Have we been “snookered”.

As I began to read the recently released book, Washington Rules – America’s Path to Permanent War, I became immediately engaged. The author Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army Colonel and professor of history and international relations at Boston University, had taken the same journey of discovery that I had taken. Although his journey started in a different place and at a different time we ended up at the same destination.

We both can define specifically when this journey began. Professor Bacevich started his journey in 1990 when, as an active duty Army officer, he visited the German Democratic Republic and observed a Soviet military exercise. He noted that the trucks were 1950’s vintage and one of their battle tanks suddenly belched smoke and burst into flames. My journey began in 1994 in St. Petersburg, Russia when I consulted with a Russian grocery store chain. During a meeting with the VP of distribution about his vehicle acquisition practices, he told me that he could buy a Russian made truck for 15,000 USD or a Volvo or Mercedes Benz (MB) for 45,000 USD. He bought the Volvo or MB every time because it “would actually run and not break down every week”.

Like Professor Bacevich I had been indoctrinated during my military career that we were faced off against the vaunted Soviet military which posed an existential threat to the US and its allies and required enormous expenditures for personnel, armaments and foreign bases. I asked myself; how did I miss the fact that the Soviet Union was a paper tiger? Was I not paying attention or had I been “snookered”?

In the last 15 years as I have traveled to countries that are classified by the US government as existential threats and met with militant groups that are said to require invasion and occupation of countries around the world, I have concluded that we have been “snookered”. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US government continues to try and persuade us the “world’s only superpower” has an obligation to project power around the globe in order to make the world a safer and more peaceful place.

As we consider our policies in places like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine and North Korea it would be well to remember some of the wise remarks of Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas during the Vietnam War that were quoted by Bacevich.

“What I do question is the ability of the United States …to go into a small, alien, undeveloped Asian nation and create stability where there is chaos…democracy where there is no tradition of it and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life.”

“Any people setting out upon self-appointed missions to police the world, to defeat all tyranny, to make their fellow man rich, happy and free were less likely to advance the cause of world peace than to bring misery to their beneficiaries and destruction upon themselves.”

“I think that the world has endured about all it can of high-minded men bent on the regeneration of the human race.”