Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [70]
No sooner had U.S. forces managed to impose some faint semblance of order on Iraq in 2008, than deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan revealed that earlier claims of victory there had likewise been overstated. The Taliban were once again on the march and the United States found itself back at square one. By the time Barack Obama succeeded George W. Bush as president in January 2009, the phrase global war on terror had become an epithet, redolent with deception, stupidity, and monumental waste. Soon thereafter it faded from the lexicon of American politics.
Donald Rumsfeld’s transformation initiative followed a similar trajectory and suffered a similar fate. What seemed ever so briefly to be evidence of creative genius—Rumsfeld prodding, cajoling, and lashing hidebound generals into doing things his way with spectacular results—turned out to be illusory, and the RMA’s much-hyped formula for military supremacy ersatz.
Campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq intended to showcase an unprecedented mastery of war demonstrated the folly of imagining that war could be mastered. When he finally left the Pentagon in late 2006, Rumsfeld found himself running neck and neck with Robert McNamara for the title of worst defense secretary in U.S. history. The concept of transformation had become a symbol of the overweening arrogance and hucksterism that had characterized his entire tenure in office. Yet Rumsfeld’s failure—the bungled wars that discredited his military reform project—deserves careful examination for one specific reason: Out of that failure came yet another misguided effort to refashion the sacred trinity, namely the new era of counterinsurgency in which the United States finds itself today.
President Bush and his chief advisers intended the global war on terror to serve several purposes, not least among them to shore up the basic approach to national security that had prevailed since World War II. For Rumsfeld and others in the administration, transformation and the conflict initiated in response to 9/11 were component parts of a even larger enterprise. Their overarching goal was to affirm and even deepen the Washington consensus, while removing any remaining constraints on the use of American military power.
Forged during the early Cold War, the Washington rules once underpinned a strategy of containment: Washington’s declared aim had been to avert a domino effect, the loss of any one country to communism presumably leading to the loss of many others. As reconfigured in the wake of 9/11, the Washington rules provided the basis for the United States to promote its own domino effect, the forceful “liberation” of one or two countries in the Islamic world expected to unleash a wave of change eventually rippling across the entire Greater Middle East.
Yet implementing this new domino theory required the United States to shed any lingering reticence when it came to the actual use of force. Here lay the inspiration for the Bush Doctrine of preventive war: It offered the means to advance Bush’s Freedom Agenda. Rather than merely containing threats to national security, the United States would anticipate, confront, and eliminate threats before they actually posed a danger. By embracing preventive war, the Bush administration added a codicil to the Washington consensus, with massive (although largely unexamined) moral, political, and strategic implications. What made this doctrine of preventive war appear plausible—even alluring, in