Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [103]
This sorry spectacle of fiscal indiscipline has generated much finger-pointing by both Democrats and Republicans. In fact, the nation’s headlong lunge toward insolvency has been a thoroughly bipartisan project, with both parties deeply implicated and few Americans raising serious objections. When public protest has occurred, as with the “tea party” movement, it has derived from barely concealed partisan considerations. Overall, members of the present generation have plundered the inheritance of their children and grandchildren as remorselessly as the disgraced financier Bernard Madoff bilked those who entrusted him with their money.
By satisfying the immediate demands of their constituents, regardless of cost, politicians buy popular deference, win reelection, and insulate the Washington rules from serious examination. A half century ago, with the United States a creditor nation, President Eisenhower understood that military expenditures exact social costs. Today, with the United States in hock up to its neck, politicians pretend that Americans can have guns and butter, thereby perpetrating fraud on a scale far greater than Mr. Madoff’s. They have gotten away with this modern version of bread and circuses for the same reason that Madoff did: When you’re selling something that seems too good to be true, nothing works like having a greedy and gullible clientele.
The bottom line is this: A minimalist conception of citizenship that relieves individual Americans of any obligation to contribute to the nation’s defense allows Washington wide latitude in employing U.S. military power. Unnecessary and misguided wars are but one deleterious result. An insistence that, unlike other nations, the United States need not live within its means obviates any requirement to balance the books, with the country hurtling toward insolvency as a result.
To put it another way, if Washington pursues ruinous military and fiscal policies, Americans have no one but themselves to blame. Were they to define national defense as a collective responsibility (as George Washington urged) and were they to demand that the state operate on a pay-as-you-go basis (as common sense requires), the Washington rules would almost immediately become untenable.
CHOOSING
At a White House press conference on July 28, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson explained why it had become necessary to send thousands of U.S. combat troops to fight in South Vietnam. “We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate,” he emphasized, “but there is no one else.”15
Johnson’s statement, expressing a sentiment widely shared in Washington then and now, was deeply misleading. LBJ’s immediate predecessors in the White House had chosen. In the wake of World War II, with American wealth and power at their zenith, they had established “national security” as paramount among the purposes that government exists to serve. They imparted to “U.S. national security policy”—a phrase laden with weighty connotations—its abiding characteristics: a reliance on ideologically charged statements of intent and justification; an emphasis on coercive power held at the ready; and a penchant for global interventionism, both overt and covert.
Johnson had not invented this approach; he had merely inherited it. Yet by escalating the U.S. military involvement in Indochina,