The Semiwarriors

[The2ndWheel]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070423/bacevich

In books, essays and op-eds, complaints about presidential power run amok have once again become legion--with the still-unfolding saga of the Gonzales Eight the most recent, if hardly the most egregious, example. These complaints derive from a common source: the perceived excesses of the Bush Administration, perpetrated under the pretext of prosecuting the Global War on Terror. Yet as a close reading of the books considered here makes plain, "unchecked and unbalanced" presidential power is itself not the problem but merely its outward manifestation. The imperial presidency is not the disease; it is a symptom. To imagine that getting rid of Bush will cure what ails the body politic is akin to assuming that excising a tumor will alone suffice to cure cancer.

The real affliction is more insidious. For want of a better label, call it "semiwar," a term coined after World War II by James Forrestal to promote permanent quasi mobilization as the essential response to permanent global crisis. A man who saw demons everywhere, Forrestal was convinced that he alone grasped the danger they posed to the United States.

Forrestal was also a zealot, the prototype for a whole line of national security ideologues stretching across six decades from Dean Acheson to Donald Rumsfeld, from Paul Nitze to Paul Wolfowitz. Geoffrey Perret's acerbic description of Acheson applies to them all: His "mind turned to the apocalyptic as easily, if not as often, as other men's thoughts turn toward money or sex." For semiwarriors, time is always short. The need for action is always urgent. The penalty for hesitation always promises to be dire.