Andrew Bacevich described the American condition — and a comment of my own

© 2019 Peter Free

 

11 September 2019

 

 

Former Army colonel Andrew Bacevich . . .

 

. . . generally has a good eye for what runs amuck in the United States.

 

Discussing parallels between our withdrawal from Vietnam in the mid 1970s — and parallels with what we are doing now in Afghanistan — he said that:

 

 

[M]ilitary service rarely encourages critical thinking.

 

Near the end of his famed novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald described two of his privileged characters, Tom and Daisy, as “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures” and then “retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness” to “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

 

That description applies to the United States as a whole, especially when Americans tire of a misguided war.

 

We are a careless people.

 

In Vietnam, we smashed up things and human beings with abandon, only to retreat into our money, leaving others to clean up the mess in a distinctly bloody fashion.

 

Count on us, probably sooner rather than later, doing precisely the same thing in Afghanistan.

 

© 2019 Andrew J. Bacevich, Reflections on “Peace” in Afghanistan: Leaving a Misguided War and Choosing Not to Look Back, TomDispatch (10 September 2019) (paragraphs split)

 

 

I would go further than Bacevich

 

The primary reason that the US gets into wars — is to profit its Military Industrial Complex.

 

It is, therefore, difficult to address American carelessness, combined with its incessant displays of greed, without addressing the religious concept of evil.

 

American avarice is significantly more than just carelessness in action. It is an infatuation with:

 

 

(i) profit-swilling wrongdoing

 

and

 

(ii) the stubborn unwillingness to recognize the human consequences thereof.

 

 

The moral? — Careless and evil

 

When a powerful nation can be labeled as irretrievably and often maliciously grasping, we have arguably turned ourselves into an example of Biblical badness.

 

Were Amer-i-kuh really a "Christian" nation, we would recognize this trait. And probably do something corrective about it.

 

In the context that Bacevich addresses, the predominating silence of American society's purported religious and spiritual teachers is indicative and cynically humorous.