Why Obama — and every president since Carter — failed to transform the Middle East

Sean Illing · Thursday, December 29, 2016, 10:25 am

“We are not a people to whom and nation to which limits don’t apply.” —Andrew Bacevich

What are America’s strategic objectives in the Middle East? How consistently have they been defined and pursued over the past three decades? What are the metrics of success? Are we better off today than we were 15 or 20 years ago?

For Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and a professor of international relations at Boston University, the answers to these questions are muddled at best, depressing at worst.

Among the sharpest critics of American foreign policy in recent years, Bacevich has authored a number of books (including The Limits of Power and The Long War) documenting America’s entanglements abroad. His latest book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, offers a sweeping look at America’s policies in the Middle East since the Carter administration.

The book begins with the Carter administration because two events in 1979 set America on its current course in the Middle East: the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Together these events cemented the view among American political leaders that access to Persian Gulf oil, then seen as indispensable, had to be protected.

A weak president at the time, Carter projected strength, declaring the Persian Gulf a vital national security interest. Every president since Carter, in his own way, has upheld this conviction. And much of America’s subsequent actions in the region have aimed to preserve this strategic stronghold.

Bacevich’s diagnosis of this multi-decade project is damning. “As an American who cares deeply about the fate of his country,” he writes on the opening page, “I should state plainly my own assessment of this ongoing war, now well into its fourth decade. We have not won it. We are not winning it. Simply trying harder is unlikely to produce a different outcome.”

The “ongoing war,” as Bacevich defines it, is America’s perpetual effort to impose its will on the Middle East, to use hard power to shape outcomes and bend history in our favor. It was believed that America could, if not quite reshape the region in its own image, at the very least render it more amenable to American interests.

In the end, though, what we got was less security, more fruitless interventions, and a region continually in chaos.

For Bacevich, America’s militarism is fueled by a false assumption about the reach and efficacy of military power. The presumption is that force, sufficiently employed, can achieve desired political goals across the world. This is a dangerous myth, Bacevich argues, and one our foreign policy establishment can’t seem to shake.

I sat down with Bacevich earlier this week to talk about his book, his criticisms of American interventionism, and his broader assessment of American foreign policy over the past three decades.

Sean Illing

The guiding thesis of your book is that America has waged what amounts to a 35-year war in the Greater Middle East. What’s the premise of this war, and why are we not winning it?

Andrew Bacevich

At the outset, it was a war for oil. What triggered the war for the greater Middle East was a couple of events that occurred in 1979. First, the Iranian Revolution and the creation of the Islamic Republic, which was hostile to the US. Secondly, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

Those two events together suggested to American political leaders that US access to the Persian Gulf was now in jeopardy, and this at a time when virtually everybody believed that the future well-being of the United States was directly dependent on our having access to Persian Gulf oil.

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http://www.vox.com/conversations/2016/12/29/14089888/trump-foreign-policy-obama-carter-bush-andrew-bacevich-isis-middle-east