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First, even as the enterprise once known as the global war on terror continued, it lost all coherence and began to metastasize. As the end of that war’s first decade approached, the United States found itself strategically adrift. Even as Afghanistan replaced Iraq as the primary focus of attention, a surreptitious collaboration between the Pentagon and the CIA was opening up two additional fronts, in Pakistan and Yemen. Meanwhile, hawks clamored for direct military action against Iran. There could be no doubt that the Long War stretched well into the future. Yet where it led was anyone’s guess.

Second, yet another American way of war made a dramatic appearance or, perhaps more accurately, reappearance: Counterinsurgency (COIN) displaced the discredited concept of “shock and awe” in which Rumsfeld and others had invested such lofty expectations. In fact, COIN offered no plausible remedy to violent anti-Western jihadism, the threat from which the Long War derived its ostensible rationale. By restoring an appearance of purposefulness to military activity, however, it helped distract attention from the strategic crisis confronting Washington. Here, in fact, lay COIN’s chief political appeal along with the true measure of its perniciousness: It enabled senior civilian and military officials to sustain the pretense of having reasserted a measure of control over a situation in which they exercised next to none.

Finally, helped in part by the illusions propagated by counterinsurgency advocates, the Washington rules survived. Notwithstanding the aimlessness of the Long War, their proponents, both in and out of government and in and out of uniform, were able to quash rising popular doubts about the credo and the trinity. In this regard, as the Age of Bush gave way to the Era of Obama, little of substance changed. That was the greatest irony of all.

COURSE CORRECTION

Had Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats made good on their promises to shut down the Iraq War, the implications might well have been profound. President Bush had repeatedly declared Iraq to be the global war on terror’s primary front, the must-win theater. Replace that must-win designation with not-worth-fighting and the idea that global war offered an antidote to violent jihadism would have collapsed. Americans might then just possibly have entertained second thoughts about the reigning conception of global leadership.

President Bush and his lieutenants were dead set against allowing that to happen. To forestall such a prospect—which Democratic leaders such as Pelosi never seriously contemplated anyway—Bush responded to electoral defeat by ordering a course change. He sacked the widely reviled Rumsfeld and jettisoned the approach to fighting the Iraq War his administration had steadfastly defended over the three previous years. In January 2007, he unveiled a new approach to be implemented by a new command team in Baghdad.

At its heart, as the president explained in a nationally televised address, was a freshly discovered determination “to protect the local population.” Rather than defeating the Iraqi insurgency, the United States would persuade the Iraqi people to deny the insurgents their support. Rather than periodically venturing out from large fortified base camps in hot pursuit of bad guys, U.S. forces would saturate and safeguard Iraqi cities, living among the people in small (and necessarily vulnerable) contingents.

To implement this new policy, the president announced his intention to increase the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq. Reinforcements told only part of the story, however. “A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations,” Bush emphasized. “Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities.”

In a country riven with ethnic, sectarian, and tribal divisions, reduced violence combined with good governance promised to make life better for the average Iraqi and thereby “help