The continuing anti-American drift of Andrew Bacevich

In 2007, as I discussed at the time, Andrew Bacevich was simultaneously calling for a policy of “containing” radical Islam, and advocating the admission of “millions” of Iraqis into the U.S. in order to pay for our guilt for what we had done to their country. Think about the implications of that for a minute.

Now Bacevich, who has shifted his publishing venues over the last decade from First Things (neoconservative), to The American Conservative (anti-war right), and now to The Huffington Post (leftwing), has a piece in the last magazine on the need for generals to be non-political. In it, he writes:

When the liberal Democrat Bill Clinton became president in 1992, members of the officer corps made little attempt to conceal their contempt for the commander-in-chief. One U. S. Air Force general described Clinton’s chief characteristics as “dope-smoking,” “skirt-chasing,” and “draft-dodging.” As soon as Clinton took office, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Colin Powell, seized upon the issue of gays-in-the-military to publicly humiliate their new boss. During the campaign Clinton had vowed if elected to issue an executive order allowing gays to serve openly in the armed forces. The JCS forced Clinton to back away from that promise, thereby demonstrating their ability to veto any presidential initiative not to their liking. Clinton found himself obliged in effect to bargain with and make concessions to his senior military advisers, with don’t-ask-don’t tell the result.

Stunning. Not only is this one-time conservative writer favoring open homosexuals in the military, he’s acting as though the criticism of the proposed Clinton homosexual policy by Gen. Powell and other senior military officers in 1993 was not a responsible expression of their professional opinion on an important issue, but an attempt to “humiliate” Clinton! Meaning that they weren’t supposed to state their views of this radical policy at all, even when called before Congress to so do. In Bacevich’s now resentment-driven, leftist mindset, if you take an anti-left position, it’s not because you rationally believe in it, it’s because you’re a mean and sneaky person trying to hurt someone. Bacevich might as well be writing editorials for the New York Times.

Then notice this tendentious passage:

The so-called “Long War” is a political war par excellence, with “politics” here having a domestic as well as an international aspect—a reality apparent in the way that the Bush administration suppressed doubts about the “surge” in Iraq by employing Petraeus as its de facto spokesman. To criticize the policy became tantamount to criticizing the general, which few members of Congress or the media were willing to do.

Bacevich would make it appear that there was something sinister and underhanded in Gen. Petraeus’s being the administration’s “de facto spokesman” on the surge. But of course the surge was Petraeus’s brainchild and his continuing responsibility. Who other than he to be the spokesman?

The wacky hostility in remarks like this suggests that the same thing has happened to Bacevich that has happened to so many other one-time conservatives. Becoming opposed to some U.S. policy, they don’t simply oppose that policy, they become reactively anti-American, like adolescents striking out at their father.

Bacevich has a new book that is getting rave reviews. I haven’t seen it, but I’ll bet it scratches every leftist itch.

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Gintas writes:

A few years ago we had a short exchange about the neocons, and how they had moved from left to right, and I wondered why there wasn’t some kind of similar group that moved from right to left. Maybe it’s happening now.

LA replies:

It’s been happening for some time. See my 2004 article at FrontPage Magazine, “The antiwar right’s bent view of the world.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 25, 2008 03:49 PM | Send