Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [42]
Much the same thing, of course, occurred after September 11, 2001. Averting further terrorist attacks provided a rationale—or pretext—for launching a “global war on terror,” for shedding any remaining constraints on the use of American power, and for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. In its own way, 9/11 was also a streetcar that members of the George W. Bush administration seized upon with the same alacrity that Bundy and his colleagues had seized upon Pleiku.
As in 2001 so in 1965, the underlying purpose was anything but defensive. In the wake of painful tragedy, U.S. officials preoccupied themselves not with protecting exposed American assets (whether Camp Holloway or Manhattan), but with doubling down on the existing approach to exercising global leadership. In both cases they rejected out of hand the possibility that such an approach might itself render the United States more vulnerable rather than more secure. For Washington, the essential response to setbacks, whether relatively modest as in February 1965 or calamitous as in September 2001, is not thoughtful reflection but energetic action, preemptively diverting attention away from the existing premises of national security.
On his way back from Saigon, Bundy made a special point of reassuring Johnson that “U.S. policy within Vietnam is mainly right and well-directed.” Naysayers didn’t know what they were talking about and could be ignored. “None of the special solutions or criticisms put forward with zeal by individual reformers in government or in the press is of major importance, and many of them are flatly wrong.”62
In 1965 as in 2001, naysayers with access to the White House were few in number. In the wake of Pleiku, the role of lonely dissenter fell to Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democrat from Montana who was then Senate majority leader. In a city where esteem is the reward of well-regarded figures who don’t wield much clout, Mansfield was said to be much esteemed.
Yet his critique of the Pleiku incident and its aftermath merits our attention. In a letter to President Johnson on February 8, Mansfield had the temerity to suggest that the Viet Cong had penetrated Camp Holloway because the Americans there had failed to properly defend themselves. The problem, he told the president, was one of “lax” security. The failure resembled another recent incident, in Bien Hoa, where “we were caught off guard.” The solution to the problem was not to bomb North Vietnam. It was to do a better job of manning the perimeter.63
Much the same argument might have been made after 9/11: Nineteen jihadists armed with box cutters perpetrated the most devastating attack on the United States since the War of 1812 because security at American airports was lax. To avert a recurrence, the United States might have attended to repairing its defenses. Instead, within twenty-four hours, senior officials in the Bush administration were pressing for an invasion of Iraq, a country not involved in the 9/11 conspiracy.
As in 2001 so too in 1965, defense—protecting Americans from harm—never figured as more than an afterthought. At stake was a thoroughly militarized conception of statecraft to which those at the center of power remained deeply wedded. Those adhering to that conception—officials like Bundy, McNamara, and Taylor in 1965 or Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz in 2001—depicted the vigorous exercise of American leadership (by which they meant the vigorous application of hard power) as essential to peace. When leadership thus defined yielded not peace but war, questions naturally arose about the efficacy of that conception. Sustaining the Washington consensus—and preserving the status of those whose authority derived from their ostensible ability to interpret that consensus—meant suppressing such questions. In practice, this meant that the only permissible