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On May 10, 2004, Bush was still justifying the ongoing war as central to American efforts to encourage “the spread of freedom throughout the world.” U.S. forces were “steadily defeating” the enemy, he reported. American troops were “on the offensive, conducting hundreds of patrols and raids every day . . . responding with precision and discipline and restraint, [while] taking every precaution to avoid hurting the innocent as we deliver justice to the guilty.” The president expressed confidence that things were well in hand. “We’re fielding the most technologically advanced military forces ever assembled, forces that are agile and flexible, able to strike in darkness and in light.”26

All of this was fantasy. June 30 came and went, with the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty largely a fiction. Little of substance changed. The violence worsened. Tens of thousands of foreign troops continued to occupy Iraq and operate as their commanders saw fit. The war continued.

Rather than liberating Iraq en route to liberating the remainder of the Greater Middle East, the Bush administration had blundered into an immense cul-de-sac, from which it could not extricate itself. The campaign intended to highlight American military capabilities without precedent became instead an open sore—the very war that Colin Powell, while a serving officer, had vowed to avoid.

In November 2001, with U.S. intervention in Afghanistan just under way, Paul Wolfowitz had touted the Pentagon’s plans for reforming the military even as it waged the global war on terror. “We are getting it right,” he declared. “I guarantee you.”27

Wolfowitz’s promise reflected the confidence then pervading the ranks of the semiwarriors. Like so much else undertaken by the Bush administration, the guarantee proved worthless. Rumsfeld’s attempt to use the global war on terror as a device to validate his transformation agenda proved to be a massive miscalculation. Marrying the two together resulted in the undoing of both.

5

COUNTERFEIT COIN

President Bush had embarked upon successive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq expecting each to end quickly and decisively. Yet in each theater—with Iraq attracting the lion’s share of attention—fighting dragged on, increased in intensity, turned ugly, and consumed prodigious amounts of blood and treasure. The global war on terror morphed into what the Pentagon began styling the Long War, a conflict defined not by purpose, adversary, or location but by duration, which was indeterminate. For members of the U.S. military, war—not a cold war, but engagement in actual hostilities—was establishing itself as the new normalcy.

This new normalcy imparted a radical twist to the Washington rules. Not even the most hawkish proponent of American global leadership—not Allen Dulles or Curtis LeMay, not Maxwell Taylor or McGeorge Bundy—had ever proposed committing the United States to a policy of war without foreseeable end. Yet over the course of George W. Bush’s presidency, open-ended war became accepted policy, hardly more controversial than the practice of stationing U.S. troops abroad. Speaking in 2006, Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler, a senior Pentagon planner, bluntly put into words what had already emerged as a prevailing assumption: “We’re in a generational war.” He himself expected that conflict to last another fifty or one hundred years.1

More extraordinary still was the extent to which the country’s military leaders, and the American people more generally, accommodated themselves to this prospect. Even as the course of events (especially in Iraq) evoked widespread consternation, questions about the origins of the predicament in which the United States found itself remained unasked. It was a classic example of a symptom masking the disease. Even as a growing chorus of critics raged against President Bush’s “mismanagement” of the Long War, the national security consensus that provided the real, if unacknowledged, foundation for