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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