The Bush Legacy, But What Next?

By Cernig

Matt Yglesias points to a great op-ed in the Boston Globe by professor of history and international relations, Andrew J. Bacevich. The latter describes Bush's true legacy:

Among other things, the Bush team has accomplished the following:

Defined the contemporary era as an "age of terror" with an open-ended "global war" as the necessary, indeed the only logical, response;

Promulgated and implemented a doctrine of preventive war, thereby creating a far more permissive rationale for employing armed force;

Affirmed - despite the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001 - that the primary role of the Department of Defense is not defense, but power projection;

Removed constraints on military spending so that once more, as Ronald Reagan used to declare, "defense is not a budget item";

Enhanced the prerogatives of the imperial presidency on all matters pertaining to national security, effectively eviscerating the system of checks and balances;

Preserved and even expanded the national security state, despite the manifest shortcomings of institutions such as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff;

Preempted any inclination to question the wisdom of the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, founded on expectations of a sole superpower exercising "global leadership";

Completed the shift of US strategic priorities away from Europe and toward the Greater Middle East, the defense of Israel having now supplanted the defense of Berlin as the cause to which presidents and would-be presidents ritually declare their fealty.

By almost any measure, this constitutes a record of substantial, if almost entirely malignant, achievement.

And goes on to point out that a vote for John McCain really is a vote for the continuation of this policy. "McCain's determination to stay the course in Iraq expresses his commitment not simply to the ongoing conflict there, but to the ideas that gave rise to that war in the first place."

Bacevich (and Yglesias, and Drum) would like Obama to stop talking merely about whether the Surge is working and start talking about whether this wider national security agenda, one which has been wrapped in a lot of empty talk about democratization, is really the course the U.S. should stay on. I wouldn't want them to hold their collective breath, as there are two reasons that isn't what Obama is going to do.

Firstly, Obama himself has already shown a Blair-like tendency to believe that a surveillance state and a foreign policy with overwhelming military might permanently on the table will be ok, just as long as a 'good guy' does it. Trust him.

Secondly - and Obama has surrounded himself with senior advisors who bear this out - the notion that the U.S. government is inherently the 'good guy' and can be trusted to wield the biggest stick is ingrained in the VSP establishment in the U.S. As Matt's first commenter ably puts it:

You're not going to see a major examination of these themes because Bacevich's core beliefs are antithetical to so many mainstream republican and democratic leaders, bloggers, and journalists. Anyone who writes a book about the "new american militarism" isn't going to get a serious hearing on security matters from people who are arguing not about whether to fight wars overseas but rather how the wars should be fought and where.

No, don't hold your breath for radical change on the core assumptions of the Bush legacy.