Andrew Bacevich: Anti-Imperialist

Here is the way that U.S. military officers describe their purpose in Year Nine of the Long War: “Our goal is to take care of the people, not kill the Taliban.” The speaker is Captain Ryan Sparks, commander of the Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, currently engaged in operations that aim to deliver good governance to the people of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.

Yet this sort of thinking finds application well beyond war zones. The same edition of The Washington Post that quoted Captain Sparks included a column in which Michael Gerson paid tribute to America’s “tenderhearted legions.” Gerson was reporting on U.S. military contributions to earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.

Haiti, it turns out, is Afghanistan all over again, only with weapons kept on safety. One Marine officer interviewed by Gerson put it this way: “It is very similar to Iraq and Afghanistan, except that here there is no bad guy. We're helping the populace, winning their trust. This is right up our alley.”

U.S. forces today don’t win wars by defeating enemy armies; they win trust by distributing alms and doing good works. The Centurion has become the Good Samaritan. Gerson, for one, is impressed.

U.S. forces have distributed tens of thousands of jars of peanut butter to Haitian schools, he reports, while onboard a navy warship “a 96-year-old Haitian woman in intensive care is attended like an admiral.” All of this reflects what Gerson calls “a dramatic shift in military thinking,” credited to General David Petraeus, which today finds U.S. forces “practicing a kind of noninvasive surgery—providing structure and security, but cultivating community institutions that must continue to stand after America leaves.”

In Gerson’s world, the peanut-butter-distributing United States military just now discovered Haiti. His column contains no allusion to the fact that from 1915 to 1934 Marines occupied Haiti and ran the place. The “community institutions” that remained after they departed—mostly a corrupt, rapacious indigenous officer corps—didn’t exactly serve the interests of the Haitian people.

But why recall such unpleasantness? Forget history, and it becomes so much easier to persuade yourself that the presence of U.S. forces in the Caribbean or on the other side of the world represents not a latter-day version of imperialism, but the benign and generous purposes of the United States itself, helping to bring light to a dark and troubled world.

Here’s hoping that Haitians, Afghans, Iraqis, and other targets of American beneficence have memories as conveniently selective as columnists employed to produce sentimental drivel for The Washington Post.