Andrew Bacevich and an American 'Agape'

Andrew Bacevich has been among the most persistent and perceptive critics of recent American history. A couple of weeks ago, he wrote a piece at tomdispatch that marked a kind of turning point in his assessment of the American troubles. In light of a series of reports, polls, and essays about the American wars of the last decade, Bacevich concluded, tentatively, that America has begun to awake from a martial stupor. What follows is one part of my argument regarding Bacevich's significance. His thought seems to place him among critics such as William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, J. William Fulbright, and, even, George Kennan. Yet, I think the fact that Bacevich is Catholic complicates mattes a bit because he takes his religion seriously in matters of politics but not as seriously as someone such as Stanley Hauerwas. I am curious what others think.

Over time the war on terror became a strange amalgam of two traditions: an American penchant for hand-wringing when things go bad and an impulse to look for redemption in failure. Among the many critics who attempted to untangle these traditions, the best was perhaps Andrew Bacevich. Bacevich had credentials and the arguments similar to many other critics of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He saw them as part of larger ideological problem as well as a patchwork of policies and assumptions about the world since 1945. But to my mind, Bacevich has had a few things going for him: he had been a soldier, and so could see both sides of the deification of “our troops;” he became a scholar, and thus sought critical distance from events (for example, he has used to great effect Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought in picking apart an American theology of nationalism); he is Catholic, and has made clear that like Stanley Hauerwas he takes seriously the requirements of faith and the restrictions imposed by dogma; and finally he is a father who has suffered for American civil religion—he lost a son in Iraq.

This combination made Bacevich a particularly astute and acute critic of recent American civil religion. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University and has become well-regarded as a public intellectual whose recent books include Washington Rules (2010), The Limits of Power (2008) and The New American Militarism (2005). His moral accounting of recent American wars stand as Bacevich’s contribution to the deluge of critical appraisals of post-war and, more specifically, Bush-era delusions of grandeur. But Bacevich is also a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the U.S. Army, for which he served a year in Vietnam and, as a colonel, in the Gulf War. In a revealing comment regarding his training at West Point, Bacevich explained that a significant problem with the popular adulation of the military is that as an institution the military is not an expression of democracy but it’s opposite. The point is “to socialize you to the primacy of duty, while not encouraging you to assess critically whether the duty makes any sense,” Bacevich observed. “One is devoted to one’s country above devotion to anything else other than your family: country above the notion of humanity; country above the notion of what’s right or wrong or true or beautiful.” When a nation’s civil religion becomes increasingly defined and incarnated by war, the consequences are dire.[1]

Andrew Bacevich and his wife personally experienced those consequences in the most tragic way when they lost their son Andrew Bacevich, Jr., who was killed in the Sunni triangle north of Bagdad on Mother's Day 2007. A few weeks later, on May 21, his family buried him in a cemetery in Walpole, Massachusetts. Thousands of people lined the streets of the town to witness the funeral procession—a gesture that “profoundly moved” the Bacevichs. Andrew Jr.’s death was the first casualty of the Iraq War for Walpole. Andrew Sr. supported his son's decision to enlist in the military, but continued to write critically about the war and President Bush’s prosecution of it.

Was this a disjunction? Bacevich ruminated on it, especially after receiving two messages contending “that my son’s death came as direct result of my antiwar writings.” Bacevich reasoned that such a charge, while seemingly vile, forced him to consider “what exactly is a father’s duty when his son is sent into harm’s way?” He answered that like his son’s service to the nation as a soldier, he, as a critic of the war in which his son fought, was doing his duty as well. But both father and son saw the tragedy of war: for Bacevich he lost his son to the war he opposed and lost hope that speaking out against war would make a difference. Bacevich remarked ruefully, “Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it.” The cost of the war was in fact the point, he argued. It was about money—money to buy influence, money spent on the war that sank the economy, and money that was given to the family of a fallen soldier to pay them for the sacrifice they made for the nation. “I know my so did his best to serve our country,” Bacevich concluded. “Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.”[2]

Bacevich’s profound sense of loss came in the two areas that matter most: the personal and the mythical. He lost his son to a war that had done a great deal to undermine the mythical nature of the nation he loves. Through his work, Bacevich has expressed his agape for America—his love for the nation that has been hard-earned through suffering and extensive reflection. He is not merely a cold-water critic, dousing the hopes of Americans—he chose not to dash the wishes of his son when he wanted to serve his nation. He wrote in Limits of Power, “ironically Iraq may yet prove to be the source of our salvation. For the United States, the ongoing war makes plain the imperative of putting America’s house in order. Iraq has revealed the futility of counting on military power to sustain our habits of profligacy. The day of reckoning approaches. Expending the lives of more American soldiers in hopes of deferring that day is profoundly wrong.”[3]

Can Bacevich find something in the fact that he was right?

[1] Wendy Murray, “U.S. delusions: An army man changes his mind,” The Christian Century Magazine, August 11, 2009, accessed at:

[2] Andrew Bacevich, “I Lost My Son to a War I oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty,” Washington Post, May 27, 2007).

[3] Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 12-13.