It has become necessary for us to demonstrate that the complexities, circumstances, challenges of the Greater Middle East will not defeat us. Why is that important? Because if authorities in Washington get to the point of acknowledging that American military power does not and can not hold the solution to the problems that beset that part of the world, then in effect the US will have admitted that there are limits to American power. And that we cannot do.

Historian Andrew Bacevich examines the Carter-era roots of America's four-decade military involvement in the Greater Middle East, and explains how the conflict's impetus shifted from oil acquisition and anti-Soviet defense to an existential defense of American power set the course for state of perpetual war in the Islamic world, invulnerable to political opposition, or its own dire consequences.

Andrew is author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History from Penguin Random House.