Bacevich on the policy decisions that brought us "Endless War"

Andrew Bacevich has a long piece at Antiwar.com on the development of America's post-Cold War military policy. As ever, Bacevich is thorough and informative. This is all material from his new book, Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

Here's a sample:

Yet in the wake of the Cold War came not peace and harmony but unprecedented US military activism.  Here was the common theme of the otherwise disparate presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. During the quarter-century that elapsed between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of Donald Trump, the United States intervened in or attacked Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sudan, Afghanistan (again), Iraq (again), Libya, Somalia (again), Yemen, Syria, several West African nations, and, briefly, Pakistan. And given a presidential preference for employing Special Operations forces on highly classified missions, that list is almost surely incomplete. Simply put, reticence regarding the use of force vanished.

And this:

After 9/11, Congress quickly passed an open-ended Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), empowering the president “to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.” Of course, “terrorism,” as we are frequently reminded by the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan is very much in the eyes of the beholder. In effect, Congress had simply handed the commander-in-chief a blank check.

That AUMF became law on September 18, 2001, following a unanimous vote in the Senate and with only a single member dissenting in the House of Representatives. In the 18 years since, it has shown both remarkable durability and elasticity.  Best illustrating its durability have been the wars launched under its auspices. Best illustrating its elasticity was Barack Obama’s “disposition matrix,” a secret procedure devised by his administration empowering him to order the killing of just about anyone anywhere on the planet deemed to pose a threat to the United States.  All of this transpired with the cool deliberation and thorough consultation that was an Obama signature. Acting pursuant to the provisions of that AUMF, in other words, Obama codified assassination as an integral component of U.S. policy. In Washington, war thereby became a permanent undertaking that recognized no boundaries. 

 It's a great critique of the ongoing "Global War on Terror," and you should read the whole thing.