Warmaking at its most immoral.

• Author: Whitney, Jake
• Position: 'Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country' - Book review

Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

By Andrew Bacevich

Metropolitan Books. 256 pages. $26.

In May 2005, Colonel Theodore Westhusing, a West Point professor of English and Philosophy who was serving in Iraq, received an anonymous letter. It was written by someone on the staff of USIS, the military contractor that Westhusing was overseeing. It alleged the company was ripping off the U.S. government and engaging in serious abuses--including murdering unarmed Iraqis and bragging about it. The anonymous writer said that the corporation's top goal in Iraq (the company was being paid to train Iraqi police) was to make as much money as it could while doing as little as possible.

Westhusing initially refused to believe the charges, asserting that he had witnessed nothing of the sort. But over the following days, Westhusing became increasingly withdrawn. He would make angry statements implying that the anonymous writer was telling the truth after all. On June 5, after a heated argument with USIS staff members, Westhusing walked back to his trailer near the Baghdad International Airport and shot himself in the head.

"I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuses, and liars," his suicide note read. "I didn't volunteer to support corrupt, money-grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored."

In Breach of Trust, Andrew Bacevich asserts that Americas current brand of warmaking has never been more immoral, and Westhusing's demise represents the consequences--to the soldier and to the nation.

Over the last forty years, Bacevich's thesis goes, the American public has become completely disengaged from its military. Whether by design or happenstance, this disengagement has been a tremendous boon to warmakers and profiteers. With little say from the American people, a state of perpetual war has ensued in which privatization and corruption have flourished on an unprecedented scale.

Bacevich pinpoints Nixon's elimination of the draft as the watershed moment on our path to civic-military decay. It transferred responsibility for war from the people to Washington, D.C. With no fear of having to fight, the vast majority of Americans could shrug off war as somebody else's business. "The state now owns war, with the country consigned to observer status," Bacevich declares.

Although the original sin was Nixon's, Tricky Dick is not...