The toll of overreaching.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: 'Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War' - Book review

Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

By Andrew J. Bacevich

Metropolitan. 304 pages. $25.

Andrew Bacevich's scathing critique of American militarism in Washington Rules cannot be dismissed as the rantings of a peacenik. His personal history as an Army officer who served in Vietnam (eventually retiring as a colonel) and as the father of an Iraq War casualty makes him difficult to ignore.

Bacevich is politically unclassifiable. As he himself confesses, his enlightenment started late (at the age of forty-one), and has involved reading up on progressive critics of U.S. foreign policy such as Randolph Bourne and William Appleman Williams.

In his new book, Bacevich presents a convincing and readable case: that the American self-image as the indispensable nation committed to bringing liberty and justice to all has resulted in the overreaching and hubris that is the central, bipartisan foundation of U.S. foreign policy. This comprises, Bacevich says, a global military presence, global power projection, and global interventionism. These are the Washington rules (a nice double play on words) that Bacevich uses as the leitmotif of the book.

"In American politics, adherence to this creed qualifies as a matter of faith," Bacevich writes. "In speeches, state papers, and official ceremonies, public figures continually affirm and reinforce its validity."

The results are devastating. Bacevich outlines the enormous costs extracted by this mentality: a Pentagon budget of $700 billion-plus, 300,000 U.S. troops deployed overseas, and an overweening Pentagon divvying the world up into various commands. He catalogs the multiple toll of the Washington rules, from the families destroyed by combat to the culture of lies and secrecy fostered by constant overseas meddling.

Bacevich performs an important service by revealing the continuities in American policy, and the chronic amnesia, where the current crisis has nothing to do with previous U.S. transgressions. Even when there have been foreign policy debacles--the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, or Iraq--they have never served as the catalyst for a fundamental rethink, Bacevich asserts.

"The United States is either the victim or an innocent bystander, Washington's own past actions possessing no relevance to the matter at hand," he writes.

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For Bacevich, the desire to abide by the Washington rules clarifies everything from the Vietnam War to the reaction to the September 11 attacks.

"As in 2001...