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America's War for the Greater Middle…
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America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (edição: 2017)

de Andrew J. Bacevich (Autor)

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3051485,331 (4.05)6
A critical assessment of America's foreign policy in the Middle East throughout the past four decades evaluates and connects regional engagements since 1990 while revealing their massive costs. From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift? Andrew J. Bacevich, one of the country's most respected voices on foreign affairs, offers an incisive critical history of this ongoing military enterprise--now more than thirty years old and with no end in sight. During the 1980s, Bacevich argues, a great transition occurred. As the Cold War wound down, the United States initiated a new conflict--a War for the Greater Middle East--that continues to the present day. The long twilight struggle with the Soviet Union had involved only occasional and sporadic fighting. But as this new war unfolded, hostilities became persistent. From the Balkans and East Africa to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, U.S. forces embarked upon a seemingly endless series of campaigns across the Islamic world. Few achieved anything remotely like conclusive success. Instead, actions undertaken with expectations of promoting peace and stability produced just the opposite. As a consequence, phrases like "permanent war" and "open-ended war" have become part of everyday discourse. Connecting the dots in a way no other historian has done before, Bacevich weaves a compelling narrative out of episodes as varied as the Beirut bombing of 1983, the Mogadishu firefight of 1993, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the rise of ISIS in the present decade. Understanding what America's costly military exertions have wrought requires seeing these seemingly discrete events as parts of a single war. It also requires identifying the errors of judgment made by political leaders in both parties and by senior military officers who share responsibility for what has become a monumental march to folly. This Bacevich unflinchingly does.--From dust jacket.… (mais)
Membro:Steve-Spann
Título:America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History
Autores:Andrew J. Bacevich (Autor)
Informação:Random House Trade Paperbacks (2017), Edition: Reprint, 480 pages
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America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History de Andrew Bacevich

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Mostrando 1-5 de 14 (seguinte | mostrar todas)
eading this book (which was published in 2016) after the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine turned eastern Europe into a conflict zone was a little odd. That didn't make the author's arguments invalid, just that some of the assumptions which went into them have proven to be a little more complicated. I did appreciate the author's tracing the history of American involvement in the Middle East back several decades and the exploration of how the Middle East became so essential to American national security. This alone makes this book a valuable read, although I do wonder if the author would make any changes after the events of the past six years. ( )
  wagner.sarah35 | Dec 26, 2022 |
Bitter (with justification) account of the ways in which the US has screwed up since the 1970s, assuming that it has the right to control the area in order to maintain access to oil and superpower status. Frustrating and painful and ultimately quite isolationist, with very little to offer going forward (which might be the most truthful thing). We keep fighting the last wars but not even learning their lessons, first not considering culture/Islam in our calculations at all because we were so powerful they’d have to give way, right? Then considering each anti-American Islamicist leader as the weirdo who needed to be killed, for much the same arrogant reasons, without realizing that (1) new leaders do tend to arise, as the graveyards are filled with indispensable men, and (2) often fragmenting groups further via decapitation makes things worse. ( )
  rivkat | Apr 29, 2022 |
With the benefit of hindsight, Andrew Bacevich provides a detailed narrative of the many missteps and failures the U.S. has made in the Middle East, from Carter's presidency, up to and including Obama's. Few if any of our military interventions or involvements are described in a favorable light, and that may well be the most accurate analysis. However, as a Monday-morning quarterback, it's easier to criticize the Administrations, Presidents, and military leaders once all the results are in and casualties are totaled.

One question these interventions raise is, if unsuccessful, why do we keep putting our military in harm’s way in the Middle East, if it results in no positive outcomes in the region, and why do we continue to follow the same policies year after year, Administration after Administration?

Bacevich describes two possible approaches we could take toward the Middle East.
(1), the military approach, which puts our fighting men in harm’s way and leads to trillion dollar deficits, and seems to create more new terrorists with each intervention; or
(2) to take the wait-and-see approach, keeping a watchful eye on the region, but keeping a more hands-off approach, similar to the cold-war posture we maintained with the Soviet Union in the 1950's through the 1980's.

He seems to favor that latter approach, yet the American public continues to be pre-disposed toward the kick-ass, tough-talking, military action approach, and electing leaders who reflect that attitude.
( )
  rsutto22 | Jul 15, 2021 |
Review of: America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History,
by Andrew J. Bacevich
by Stan Prager (3-30-2020)

“From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the greater Middle East. Since 1980, virtually no American soldiers have been killed anywhere else. What caused that shift?”

