More from Bacevich

Here is some more from A. Bacevich's newest book, "Washington Rules."

"Even as the [Kennedy] administration sought to widen its edge over the soviet union in nuclear striking power and worked feverishly to subvert the Cuban revolution, the men of the Kennedy inner circle remained certain of their good intentions. They abhorred war and yearned for permanent peace. If peace somehow remained elusive, the fault must necessarily lie with others - with the recklessness [or the malevolence] of Fidel Castro or Nikita Khrushchev in the early 1960s, and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and Al Qaeda's bin Laden at a later date, all of whom maliciously misconstrued America's motives or stubbornly refused to endorse America's benign vision for world order.

"When some event disrupts the American pursuit of peace - the missile crisis of 1962, the o0verthrow of the Shah...in 1979,...Hussein's assault on Kuwait in 1990, or the terrorist attacks of 9/11 - those exercising power in Washington invariably depict the problem as appearing out of the blue, utterly devoid of historical context. The United States is either the victim or an innocent bystander, Washington's own past actions possessing no relevance to the matter at hand. Critics of the reigning national security consensus - skeptical scholars or political radicals - might suggest otherwise, but in the corridors of power such dissenters have no standing." [pp. 85-86]