Reality Check for Republican Candidates

The men on a South Carolina stage last night who assured Americans that the war in Iraq is noble and necessary should try telling that to Andrew J. Bacevich.

Before the war started in 2003, the Boston University professor wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "if, as seems probable, the effort encounters greater resistance than its architects imagine, our way of life may find itself tested in ways that will make the Vietnam War look like a mere blip in American history."

Two months ago, he wrote in the Boston Globe that the war is “not only wrong but also stupid” and “poses a greater danger to the United States than do the perils it supposedly guards against.”

This week, Bacevich learned that his son Andrew, an Army lieutenant, had died while on patrol in Iraq of wounds suffered in a bomb explosion.

A West Point graduate and veteran of the Vietnam wars, the retired Lieutenant Colonel is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

Students taking their final exams in his course, The American Military Experience, were not told of the professor’s loss.