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American idol: could ending our adoration of oil be the key to a peaceful future?

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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."

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...

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