That stark question appears as a blurb on the back cover of my edition of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, Andrew J. Bacevich’s ambitious, brilliantly conceived if flawed chronicle which seeks to both answer that question and place it in its appropriate context. It is, of course, quite the tall order: how is it that a geography ever on the periphery of an American foreign policy that for decades could best be described as benign neglect came to not only dominate our national attention but be identified as central to our strategic interests? And how is that as this review goes to press—nearly four years after the publication of Bacevich’s book—America’s longest war in its history endures beyond its eighteenth year … in Afghanistan of all places?!
The short answer, I would posit, is oil. Bacevich is older than me, and I wasn’t yet driving at the time in 1969 when he notes dropping three bucks to fill up the tank of his new Mustang at 29.9 cents a gallon. But I was on the road just a few years later, and I recall sitting in long lines at the pump for fuel priced nearly ten times that, as well as the random guy who threatened to shoot a certain long-haired teenager for trying to cut line, and that same teen later learning how to siphon gas from parked cars. It was a time.
That tumultuous time stemmed, of course, from the 1973 oil embargo placed on the United States by OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) in retaliation for its support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Because he has styled his book “A Military History,” the author does not dwell on the gasoline shortage that so shook American self-confidence in the early 1970s, nor on the related and still unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict that remains as central to the theme of Middle East unrest as slavery was to the American Civil War. Instead, after a brief “Prologue,” Bacevich rapidly shifts focus to the Iran hostage crisis and the 1980 debacle that was Operation Eagle Claw, the aborted mission to rescue those hostages that resulted in those first American casualties referenced in that jacket blurb. This decision by the author to not accord oil and Israel their respective fundamental significance in far greater detail proves to be a weakness that tends to undermine an otherwise well-researched and well-written narrative history.
That author certainly has both the credentials and the skills worthy of the task before him. Andrew Bacevich is a career army officer, veteran of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, who retired with the rank of colonel. He is also a noted historian and award-winning author, someone who has described himself as a “Catholic conservative,” but defies traditional labels of parties and politics. He is a pronounced critic of American military interventionism, George W. Bush’s advocacy for so-called "preventive wars," and especially of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In a kind of tragic irony, his own son, an army officer, was killed in combat in Iraq. I have read two of his previous books: Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, and The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, both magnificent treatises that reflect Bacevich’s ideological opposition to spending American lives needlessly in endless wars. But treatises don’t always translate well into narrative history—in fact these are and should be entirely separate channels—and Bacevich’s tendency to blur those boundaries here comes to weaken America’s War for the Greater Middle East.
The author points to repeated epic fails in Middle East policy that take us down all the wrong roads, while experts in and out of government shake their heads in bewilderment, yet one administration after another nevertheless presses on stubbornly. Bacevich is at his best when he underscores a series of unintended consequences on a road paved with occasional good intentions that not only exacerbate bad decision-making but cement unnecessary obligations to fickle, illusory allies that then put up almost insurmountable roadblocks to disentanglement. Two salient and substantial examples are: the poorly-conceived U.S. support for rebels opposed to the Russian-friendly regime in Afghanistan that was to spark Soviet intervention in 1979; and, subsequent U.S. backing for the Islamic fundamentalist Mujahideen that was to later spawn Al-Qaeda.
There is much more to come—more perhaps intended and incompetent rather than unintended—and much of that is either utterly unknown or long forgotten for most Americans, including the 1982 suicide-bombing of the Marine compound in Beirut that killed 241 but somehow failed to tarnish the “Teflon” presidency of Ronald Reagan, who retreated while euphemistically “redeploying.” From the vantage point of Washington, the greater enemy remained the Ayatollah, and all efforts were made to enable the brutal despot Saddam Hussein in his opportunistic war upon Iran, a decision that was to fuel Middle East instability for decades and lead to two future US conflicts with our former ally. And Reagan was still President and still all-Teflon in 1988 when the US shot down through either negligence or spite Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, a commercial airliner with 290 souls aboard. George H. W. Bush led a coalition to liberate Kuwait from our erstwhile ally Iraq, but then left a wounded, isolated and still dangerous Saddam to plague our future. But, of course, it was under George W. Bush that the tragedy that was 9-11 was hijacked and turned into a fanciful “War on Terror” that ultimately was to embolden Islamic fundamentalism, served as a pretext for an illegal invasion of Iraq that strengthened Iran and utterly destabilized the region, and later bred ISIL to terrorize multiple corridors of the Middle East. You can indeed draw almost a straight line from the Afghan Mujahideen of 1979 to ISIL suicide bombers today.
Bacevich is masterful with a pen, and his history is so well-written that there are literally no dry spots. The problem I found was with the tone, which while legitimately critical of American missteps is often needlessly arrogant, eye-rolling, even snarky—all of which detracts from the primary message, which is indeed spot-on. My politics often align closely with those of MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, but I simply cannot watch her show: I find her breathless exhalations and intimations of “How-could-anyone-be-so-stupid?” and “We-told-you-so” coupled with lip-curling grimaces intolerable. Bacevich is not that bad here by any means, but there is certainly a whiff of it that puts me off. Moreover, while he makes a cogent case for why just about every policy we put in place was wrong-headed, I would have much welcomed the author’s alternative recipes. Bacevich is a brilliant man: I truly wanted to know what he would have done differently if he was sitting behind the Resolute Desk instead of Carter or Reagan or Bush or any of the others.
Bacevich does deserve much credit for his far more panoramic view of what he rightly calls the “Greater Middle East,” as he widens the lens to focus upon the often neglected yet certainly related periphery of the Balkans and the Muslim population in the former Yugoslavia subjected to ethnic cleansing. Few mention Eastern Europe in the same breath as the Middle East, but for some five hundred years much of that geography was integral to the same Ottoman Empire that ruled over present-day Syria and Iraq. There is a common history that cannot be ignored. But just as I was disappointed elsewhere that Bacevich failed to highlight the background noise of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that truly informs every conversation about Middle East affairs, in this case little was made of the bond between post-Soviet Russia and Slavs of “Greater Serbia,” which not only deeply influenced the Balkan Civil Wars but soured emerging US-Russian relations in its aftermath and resounded across the Islamic landscape. Likewise, the narrative swerves to take a peek at “Black Hawk Down” in Mogadishu, but the long history of ties between East Africa and Arabia remains unexplored.
America’s War for the Greater Middle East is divided into three parts: the first takes the reader to the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War (which Bacevich brands as “Second Gulf War”), and the second wraps up on the eve of 9-11. But it is the last part, dominated by the Iraq War, that strikes a markedly different tone and smacks of the more somber, perhaps coincidental to Bacevich’s own deeply personal loss, perhaps not. Alas, none of the sections are large enough to bear the weight of the material.
Rarely would I lobby for any book to be longer, but in this case the 370 pages in my edition—plus the copious notes and excellent maps—is simply not enough. The topic not only deserves but demands more. This book should either be three times longer or, better still, should be a three-volume series. A more comprehensive historical background—including the echo of the greater Ottoman heritage and the Russo-British grapple for Central Asia—of this entire milieu is requisite for getting a grasp upon how we got here. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict demands more focus. As does the Shia-Sunni division. And the relationships between Arab and non-Arab states, as well as the ties that transcend the regional to extend to Africa and Europe and beyond. There is no hope of a better grasp of all that has gone wrong with American entanglement in the Middle East without all of that and much more.
Given all these reservations, the reader of this review might be surprised that I nevertheless recommend this book. Warts and all, there is no other work out there that connects the dots of America’s involvement in the Middle East as well as it does, even as it cries for more depth, for more complexity. I would likely be less critical of this book if my admiration for Bacevich was less pronounced and my expectations for his work was not so high. Even if America’s War for the Greater Middle East falls short, it deserves to be on your reading list.

