A VOICE OF RATIONAL DISSENT

by H. N. Burdett

The very origin of our country defies logic: scattered, ragtag squirrel shooters whipping the strongest army of Europe, an army with a curious penchant for bright red uniforms and marching in straight columns.

But we do little honor to our unlikely heritage when we tune out today's voices of rational dissent because the simplicity of their logic often comes through as, well, simplistic.

Yet we do allow these voices to prattle on because unless they shout "Fire!" in a crowded hall, we Americans consider ourselves sufficiently sophisticated to pay them no special heed.

One such voice today is that of Andrew Bacevich, who believes that the war we are waging in South Asia should stop post haste and furthermore that it should never have started. The more logical his reasoning, the less we seem to listen.

That an ever increasing number of Americans are lining up in agreement with at least the first part of his supposition is not yet enough to convince either the White House or the Pentagon to listen more closely and take him much more seriously.

What makes this apparent lack of military attentiveness to Bacevich's cry in the wilderness even more intriguing is that in the not too distant past, he was one of them. For he is something other than John Q. Public, an ordinary citizen registering his right to be heard. Far from the garden variety civilian malcontent, he wore the uniform of the United States Army with pride and distinction, not as a mere draftee or reservist but as both a soldier and a serious thinker.

A West Point graduate and Vietnam war veteran, Bacevich was once known as a Pentagon intellectual, which to more than a few may have the ring of the ultimate oxymoron. Upon his retirement from military service, he lectured at various venues of academe, including his alma mater. He now heads the department of international relations at Boston University.

As an academic who has paid his dues through military service, it would seem to follow that he would get all of the air time and op-ed space required and then some to promote his thesis: that the United States needs to get out of South Asia and never should have invaded that region in the first place. But his public exposure is virtually limited to sit-downs with the usual suspects, Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose, perhaps intellectually satisfying but with the nagging suspicion that he is preaching to the choir.

Professor Bacevich has written widely on the topic, riveting books and magazine articles that apparently too often go unread or too soon forgotten.

One of his main points is so patently rational that the dullest schoolboy might take it up, run with it and summon visions of Clarence Darrow presenting his closing arguments: war is by definition

armed hostility between two or more nations and therefore cannot be declared upon an "ism," even one as daunting as world terrorism. l

This brings us to the truly intriguing question of whether in the wake of 9/11, should the United States and other western governments that realized the attack was on them as well, have done nothing?

Hardly, Bacevich posits, but insists that the appropriate response would have been a coordinated and comprehensive international police action that few, if any industrialized nations, would have declined to join. Indeed, many that have since dropped out of regime change roulette and the hunt for Bin Laden doubtless would still be on the case today.

It is a point worth pondering. Had the same resources spent over the past eight years and that continue to be expended in waging an unwinnable war against an "ism" been instead funneled into a police action, it is reasonable to assume that far fewer lives would have been lost and even if by this time we had not flushed all of the bad guys out of their warrens, mountain caves and urban cells, would we really be any worse off than we are today?

Bacevich is a self-styled conservative who endorsed Barack Obama in the presidential race last year as the best hope for getting back to conservative values and programs in the United States. The professor is convinced that the Republican nominee would have dangerously expanded and extended the war under the delusion that ratcheting up everything that has thus far failed is the path to victory because it obviously was not enough.

But Obama pledged to extract our soldiers from Iraq, then turned around and substantially increased the number of troops fighting a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, still without offering a clear indication of what constitutes victory, or even a hint of an exit strategy.

Meanwhile, neoconservatives who have the largest stake in change for the region maintain a low profile, other than to prop up Sarah Palin as the Great White Hope for unseating Obama in 2012, and continue to seek a viable candidate for that challenge, while those who rallied to his presidential candidacy, as Bacevich did, as the best hope for leaving the region wait both shell-shocked at the buildup of troops in Afghanistan and impatient for their President to point to the way out.