• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Yet as the bills piled up and the toll in casualties mounted (and as memories of 9/11 faded), the American people grew restive. Both Bush and the wars he had begun became increasingly unpopular. Someone had obviously screwed up. An angry season of finger-pointing ensued with the president and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, along with a few hapless generals, the favored targets.

The administration acknowledged the challenges it was facing, but remained determined. Rumsfeld famously described the road to victory in Iraq and Afghanistan as “a long, hard slog.” Yet the defense secretary did not waver in his conviction that “the coalition can win . . . in one way or another.”2

Loyalists committed to the Long War did not conceal their disappointment, but insisted on the need to stay the course. They combed reports from the battlefield in search of good news. They hailed the arrival of successive “turning points” that, in practice, never quite panned out. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was typical of those counseling patience. Writing five years after 9/11 when the situation in Iraq appeared particularly grim, Boot rejected the charge that “the Bush doctrine is a bust,” insisting that “it is far too soon to judge the results of the President’s grand strategy of transforming the Middle East.” Persistence was sure to pay off. “The Muslim masses just need to be shown that it’s possible to set themselves free.” Although there might be some bumps along the way, “vigorous American leadership can lower the body count and hasten freedom’s triumph,” which Boot characterized as “virtually foreordained.”3

For the Democratic Party, the Iraq War served as a rallying point, notwithstanding the fact that party leaders like Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Hillary Clinton of New York had voted in favor of the resolution giving a congressional stamp of approval to the 2003 invasion. Calculation rather than conviction shaped the party’s behavior: Iraq offered a perfect opportunity to make hay at Republican expense. Democrats denounced Bush’s war policies not because they were reevaluating the fundamentals of national security strategy, but because they found fault with the implementation of that strategy in Iraq. Having tendered their ritual denunciations, they then routinely voted the money needed to ensure the war’s continuation, tacitly signaling their continuing fealty to the Washington consensus.

Unwilling to take a principled stand against a conflict key members denounced as an unmitigated disaster, the Democratic Party made itself complicit in the war’s perpetuation. Claiming to oppose the war while supporting the troops, most Democrats staked out a position designed to maximize partisan advantage while minimizing political risk.

These maneuvers paid off handsomely in the 2006 midterm elections, which Democrats cast as a referendum on Iraq, promising that, if given control of Congress, they would act promptly to shut down the war. Invited to render a verdict, voters handed Bush and his party a crushing setback. In the House of Representatives, the Republicans lost thirty-one seats. In the Senate, six Republican incumbents went down to defeat. Now in the driver’s seat, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that “my highest priority, immediately, is to stop the war in Iraq.”4 Democrats wasted little time reneging on that commitment. What ensued was not a concerted effort to end the Iraq War, but a hastily contrived Republican effort to salvage it. Neither for the first time nor the last, an election touted as being about change produced results that served primarily to affirm the status quo.

For anyone with a taste for irony, the three years that followed offered a veritable banquet. President Bush opened the period by dramatically announcing a new course for Iraq. His successor, Barack Obama, closed it by deepening the U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan. In the interval between these two announcements came three singular developments,