The quagmire quandary.

• Author: Zakheim, Dov S.
• Position: Americas War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History - Book review

Andrew J. Bacevich, Americas War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016), 453 pp., $30.00.

Andrew J. Bacevich and President Barack Obama share a number of things in common. Both are convinced that the United States has relied far too heavily on its military forces to intervene in the Middle East. Both assert that these interventions have not addressed, much less resolved, the deep-rooted challenges that confront the region. Both refer to Reinhold Niebuhr as a source for national-security policy formulation. And both evince complete disdain for the "establishment," whose first instinct, they assert, is to apply military force.

But there is a difference between the two. Obama is cerebral; Bacevich, angry. Obama does not hesitate to use force; Bacevich sees America as a militarized state constantly "hell bent on war." Obama considers today's national-security establishment--the nexus of think tankers, Hill staffers, pundits and professors that congregate along the Boston-Washington axis--to be enthralled by military solutions to every problem, and therefore to have it all wrong. Bacevich goes much further. As he reiterates ad nauseam in his latest tract, Americas War for the Greater Middle East, no one in the past forty years--with the possible exception of David Petraeus, who he says "proves the rule"--has lived up to his standards of either civilian leadership or military generalship, especially with regard to the region he terms "the Greater Middle East." Lastly, Obama is no neoisolationist; Bacevich is.

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Bacevich's take on Franklin Roosevelt is particularly revealing in this last regard. He asserts that Roosevelt

maneuver[ed] his country toward war by relying on demagoguery while playing fast and loose with the facts.... Prior to U.S. entry into World War II, Franklin Roosevelt had slandered anti-interventionists as "Copperheads," a Civil War-era term equivalent to calling someone "pink" or a "fellow traveler" in the 1950s. Apart from not specifying with which facts Roosevelt played "fast and loose," Bacevich gives himself away by citing as his source an article in the Chicago Tribune (then an anti-British, isolationist paper) headlined "Wheeler Flays FDR smear of Col. Lindbergh." The Wheeler in question was Montana Sen. Burton Wheeler who, like Robert McCormick, the Chicago Tribune's publisher, was a notorious figure in the America First movement. As for Charles Lindbergh, he was America's best-known isolationist, an anti-Semite and a vocal supporter of America First. Indeed, at one point Bacevich himself approvingly employs "America First" to make his case, though he no doubt knows full well how loaded that term really is.

While Bacevich only gives Roosevelt (and Woodrow Wilson, whom he also labels a "warmonger") a cameo role, Bacevich reserves most of his venom for presidents from Jimmy Carter onwards. He holds them collectively responsible for leading America into an endless war. As it happens, there is no such place as "the Greater Middle East." It is a George W. Bush-administration creation. The "Middle East" was a term employed by the British in the nineteenth century to connote Persia, Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf, in contrast to what it termed "the Near East," which encompassed the Levant and Egypt. As Bacevich would have it, "the Greater Middle East" stretches from the Balkans (which even the Bush team did not include in the region) to Libya to Somalia to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and American intervention is to blame for virtually all their troubles. But just as his geography needs some correction (neither Somalia nor Afghanistan nor Pakistan can truly be considered part of the Middle East) so does his deeply flawed thesis--that everything America has done over the past several decades is flat wrong.

It was Carter, he asserts, whose so-called doctrine committed the United States to intervene in any Middle Eastern conflict that might thwart America's insatiable appetite for oil, who paved the way for America's constant interventions in the region throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. Bacevich notes that Carter originally proposed that America become energy independent. In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, however, Carter succumbed to Washington's conventional wisdom that America should defend its interests through a stepped-up military presence that invariably led to intervention in the region's internal affairs. Bacevich further asserts that in so doing Carter essentially reversed Dwight Eisenhower's noninterventionist policies, as well as Richard Nixon's reliance on the shah of Iran.

In one of the many disingenuous statements that permeate this volume, Bacevich claims:

Ever since World War II, apart from the brief intervention in Lebanon that Dwight D. Eisenhower had ordered back in 1958 ... Americas military had by and large steered clear of the region, leaving it in the hands of diplomats and spooks. On its face, that statement is true. But it was those very "spooks" that had perhaps the greatest long-term impact. Shortly after taking office in 1953, Eisenhower reversed Harry Truman's noninterventionist policy toward Iran and supported the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, restoring the shah to his throne after he had fled the country. The memory of that coup, which had been carried out in coordination with British intelligence, was a major factor not only in the 1979 Iranian Revolution that deposed the shah once and for all, but continues to reinforce the ayatollahs' anti-American prejudices to this day.

Moreover, the overthrow of Mossadegh was not the only...