Yet in War in a Time of Peace, Halberstam's skepticism toward government power is missing. While he has a weakness for subversives, he here exhibits a more dominant characteristic: a craving for order in U.S. foreign policy. But he can't easily make a case for order if he admits that those who should have imposed it -- Clinton and his team -- consistently abused their foreign responsibilities. How else can one describe Clinton's financial misconduct with China, his bombing of a medicine factory in Sudan, and his disastrous push for a premature Palestinian-Israeli settlement in order to pad his frayed legacy? What we have is a paradoxical book: one where the U.S. is revealed to have had little foreign policy direction in the 1990s, but where the unprincipled officials responsible for this condition get off surprisingly easily, since Halberstam cannot censure the agents of his desired order.
Halberstam is also taken in by the institution he once so effectively demolished: the U.S. military. In several passages, he exalts the American weaponry used in the Balkans, particularly the latest Air Force technology. Like a Pentagon procurement brochure, Halberstam goes into lengthy descriptions of JDAMs (Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or "smart bombs"), the F-117, and the B-2 (which both "resembled bats, but the B-2, with a wingspan of 172 feet, resembled a bat on a diet of steroids"), replete with such military-porn terms as "collateral damage," "radius of accuracy," and "striking power." He seems to believe that high-tech air power is enough to win wars, a question that still generates angry debate in the armed forces.
Halberstam describes an institution whose bureaucratic instincts commonly clashed with the optimal policies, but he never digs deep enough to determine if there was something fundamentally flawed in the armed forces during the period under consideration. And yet a military institution that so grudgingly engaged in combat in the 1990s was no less anomalous than the one that sought out war at any cost in Vietnam.
Halberstam would not necessarily have written a better book by mocking the armed forces. But he seems to be a creature of the Zeitgeist. When he previously wrote critically of the U.S. foreign policy powers-that-be, his suspicions of state power were more pervasively shared than similar suspicions would be today. The rebels of yesterday -- which for Halberstam means those, like he, who disputed U.S. policy in Vietnam -- became the establishment during the Clinton years.
These were the same people who, directly or indirectly, were once Halberstam's allies. So when he describes in his acknowledgments his love for writing "about serious subjects for serious citizens," one gets a disquieting sense that this conceited statement is partly directed at the acquaintances who are also the subjects of his book.
It might seem that War in a Time of Peace was rendered anachronistic by September 11, when the U.S. embarked on a secular crusade against myriad axes of evil, ending a decade and more of foreign policy floundering. Not entirely. Halberstam outlines a period when America's strategy overseas suffered from an absence of meaning. But what Bush and his entourage, and Halberstam for that matter, cannot quite grasp is that foreign policy meaninglessness is a splendid luxury, not something to be lamented.
For the U.S. establishment, the Cold War gave foreign policy pervasive significance. Where Halberstam describes the vacuum that followed the collapse of containment, George W. Bush has used the events of September 11 to fill this vacuum. But are Americans eager to follow? Most were happy to enjoy 10 years of peace, when foreign policy commitments only marginally disturbed their daily lives. What made September 11 traumatic was that it broke this tranquil, parochial lethargy -- a lethargy most Americans today doubtless crave, regardless of how the administration (and "national greatness" thinkers of all stripes) exploit September 11 to advance an agenda of intercontinental browbeating.
Though George W. Bush has been depicted as a man of popular tastes, his mood since the attacks has differed from that of many of his countrymen. The president has developed an appetite for world supremacy. Apparently, you can take the president out of the empire, but you can't take the empire out of the president. Bush and his administration seem firm in the belief that America has a mission to set the world straight. It is unfortunate that Halberstam, who wrote so luminously about the hazards of American overconfidence in Vietnam, should regret the loss of this particularly dangerous sense of mission.
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