ANDREW BACEVICH: Hello.
I'm Andrew Bacevich, professor emeritus at Boston University's Pardee
School of Global Studies.
I'm here to talk a bit about a course that might interest you.
The subject is recent US military history.
But this is history firmly connected to the here and now-- the past that
matters today.
For well over 30 years now, the United States
has pursued a military project of immense scope and duration.
This course describes and seeks to understand that project.
Tick off the countries that US forces in recent decades
have invaded, occupied, garrisoned, bombed, or raided,
and where American soldiers have killed or been killed.
Just since 1980, they include Iraq and Afghanistan, of course,
but also Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain,
the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia,
and Pakistan-- all part of the Islamic World.
And the list goes on.
What are we to make of the enterprise in which US forces have been engaged?
Answering that question requires that we call it by its rightful name.
For over three decades now, the United States
has been engaged in what we ought to call America's War for the Greater
Middle East.
The premise underlying that war can be simply stated--
with disarray and disorder in the Islamic World
said to threaten vital US interests.
The adroit application of hard power will check those tendencies
and thereby help keep the world safe for the American way of life.
Choose whatever term you like-- police, pacify, subdue, dominate, transform.
Since 1980, the United States has sought to use military power
to determine the fate and future of the peoples inhabiting the arc of nations
from the Maghreb and the Arabian Peninsula to the Persian Gulf
and Central Asia.
Only in retrospect does the full magnitude
of this enterprise become clear, of course.
Back in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter
declared the Persian Gulf a vital American interest,
he did not intend to embark upon a war.
Like the European statesman who 100 years ago touched off
the cataclysm we know today as World War I,
Carter lit a fuse without knowing where it led.
Yet Carter initiated the first in a sequence of military actions
to which each of his successors down to the present day has contributed.
Look closely enough, and the dots connect.
Seemingly disparate events such as the Beirut bombing of 1983,
the Black Hawk Down debacle of 1993, and the Iraq Invasion of 2003,
along with many other episodes, all form part of a single narrative.
Our aim in this course is to connect those dots.
Seeing America's War for the Greater Middle East whole,
we will examine the war's origins and conduct.
We will learn the lessons it has to teach.
And we will consider the implications of those lessons for future policy.
I hope you will be able to join us.