Readers who don't know Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich would do well to watch yesterday's "Bill Moyers Journal," the weekly interview program on America's public TV channel, PBS. You can see it in a very clear video here. I cannot recommend it strongly enough, for Bacevich, more than almost any other observer of American foreign policy, clearly sees imperial overreach as an existential threat - but a natural outgrowth of American society's "profligacy."
The PBS website also has a great service of providing the transcript, which is here. Bill Moyers told Bacevich, "It's been a long time since I've read a book in which I highlighted practically every third sentence. So, it took me a while to read, what is in fact, a rather short book." The same could be said of the transcript of this hour-long program. But here's a selection:
- The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire...
- There was a time, seventy, eighty, a hundred years ago, that we Americans sat here in the western hemisphere, and puzzled over why British imperialists went to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We viewed that sort of imperial adventurism with disdain. But, it's really become part of what we do.
- What I would invite [Americans] to consider is that, if you want to preserve that which you value most in the American way of life, and of course you need to ask yourself, what is it you value most. That if you want to preserve that which you value most in the American way of life, then we need to change the American way of life. We need to modify that which may be peripheral, in order to preserve that which is at the center of what we value.
Bacevich, who still refers to himself as a conservative, is above all a realist, and a straight talker. His 2005 book, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War, was in many ways a theme-setter for many of the conclusions of his latest book, the topic of the discussion with Moyers. Bacevich, who writes in journals from American Conservative to the Nation, has a two-part excerpt from his latest book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, in Tom Dispatch.