Andrew Bacevich, a historian of growing repute, a writer of substantial historical and social analysis and a self identified conservative Catholic, entered the lions’ den of KPFA Berkeley lefties on Friday evening. They rewarded him with a standing ovation for his impressive analysis of the American Imperial journey and “The Path to Permanent War,” as the subtitle of his newest book, “Washington Rules” calls it. Despite protesting to the organizer that he was not a good lecturer, he yielded to the request to give a formal presentation and gave the best natural reading of a paper I’ve heard in years, barely looking down, adding asides, and acknowledging the audience with remarks both droll and unvarnished.

The content was a 45 minute serving of the meat of Washington Rules, which he is flying around the country promoting. “Differences are interesting,” he began, “but it is the continuities which are instructive.” His subject is American foreign policy. Each new president comes into office promising great differences from his predecessor. Yet it is the continuities which are instructive. Those continuities are what Bacevich [BAY-sa-vich] calls “Washington Rules.”

Washington Rules is composed of two elements which are taken as a given, a kind of national wallpaper which we don’t notice but is forever present.

The first he calls the American Credo: a set of beliefs about how the international order ought to work, and that the United States, alone, is responsible for enforcing those norms. One of the first articulations of this credo was by Henry R Luce in early 1941, in Life magazine “[we should] accept whole heartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

If the first element of Washington Rules is the belief that American values should govern the international order the second is the means by how this is to be done. Bacevich calls this The Trinity — three parts to one means. The means is military might — staggeringly greater than is needed for self-defense.

The Trinity is: Global military presence; global power projection and a policy of global interventionism.

“Together, credo and trinity — the one defining purpose , the other practice– constitute the essence of the way that Washington has attempted to govern and police the American Century.”

From the era of Harry Truman to the age of Barack Obama the consensus has remained intact. The consensus is held together with little grounding in fact – from the Pentagon to the State Department, from bankers to industrialists to software makers; law enforcement, lobbyists, retired military officers … the list goes on and on. It is not only the elite, though the source is there. As he wrote in “The New American Militarism,” it is a large and growing segment of American society that holds such views — the military is the most honored and trusted institution in the country.

As he tellingly points out, “A people who had long seen standing armies as a threat to liberty [have now come] to believe that the preservation of liberty requires them to lavish resources on the armed forces.”

Not only does the vast military apparatus work in synergy with the credo to justify itself, it makes soft power — the art of listening, persuasion and compromise– seem unnecessary or even silly. “It creates excuses for the United States to avoid serious engagement: Confidence in American arms has made it unnecessary to attend to what others might think or to consider how their aspirations might differ from our own.”

Most interesting was is his view that post-Vietnam war in the United States, instead of an analysis of the credo and American interventionism the conversations in the military and policy elites took on the tone of post-WW I Germany. The loss had not been due to a wrong vision but to a stab in the back — many of them. While Germans scapegoated Jews and communists, American elites pointed at liberals, academics and the media as responsible for the loss of the war. The armies, to salvage themselves from the debacles, reconstituted themselves with fervor, and vowed this shall not happen again.

His talk is of course contained in the book, Washington Rules, which I strongly urge you to read. What was just as interesting were his answers to some of the questions zinged at him by his skeptical admirers.

Q: You say you are a conservative. Are you a Republican?

A: NO! And I never will be.

Q: What about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell?

A: Ohh! These are mean questions! Let be tell you exactly what I believe. I believe in traditional values. I believe that marriage is between one man and one woman — hold on now before you boo. I also believe marriage is a contract till death do us part, and that divorcing parents probably do much more damage to children than having two daddies or two mommies. I also believe this is a war that has been lost. There has been a vast change in American attitudes toward individual autonomy in the last forty years. We allow far wider behaviors and beliefs. If I want you to respect my traditional beliefs it is incumbent on me to respect your not so traditional ones. As to the military. It is already too separated from the citizens it is supposed to defend, it should not make itself even more distant by holding on to DADT. It’s time to let it go and make an army like the people from which it comes.

Q: What about the Time Magazine cover of the Afghan girl with her nose cut off by the Taliban?

A: The Taliban have a cruel and regressive view of the world. We all know that. But I don’t believe that foreign policy is made by the leadership elite sitting around a table saying, ‘what course of action should we take? Let me search my conscience.” If they did they would have to ask why the moral case for protecting that girl is greater than that for the wedding parties being bombed in her defense. If there is a moral obligation, and as a Catholic I believe we have some, why is it to Afghans? Why is it not to Iraq, where the lives of millions are in chaos because of our intervention? Even closer at home, why isn’t it to Mexico, our neighbor and supplier of most of the low paying labor in our country and which our foreign and economic policy have affected for years? If we have such a moral concern for Afghan women let’s declare a complete open border policy — that any Afghan woman who wants asylum will get it, and we’ll provide the transportation out.

If we have a moral obligation to anything we also have an obligation to pay for it — something we are not now willing to do. The costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are almost completely off the books. The national debt is enormous and no one wants to pay greater taxes.

Even in Berkeley they were lining up to have a word with the author and have a book signed. Bacevich not only opens minds about American power and intentions but about what real, rock-ribbed conservatives could be.