Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [101]
That Washington is the principal beneficiary of the national security consensus prompts critics—whether on the antiwar left or the anti-interventionist right—to conclude that Washington itself defines the problem. Change the way Washington works, as virtually every presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter has vowed to do, and the problem will fix itself.
This diagnosis accords with a hallowed practice of blaming dark and distant forces for whatever problems afflict American society, from air pollution and fatty foods to poverty and the erosion of moral standards. Wall Street, the Trusts, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and the Mainstream Media: The list of villains is an imposing one. Yet even when the charges levied are not without merit, they fall well short of being satisfactory. In blaming Leviathan, Americans conveniently give themselves a pass.
The Washington consensus persists in considerable measure because it conforms to and reinforces widely accepted, if highly problematic, aspects of American civic culture. Put simply, if “they” routinely promulgate ill-advised national security policies, it’s because “we” let them. Semiwarriors—whether Allen Dulles or Robert McNamara from an earlier era or their latter-day successors like defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates—get away with perpetuating the Washington rules because those rules draw upon, sustain, and help conceal the implications, moral as well as practical, of contemporary America’s impoverished and attenuated conception of citizenship.
That conception privileges individual choice above collective responsibility and immediate gratification over long-term well-being. For Americans today, duties and obligations are few. Although the United States is not without “good citizens”—they exist in every community—active participation in civic life is entirely a matter of personal preference. The prevailing definition of citizenship requires simply that you pay your taxes and avoid flagrant violations of the law.
The Washington rules offer an approach to national security policy that hews closely to this minimalist definition of what it means to be a citizen. Americans once believed—or at least purported to believe—that citizenship carried with it a responsibility to contribute to the country’s defense. In his “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment,” written in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution, George Washington offered the classic formulation of this proposition. “It may be laid down, as a primary position, and the basis of our system,” the general wrote, “that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defence of it.”13 Out of this proposal came the tradition of the citizen-soldier, the warrior who filled the ranks of citizen armies raised for every major war fought by the United States until that system foundered in Vietnam.
Since Vietnam, military and civilian authorities presiding over the capital that bears the old general’s name have abandoned his position, radically revising—indeed severing—the relationship between citizenship and soldiering. As with owning a gun or getting an abortion, military service falls within the realm of activities governed by individual choice. To defend the country and its interests, the United States now relies on volunteers who fill the ranks of a professional military establishment only loosely connected to American society.
In General Washington’s day this was known as a “standing army.” To the extent