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Andrew Bacevich discussed the U.S.’s over-reliance on military power to achieve its foreign policy aims in his 2011-12 Kritikos Lecture, “A Decade of War,” that took place on May 15th 2012 in the EMU Ballroom. In his talk, Bacevich addressed several urgently important questions: “More than a decade into the ‘Global War on Terror,’ where has that conflict taken us? What has it achieved? What has it cost? Although,” Bacevich notes, “the inclination to turn away from these questions may be strong, Americans should resist that temptation.”
Andrew Bacevich was a persistent and vocal critic of the U.S. occupation of Iraq from the outset, describing George W. Bush’s endorsement of such “preventive wars” as “immoral, illicit, and imprudent.” His son, Andrew Bacevich Jr., also an Army officer, was killed in action in Iraq in 2007 at the age of 27. In 2010, Bacevich accused President Obama of “want[ing] us to forget about the lessons of Iraq.”
A graduate of West Point (1969), Bacevich holds a Ph.D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton. He taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins prior to joining the faculty at Boston University in 1998. Bacevich is the author of several books, including Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010); The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008); and The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (2005). He is also the editor of a book of essays titled The Short American Century: A Postmortem (March 2012).
Read Andrew Bacevich’s blog at the Huffington Post.
