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There is a lot of truth in Bacevich’s analysis. The oil-focused military campaign of the 1980s did balloon into an attempt at regional transformation. And while Obama quickly abandoned the transformation part of Bush’s agenda, intense US involvement in the region is outlasting the Middle East’s status as an indispensable source of oil. But Bacevich never asks — much less answers — the question that naturally follows: Why hasn’t the declining importance of Middle East oil produced any changes in US military policy? Nor does he ask why American politicians haven’t spent any time celebrating an impending energy independence that they spent more than a decade demanding. Here the limits of Bacevich’s argument come into view. Identifying oil as the long war’s cause allows him to begin his narrative in 1980. This obscures the ideological roots of a commitment to the Middle East that doesn’t look to be disappearing in the foreseeable future.
The US loves to see itself as a noncolonial power. As the country assumed a global leadership role after World War II, it was eager to be viewed as a new kind of leader, a successor to the European colonial regimes that were rightly disappearing. But in many instances, such as its inheritance of the Vietnam War from France, the US simply perpetuated colonial wars. America’s quest for Middle East oil was as predatory as the British Empire’s. During the wind-down of World War II, the US sought an oil concession in Iran, which was England’s largest source of overseas oil, and it sought to keep British oil companies out of Saudi Arabia, which the US considered its own. All the while, the US declared that its entire rationale was “anticolonial.”
[...] even on the narrow terms of maintaining an “American way of life,” American policy abroad has been disastrous, and Bacevich’s is now one of many volumes arguing that the US would have been better off had it abandoned its quest for world hegemony long ago. The paradox of American power is its luxury. The US enjoys, geographically as well as militarily, a form of superiority and safety that has never been truly threatened. Hegemony is now a choice, and the US has indulged that choice extravagantly. Trillions have been spent on mishaps and catastrophes: even Dwight Eisenhower acknowledged that “every gun that is made . . . signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
What would happen if the US were to abandon this rationale — if, for a moment, the dissident counterestablishment occupied the halls of power and began setting policy? The essential prescriptions have been set out by Christopher Layne in his book The Peace of Illusions (2006). Like Bacevich, Layne is a conservative — he is the Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University — and a descendant of the Wisconsin School. For Layne, the US’s indispensability is a big problem for the world, and a big problem for the US. Abandoning it begins to set more sensible terms for the world order. Under Layne’s more or less realist rubric, the US could begin by leaving NATO and allowing the European Union to take responsibility for its own interests. It would then terminate its security treaty with Japan and withdraw from South Korea, similarly allowing those countries the ability to set the terms of their own foreign policy.
It was always folly for the US to attempt to secure Middle East oil — even an embargo by a single country would simply mean increased production by another, and in any case the US hegemony over Saudi Arabia has increased, not diminished, the possibility of instability there. But now that the US no longer depends on that oil, its continuing military presence in the region is not only indefensible but dangerous, increasing the threat of Islamist terrorism that it exists to tamp down. It should withdraw entirely, as it should encourage the withdrawal of Israel’s forces and citizens from the settlements, to help foster the creation of a Palestinian state.
The fact that these sensible prescriptions strike the foreign policy establishment as totally insane stems from a persistent belief in America’s exclusive prerogative to reorganize and remake the world, which the members of that establishment euphemistically refer to as the country’s “credibility.” Politicians defend this prerogative just in case someone comes up with a new and better idea for remaking the world somewhere down the line. Solving this problem can’t just be a matter of the US realizing its “true” interests. The country would have to learn to give up the colonial mandate that it took up decades ago, well after the colonial era was already passing into history.
he says earlier that the underlying assumption driving US foreign policy is that the US should and can lead and shape the rest of the world (which the author of the book being reviewed does not acknowledge)
[...] Indiana’s work suggests a spiritual ambivalence that sees love as tethered to the brutalizing character of our society yet holding out some twinkling promise: a “mortal illness,” yes, but also a “rescuer’s flashlight.” He would object to the comparison (Indiana’s is a fitful radicalism, always wriggling out of ideology’s drab uniform), but his orientation to love resembles Marx’s critique of religious faith: love devolves into an opiate of the masses. Religion dreams of utopias, grasps at transcendence, dignifies our slogging trials — and is fastened to the notion, however distant, of redemption. Might the desire for love, too, be an “expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering?” Might love be “the heart of a heartless world,” “the soul of soulless conditions” — or, in Marx’s most swooning, sympathetic formulation, the “sigh of the oppressed creature”?
earlier, the author brings up theorists like Erich Fromm who come up with Leftist Critiques of Love
She smiled up at him, surprised. She was in her mid-twenties, with an etched delicacy of feature and large and artless eyes. Her beauty had an element of remoteness. This was intriguing but maybe not. Her head rode slightly forward on a slender length of neck. She had an unexpected laugh, a little weary and experienced, and he liked the way she put a finger to her lips when she wanted to be thoughtful. Her poetry was shit.
i enjoyed this
"Where's your car?"
"We can't seem to find it," she said.
"I'd offer you a ride."
"I couldn't. Absolutely. I know you work en route. And I like taxis. I was never good at geography and I learn things by asking the drivers where they come from."
"They come from horror and despair."
"Yes, exactly. One learns about the countries where unrest is occurring by riding the taxis here."
He'd noticed that Torval had stopped calling him Mr. Packer. He called him nothing now. This omission left a space in nature large enough for a man to walk through.
[...] There were eating places up and down the street. He thought of people eating, lives running out over lunch. What was behind such a thought? He thought of bussers combing crumbs off the tables. The waiters and bussers did not die. It was only the patrons who failed to show up, one by one, over time, for soup with packaged crackers on the side.
"And property follows of course. The concept of property is changing by the day, by the hour. The enormous expenditures that people make for land and houses and boats and planes. This has nothing to do with traditional self-assurances, okay. Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your one hundred and four million dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not the rotating bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air rights? The regulating sensors and software? Not the mirrors that tell you how you feel when you look at yourself in the morning. You paid the money for the number itself. One hundred and four million. This is what you bought. And it's worth it. The number justifies itself."
Vija Kinski (chief of theory) speaking
He'd always wanted to become quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void.
The technology was imminent or not. It was semimythical. It was the natural next step. It would never happen. It is happening now, an evolutionary advance that needed only the practical mapping of the nervous system onto digital memory. It would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment.
But his pain interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his distinctiveness, too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible, he didn't think, to computer emulation. The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother's breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflection he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that's not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end.
Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be.