The New American Militarism...

The following is an excerpt from The New American Militarism by Andrew Bacevich, Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University, West Point graduate and veteran of Vietnam.

The new American militarism draws much of its sustaining force from myth - stories created to paper over incongruities and contradictions that pervade the American way of life. The exercise of global power by the United States aggravates these incongruities.

Americans want to feel secure, in their homes and where they work. Rather than safety, however, the possession of military might without precedent has in practice yielded a heightened sense of vulnerability.

Americans see themselves as an idealistic people. But the dispatch of U.S. forces to oppose tyranny and create the conditions for peace does not evoke accolades from abroad. Instead, it fuels anti-Americanism and generates suspicion of our motives and intentions.

Americans believe in democracy. But their democracy works such that the divide between rich and poor grows ever wider. In America, the winners control an ever-increasing percentage of the nation's wealth. To be a member of the upper class is to have privileges, among them ensuring that it's someone else's kid who is getting shot at in Iraq or Afghanistan.

These are hard, uncomfortable truths, for which the existing political system does not provide an easily available remedy. So Americans concoct stories to make such truths more palatable. During the past quarter century, American politicians with their eyes firmly fixed on the main chance, assisted by purveyors of popular culture with a well-honed instinct for what sells, have promulgated a host of such stories. One result has been to contrive a sentimentalized version of the American military experience and an idealized image of the American soldier.

These myths make an essential contribution to the new American mlitarism. They create an apparently seamless historical narrative of American soldiers as liberators, with Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003 becoming a sequal to Operation Overlord in June 1944. They divert attention from the reality of U.S. military policy, now having less to do with national defense than with imperial policing. They help to sustain the willingness of American soldiers to shoulder their frequently thankless and seemingly endless burdens in places like th Balkans, Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf. Above all, they function as a salve for what remains of the American conscience. Myths offer reassurance that America remains, as Ronald Reagan put it, "still a land of heroes with all the courage and love of freedom that ever was before." They enable us to sustain the belief that the soldiers whom we hire to do the nation's dirty work but whom we do not know are, in fact, bringing peace and light to troubled corners of the earth rather than pushing ever outward the perimeter of an American empire.