Open Source: Andrew Bacevich -- How War Without End Became the Rule

(For my ENG 102 students you can do an extra credit response to this episode--listen to it and write a 2 page response in which you analyze Bacevich persuasive rhetoric; For my HUM 121 students you can do an extra credit response to this episode--listen to it and write a 2 page response in which you analyze Bacevich's perspective in light of our Peace and Conflict Studies theories/concepts. Click the link at the bottom of this page and once you are on the website, go to the top where you see "listen to the conversation" click on the "play" button at the top of the page.)

Andrew Bacevich: how war without end became the rule
Open Source



Andrew Bacevich is the soldier turned writer who’s still unlearning and puncturing the Washington Rules of national security. The rules have turned into doctrines, he’s telling us, of global war forever. He is talking about the scales that have fallen from the eyes of a slow learner, as he calls himself — a dutiful, conformist Army officer who woke up at the end of the Cold War twenty years ago to the thought that the orthodoxy he’d accepted was a sham.

Andrew Bacevich’s military career ran from West Point to Vietnam to the first Gulf War in 1991. The short form of the story he’s been writing for a decade now is: how unexamined failure in Vietnam became by today a sort of repetition compulsion in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington Rules is Andrew Bacevich’s fourth book in a project to unmask American empire, militarism, over-reach and what sustains them.

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