The Long War (2006).

In attracting a broad readership to his critique of American militarism, Bacevich has transcended both the arid tone of virtually all academic writing on the history of foreign and military policy and the right-left divide over social and political values. As a former army officer, a Catholic and a social conservative from the mid-West, he has appealed to both conservatives and radicals unhappy with both the militarized pursuit of power abroad and the encouragement of unlimited individual self-gratification at home. He has argued that the all-volunteer army is the nexus between these twinned developments in American society and global policy.

In Washington Rules, Bacevich offers a series of ruminations on how and why the United States has come to what he calls “a condition approximating perpetual war….” He begins by positing a consensus held firmly by the U.S. political, business, foreign policy and media elite ever since the end of World War II consisting of what he calls “the sacred trinity” of principles: global U.S. military presence, global power projection and global interventionism.

photo: lensfodder via Flickr

Glenn Greenwald wrote a lucid post yesterday entitled, “What Collapsing Empire Looks Like.” With his characteristic precision, he contrasts our lavish spending on endless wars and internal surveillance networks, with impending cuts to social security and Medicaid (I would add the recently passed cuts to the food stamp program). He relates how in the richest, most powerful country in the world, streets lights go dark, libraries are closed, public transportation shut down, and school children are furloughed, as we continue to raise larger armies to fight our wars and maintain endless occupations in countries where we are rightly despised.

At the end of the piece, he quotes Simon Johnson, “Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk — at least until the riots grow too large.”

Then Greenwald adds, “The real question is whether the American public is too apathetic and trained into submission for that to ever happen.”

“Trained into submission” may be correct, but apathetic is a misconception.

My state has been especially badly hit by this recession — it ranks among the highest in job loss. And the mood in my state is getting uglier and more desperate, especially among those who have suffered the most economic pain. And people here are anything but apathetic.

I was talking with a passing acquaintance in the supermarket the other day, and she began to tear up as she described how she had lost her job running the personnel department for a mid-sized company, and her inability to find anything but part-time work since. She started crying as she told me that her home was being foreclosed on and she and her son had nowhere to go. She then said with cold fury, “No one in Washington cares about what we’re going through. All those politicians should be taken out and shot.”

I was surprised at her vehemence, but thinking about it later, I don’t know why I was. People are at the breaking point. Revolutionary fervor is out there, but more often the target of people’s rage is closer to home. (cont’d.)

The “DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama” is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, have good moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service. With broader comprehensive immigration reform stuck in partisan gridlock, the time is now for the White House and Congress to step up and pass the DREAM Act!

A lot has happened as we complete the third week of the DREAM Now Series. The DREAM Act picked up two new co-sponsors in the U.S. House: Mike Thompson (D-CA-1) and Chellie Pingree (D-ME-1). Two extremely important and influential organizations have also come out strongly in support of passing the DREAM Act as a downpayment on comprehensive immigration reform: the Center for American Progress and the AFL-CIO. Finally, a major victory was won in Arizona where the deportation of Marlen Moreno was deferred. Please express support for the above in anyway possible. It has all helped build a lot of momentum for passing the DREAM Act, this year.

Just was we have been busy moving the DREAM Act forward, though, nativists have been busy undermining it.

Last week, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and the nativist organization NumbersUSA were behind a political effort to release an inflammatory memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The memo was released with the suggestion that Obama was preparing a stealth amnesty without the aid of Congress. An explicit target of this memo was most certainly possible beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, whom advocates and even U.S. Senators have been passionately arguing should receive some sort of administrative relief from Obama.

It is an absolute lie, of course, to suggest that Obama is in favor of providing mass administrative relief to migrants. Obama specifically argued against doing so in his only major immigration policy speech as President, and has ramped up enforcement even more than the Bush administration ever did.

As if the political and misleading release of the USCIS memo wasn’t enough, Republican leadership has sunk to an even newer low with the suggestion that the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution should be revisited to prevent the children of migrants, or “anchor babies” as dehumanizing nativists like the call them, from gaining U.S. citizenship through their birth on U.S. soil. Led by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Republican Senate Leaders such as Mitch McConnell (R-KY), John Cornyn (R-TX), and John McCain (R-AZ), have all come out in support of “hearings” on the manner.

This isn’t the first time nativists have proposed altering or reinterpreting the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In one of my better posts written for Citizen Orange a couple of years back, I addressed this very issue when former Republican Congressman Virgil Goode tried to raise this issue in his race against current Congressman Tom Periello (D-VA-5). Here’s what I wrote then: