Could ending our adoration of oil be the key to a peaceful future? 

Has the idea of American exceptionalism finally run its historical course in the big muddy by the Euphrates? A persistent critic of the Iraq invasion and an ongoing skeptic of U.S. military adventures pretty much anywhere, Andrew Bacevich is too much a scholar of history to believe that Americans have permanently lost their taste for foreign entanglements.

Still, this conservative gadfly of neo-conservative policies entertains some hope that the United States might be ready now to devote more time to fixing problems at home than to creating new ones overseas.

A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Bacevich has been attacked from conservative corners since he first challenged the presumptions of the war on terror. He argues that his limits-to-power perspective most closely resembles true conservativism, although he's content to leave the labels behind.

"I'd like to see us have a politics of principled progressives and principled conservatives, arguing out the fundamental issues of public policy related to social justice, fiscal responsibility, and sensible foreign policies," he says.

"I think that creative tension could produce the kind of policies that actually might be in the long-term interests of the country."

The editors interview Andrew Bacevich

You frequently criticize the notion of "American exceptionalism." Could you define that for us?

It's the idea that as a culture and a country we in the United States are different, that we have a God-given mission to the rest of the world. It's the presupposition that American values are indeed universal values.

The vast majority of Americans more or less unthinkingly subscribe to this belief. We know we are special. We know we are called upon to do great things.

This faith in our cultural exceptionalism is not unique to Americans. There are and have been other nations and societies that view themselves as the chosen people. But I think in our case that concept of chosenness, married to great power, makes American exceptionalism globally significant and dangerous. For all I know, the Finns think they're the chosen people, but they can think that all they want and most of the world wouldn't notice.

How did that faith in our national exceptionalism contribute to our experience in Iraq?

When George W. Bush became president, he did not in particular have a well-developed worldview or any particular principles related to foreign policy that he felt passionate about. He was kind of a soft realist. He talked about wanting to have a humble foreign policy. He was dismissive of nation-building.

But I think that he underwent a conversion experience on 9/11, and he came away as somebody who was converted to the Church of Woodrow Wilson. Bush now genuinely believed that as a nation we were called upon to remake the world in our own image. But unlike Wilson, he believed that the best way to achieve that was through unilateral action.

Now the idea of transforming and democratizing the greater Middle East as a national duty aligns neatly with the notion that a stable Middle East, dominated by American power, would be a place to reliably extract energy resources in order to sustain our way of life. But I don't think the decision to invade Iraq was necessarily cynical. I think Bush really believed invading Iraq was the right thing to do, and I think many of the people who supported his policies genuinely believed it.

Today that project has not fared too well, and I'm not sure too many people are willing to sign on to a crusade to democratize the Middle East any longer.

That doesn't mean that the idea of American exceptionalism is dead. I think it probably ebbs and flows, and it will no doubt come back because it is somewhere near the core of what makes Americans American. I say that with considerable regret.

Most Americans accept that our vast military capability is maintained for defensive purposes. Would you say that's a fair assessment?

The events of 9/11 alone suggest the extent to which defense as such doesn't figure as a priority for the so-called Department of Defense. The entire eastern seaboard was essentially left defenseless that morning because we had different priorities overseas.

The reality is we devote enormous energies into figuring out how to defend, let's say, Seoul, but nobody thought about defending Manhattan. So Manhattan was left naked to this very crude, primitive attack, which ended up causing so much devastation and destruction.

Indeed we've created an entirely different national security apparatus called the Department of Homeland Security that now assumes responsibility for the actual defense of the United States of America. So we have a department of defense that we don't call the Department of Defense, and this thing we call the Department of Defense, which should be called the Department of Power Projection.

This reflects a view that has evolved at least since the early days of the Cold War that advancing our vital national security interests is best accomplished by projecting American power "out there," and that's still the focus. Pentagon security strategists are far more concerned about what goes on in Baghdad or Kabul than they are about protecting Chicago or Los Angeles.

Why do we commit so much of our resources to conditions "out there" in the Middle East?

Oil, of course. Were it not for the existence of large reserves of oil and natural gas in that part of the world, we wouldn't care about it any more than we care about Uruguay.

The Middle East moved to the front rank of importance when it became evident decades ago that we no longer had the capacity to generate the oil necessary to sustain the American way of life as we have defined it. To this day the only way to sustain that way of life is to find a way to guarantee uninterrupted access to oil reserves abroad.

At the same time, our focus there is not completely about oil either. The Islamic revolution in Iran was tremendously significant. It deprived the United States of a valued ally, the Shah of Iran, who seemed to be a guarantor of regional stability. In his place it introduced a regime that was virulently anti-American, that had aspirations that were hostile to the status quo, and that challenged stability. Throw in the Soviet encroachment in Afghanistan, and the region begins to move up the list of strategic priorities.

Finally in 1980 President Jimmy Carter identified the Persian Gulf as a region that was vital to U.S. strategic interest and that if necessary we would use force to protect our interests there, what became known as the Carter Doctrine. Now we have a specific war planning responsibility focused on the region.