U.S. Army colonel turned academic, Bacevich (The Limits of Power) offers
an unsparing, cogent, and important critique of assumptions guiding American
military policy. These central tenets, the "Washington rules"--such as the
belief that the world order depends on America maintaining a massive military
capable of rapid and forceful interventions anywhere in the world--have
dominated national security policy since the start of the cold war and have
condemned the U.S. to "insolvency and perpetual war." Despite such disasters
as America's defeat in Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis, the self-
perpetuating policy is so entrenched that no president or influential critic
has been able to alter it. Bacevich argues that while the Washington rules
found their most pernicious expression in the Bush doctrine of preventive
war, Barack Obama's expansion of the Afghan War is also cause for pessimism:
"We should be grateful to him for making at least one thing unmistakably
clear: to imagine that Washington will ever tolerate second thoughts about
the Washington rules is to engage in willful self-deception. Washington
itself has too much to lose."

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