Andrew J. Bacevich Quotes
Large-scale corruption persists, with Afghanistan third from the bottom in international rankings, ahead of only Somalia and North Korea. Adjusted for inflation, American spending to reconstruct Afghanistan now exceeds the total expended to rebuild all of Western Europe under the Marshall Plan; yet to have any hope of surviving, the Afghan government will for the foreseeable future remain almost completely dependent on outside support.
Andrew J. Bacevich, "The Never-Ending War in Afghanistan", Op Ed, The New York Times, March 13, 2017
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At first reading, this quotation appears to have been made in 2013 with respect to the American-led Coalition in the Afghan War in 2013. But this was 133 years earlier. Little had changed.
The government of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai was totally corrupt and preyed on the Afghan people. See {629318}. The United States had committed to the turnover at the end of 2013 the responsibility for maintaining the security of Afghanistan to the Afghan military and police forces who were being trained by the Americans.
In 2002 he thought that President George W. Bush was the fool American. He thought the invasion of Iraq was a terrible idea which was doomed to failure.
Stark was opposing the George W. Bush ordered Invasion of Iraq and the subsequent Iraq War. “Big George” referred to his father who it is claimed arranged a deferment for George W. in the Vietnam War. George W. Bush had never served in combat but was willing to order others to fight. Most of the strong advocates in the Bush Administration for the Iraq War had never served in the military or seen combat either.
War has always been a very expensive enterprise. The winner used to require the loser to pay the cost for years afterword, but with the Second World War the U. S. reversed the process. Since then winning a war has been extremely expensive, though not as much as continuing a war without resolution.
His view was that the regime change of ousting Saddam in the Iraq War just exposed the intrinsic ethnic, religious and political problems of Iraq.
the modern believe is that democracies are not prone to war, especially against other democracies. Seward, and some others believe that democracies can be pushed into war by politicians you do so for partisan political advantage. Politicians often have to show how tough they are.
What was remarkable was that all the Defense Department and military witnesses agreed with Lynch on this point.
Classic socialism thought that war was the greatest danger of capitalism. However in the 21st century the consensus was that the great capitalistic danger was failure and collapse of the ley capitalistic institutions like banks in a globalized world such as the 2008 Great Recession.
Andrew J. Bacevich Jr. is an American historian specializing in international relations, security studies, American foreign policy, and American diplomatic and military history. He is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. He is also a retired career officer in the Armor Branch of the United States Army, retiring with the rank of colonel. He is a former director of Boston University's Center for International Relations (from 1998 to 2005), now part of the Pardee School of Global Studies. Bacevich is the co-founder and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
