WSJ editor: Andrew Bacevich is a "quack"
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Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, has an innovative foreign-policy theory. "At periodic intervals," he argues in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, "the American body politic" succumbs to "war fever," which he defines as "a sort of delirium" whose symptoms are "delusions of grandeur and demented behavior."
He offers a medical history beginning with the Spanish-American War: "Gripped by such a fever in 1898, Americans evinced an irrepressible impulse to liberate oppressed Cubans." Once it was all over, "no one could quite explain what had happened or why."
Then, "in 1917, the fever suddenly returned. Amid wild ravings about waging a war to end war, Americans lurched off to France. This time the affliction passed quickly, although the course of treatment proved painful: confinement to the charnel house of the Western Front, followed by bitter medicine administered at Versailles."...
Were they really? Half a dozen years ago would be 2005, two years after Iraq was liberated from Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. By that time, there was no clamor for more "wars of choice." To the contrary, opposition was mounting to the continuing American presence in Iraq. The next "war of choice" didn't begin until just a few months ago, in Libya. (Bacevich obliquely acknowledges that last point, writing that "the post-9/11 fever . . . lingers most strongly in the Obama White House, where a keenness to express American ideals by dropping bombs persists"--though our recollection is that the "keenness" for intervention in Libya emanated from the State Department rather than the White House.)...