Analysts see Iraq War as "forgotten war" – USATODAY.com

Analysts see Iraq War as "forgotten war" – USATODAY.com

Rick Hampson, USA TODAY

BOSTON – Four years ago, students filed into a Boston University classroom for the final exam in "The American Military Experience," a course taught by Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam combat veteran and retired Army colonel.

The professor was not there.

The students knew that Bacevich had always opposed the war in Iraq. They may have known that his only son, Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich Jr. was an Army officer there. They did not know that the day before he had been killed there.

That awful irony — a son follows his father into the military and dies in a war the father fought to end — has helped make Bacevich one of the most prominent and credible critics of U.S. foreign policy.

Now, as the United States completes its military withdrawal from Iraq, Bacevich says there are huge lessons to be learned about the limits of U.S. power. But he's dismayed by what he calls "the unseemly haste" with which Iraq is supplanting Korea as our "forgotten war."

"The final tragedy of a tragic enterprise is that the U.S. has learned next to nothing," he says. "The belief that war works remains strangely intact." The evidence, he adds, is to be seen in Yemen and the Horn of Africa, where the nation has intervened even though it has no vital interests.

Along with thinkers such as Barry Posen of MIT and the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer, Bacevich is one of what policy analyst Thanassis Cambanis calls the "new isolationists," who challenge the bipartisan consensus on foreign affairs.

Bacevich said he believes that by over-relying on military force and overextending its global reach, the United States has squandered wealth and power, creating a state of what he calls "permanent war." He blames not only leaders, but citizens who say they support the troops while displaying little interest in, or responsibility for, the wars the troops fight.

'A passionate Cassandra'

Bacevich is hard to pigeonhole. He has written on the left for The Nation, and on the right for The American Conservative, and excoriated both Presidents Bush and Obama. He "speaks truth to power," Bill Moyers has said, "no matter who's in power."

Eliot Cohen is a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins, a former counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and an advocate of the Iraq invasion in 2003. He helped Bacevich start his academic career after he left the Army.

"He has a fluent pen and a strong, coherent point of view," Cohen says. "At a time when a lot of folks think the U.S. should pull in its horns, he's given voice to that."

Yet on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bacevich has been "a passionate Cassandra," says the historian and columnist James Carroll— fated, like the figure in Greek mythology, to see his warnings go unheeded.

With good reason, say critics such as Larry Schweikart, a University of Dayton historian and political analyst who supported the war in Iraq and says Bacevich is too pessimistic.

"I can't believe he's sold so many books," Schweikart says. "He has this 'America is bad' idea, that you can't exert American power. But nature abhors a vacuum. If it's not us, it will be someone else."

Despite his critique of the military, professor Bacevich is every inch the former regimental commander — suit coat buttoned, blue button-down shirt starched, tasseled loafers polished, shoulders back, jaw square, smile confident. In class, seats are assigned, some students call him "sir" and he's apt to begin by announcing a "plan of action."

Since coming to B.U. in 1998, Bacevich has become a popular teacher and prolific speaker and writer. He has produced six books, two of them best-sellers (Washington Rules in 2010, The Limits of Power in 2008) and edited or co-edited eight others. He has written 38 essays, 323 articles and 135 book reviews.

In 2004 Andrew Jr., who had been forced to leave ROTC in college because of asthma, told his father that Army medical standards had changed and that he was enlisting. His father says that despite his own feelings about the war, he was proud: "He wanted to serve. I supported him in that."

Did they discuss the war? "We didn't talk politics," Bacevich says. "He had enough respect for me that it did not affect our relationship. And the war did not affect my opinion that service to country is important. … Soldiers don't get to choose the war they're going to fight. No one asked my opinion about Vietnam."

After his son went to Iraq in 2006, Bacevich says he felt no differently than a parent who supported the war: "I prayed every day for him to come home." On Mother's Day 2007, he learned his son had been killed by a suicide bomber.

Settling for symbolism

Bacevich says his son's loss does not affect his analysis and should not affect how it is received. "I've never said, 'You need to listen to me because my son died in Iraq.'"

Bacevich's loss does seem to have made him sensitive about how Americans attend to their wars and warriors.

In a July 4 blog post he described a pre-game ceremony at Boston's Fenway Park, in which a sailor serving overseas on an aircraft carrier was reunited with her unsuspecting family.

The event, staged with great pomp (the sailor emerged from behind a huge U.S. flag covering the left field wall) epitomized to Bacevich a cheap, feel-good, home-front patriotism. He wrote:

" 'Support the troops' has emerged as a central tenet. … Fulfilling that obligation has posed a challenge, however. Rather than doing so concretely, Americans … have settled for symbolism. With their pronounced aversion to collective service and sacrifice (an inclination indulged by leaders of both parties), Americans resist any definition of civic duty that threatens to crimp lifestyles."

And if Americans do support the troops, he asks, "Does it make sense to ask them to do what they do — five combat tours in Afghanistan? And for what? But collectively we shrug it off."

Hence, his pessimism the lessons of Iraq will be remembered any longer than those of Vietnam. But he says there is hope: "I really love this country, and retain a conviction that the American people can come to recognize the predicament we've gotten ourselves into."

Analysts see Iraq War as "forgotten war" – USATODAY.com