Andrew Bacevich is an unusual man. A brilliant professor at Boston University, a former distinguished army officer, and a profound Catholic, he uses Obama’s candidacy to render a stirring critique of the current morass.
His only son was killed in action in Iraq last May.
Excerpt:
Give the neocons this much: they appreciate the stakes. This explains the intensity with which they proclaim that, even with the fighting in Iraq entering its sixth year, we are now “winning”—as if war were an athletic contest in which nothing matters except the final score. The neoconservatives brazenly ignore or minimize all that we have flung away in lives, dollars, political influence, moral standing, and lost opportunities. They have to: once acknowledged, those costs make the folly of the entire neoconservative project apparent. All those confident manifestos calling for the United States to liberate the world’s oppressed, exercise benign global hegemony, and extend forever the “unipolar moment” end up getting filed under dumb ideas.
8:31 am on March 18, 2008
