Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [80]
So the bold talk of eliminating tyranny disappeared. The president’s minions ceased to lecture foreign leaders in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia on their duty to implement American-style liberal reforms. Apart from bitterenders bunkered in the editorial offices of the Weekly Standard or the National Review, even devout right wingers were increasingly hard-pressed to take the Freedom Agenda seriously. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad,” they had once chanted. “Real men want to go to Tehran.”6 By 2007, simply keeping Tehran out of Baghdad seemed a sufficiently ambitious goal.
In reality, the operative rationale for continuing the struggle in Iraq no longer extended beyond that country’s borders. In a global war that had become devoid of discernible purpose, the surge now served as the administration’s substitute for strategy. Nowhere was the absence of overarching strategic purpose more apparent than with respect to Afghanistan, the “forgotten war,” orphaned as a direct result of an ever-intensifying preoccupation with Iraq. Unlike Saddam Hussein, the Afghan Taliban had actually provided support and sanctuary to Al Qaeda in the run-up to 9/11; yet in a war that ostensibly aimed to destroy Al Qaeda, members of Bush’s inner circle continued to obsess about Iraq, while allowing Afghanistan to languish.
Among die-hard boosters of the global war on terror, the appeal of Bush’s course change in Iraq derived in considerable part from the opportunity it offered to change the topic. To describe the surge as a strategy was to distract attention from the extent to which strategy as such had ceased to exist.
So it was déjà vu all over again. As in the early 1960s, counterinsurgency—armed nation building to preserve a weak state beset with internal violence—took Washington by storm as the latest embodiment of military fashion. The administration quietly shelved expectations for an Information Age version of blitzkrieg enabling it to liberate—or impose its will on—the Islamic world. The surge did not constitute a new blueprint for eliminating global jihadism: President Bush did not contemplate U.S. forces employing COIN to pacify the Greater Middle East neighborhood by neighborhood and village by village. He was merely attempting to prevent the Iraq War from ending in the sort of outright defeat that might call attention to the defects of the Washington rules.
KING DAVID
Given the Republican Party’s professed aversion to anything that even remotely smacks of social engineering, the Bush administration’s revival of counterinsurgency qualifies as astonishing. That the original impetus for that revival came from within the officer corps makes it more astonishing still.
At the outset of the Long War, members of the officer corps had harbored about as much interest in counterinsurgency as in trench warfare. Although U.S. troops had repeatedly clashed with insurgents over the course of American history, little of that experience, ranging from the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans who impeded westward expansion to suppressing Asian or Latin American opposition to the rising American empire, had been positive. By their very nature, counterinsurgencies tended to be drawn-out, dirty affairs. They taxed the patience of the American people and rarely did much to improve the standing or well-being of military institutions. Seldom did they yield anything approximating clear-cut victory. The biggest of all American counterinsurgencies—the agonizing Vietnam War—had ended in abject humiliation.
Despite this unpromising record, an officer corps that found itself mired in Iraq and Afghanistan decided that counterinsurgency deserved a fresh look. The mounting frustrations of the Long War persuaded influential figures in the army and marine corps—most navy and air force officers