Review of: “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History,” by Andrew J. Bacevich https://regarp.com/2020/03/30/review-of-americas-war-for-the-greater-middle-east... ( )
  Garp83 | Mar 30, 2020 |
This is very solid work, with an author who has many years in America's armed forces and as a university professor, and the reader can sense both influences in the presentation. The book is essentially a review -- a rather detailed one, considering its scope -- of America's involvement in the Middle East and the Muslim world, in particular. It begins with the failed Carter raid to rescue the hostages in Iran and ends with the current morass in Syria. (Trump is not covered, but nothing of great significance has changed.) While the author brings in narratives on lesser conflicts like Reagan's Lebanon, Clinton's Somalia, Obama's Libya, and even the Balkan states, he specifically details what he calls the four Gulf Wars: the Iraq-Iran war, the first Bush Iraq War, the second Bush Iraq War, and ISIS caliphate war. Afghanistan is most definite covered, too, but doesn't fit cleanly into the other categories. With all this analysis, the author does not pull any punches in assessing political and military actions or lack there of, in all of these involvements. I guess I should emphasize that despite the word "war" in the title of the book and the frequent detailing of military actions, this is very much an analysis of America's foreign policies along the way, so political actions, both domestically and globally, are assessed every bit as deeply as the military ones. Any person intending to be well-grounded in where America should or should not move next in this area, will do well to read this book, if for no other reason than to sharpen focus on where we are now, how we got here, and where we should go next. ( )
  larryerick | Aug 10, 2019 |
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A critical assessment of America's foreign policy in the Middle East throughout the past four decades evaluates and connects regional engagements since 1990 while revealing their massive costs. From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift? Andrew J. Bacevich, one of the country's most respected voices on foreign affairs, offers an incisive critical history of this ongoing military enterprise--now more than thirty years old and with no end in sight. During the 1980s, Bacevich argues, a great transition occurred. As the Cold War wound down, the United States initiated a new conflict--a War for the Greater Middle East--that continues to the present day. The long twilight struggle with the Soviet Union had involved only occasional and sporadic fighting. But as this new war unfolded, hostilities became persistent. From the Balkans and East Africa to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, U.S. forces embarked upon a seemingly endless series of campaigns across the Islamic world. Few achieved anything remotely like conclusive success. Instead, actions undertaken with expectations of promoting peace and stability produced just the opposite. As a consequence, phrases like "permanent war" and "open-ended war" have become part of everyday discourse. Connecting the dots in a way no other historian has done before, Bacevich weaves a compelling narrative out of episodes as varied as the Beirut bombing of 1983, the Mogadishu firefight of 1993, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the rise of ISIS in the present decade. Understanding what America's costly military exertions have wrought requires seeing these seemingly discrete events as parts of a single war. It also requires identifying the errors of judgment made by political leaders in both parties and by senior military officers who share responsibility for what has become a monumental march to folly. This Bacevich unflinchingly does.--From dust jacket.

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