Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [88]
The agreed-upon post-surge narrative offered little explanation for the bombs that continued to detonate in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. So even when reported, these developments remained essentially inexplicable. Hearing of some bloody incident in a mosque, marketplace, or government ministry, Americans shrugged their shoulders or averted their eyes, while carefully avoiding the question of what it all might mean: Even to permit such a question was to expose the flimsiness of the claim that Petraeus had engineered a triumph in the manner of the Emperor Napoleon. The general’s most noteworthy achievement was actually this: that in the Age of Petraeus, American soldiers and the American people tacitly endorsed Rupert Smith’s proposition—modern wars had indeed become “endless.”
Ironically, the surge thereby served to vindicate Robert McNamara. Back in 1965 McNamara had believed that Vietnam’s “greatest contribution” was that it was teaching the United States “to go to war without arousing the public ire.” Persuading the public to tune out, he believed, was “almost a necessity in our history, because this is the kind of war we’ll likely be facing for the next fifty years.”28 McNamara had misread the temperament of his countrymen during the 1960s; yet his error proved to be merely one of timing. By the time he died in 2009, Americans had learned to tune out their wars.
Finally, and most important, Petraeus’s putative success made it seemingly unnecessary to inquire further into exactly how the United States had bollixed things up so badly in the first place. If the collapse of Bush’s Freedom Agenda had cracked open a window for debating policy fundamentals, the surge slammed that window shut. In salvaging something from the wreckage of the Iraq War, Petraeus also managed to salvage the Washington consensus itself.
“Korea came along and saved us,” former secretary of state Dean Acheson once cynically observed, alluding to the way the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 ended political resistance to a controversial U.S. military buildup Acheson had been advocating.29 Advocates of the Long War and of the militarized approach to policy from which it derived could say much the same thing: In their darkest hour, the surge had come along and saved them.
The campaign to choose a successor to President Bush in 2008 told the tale. As is usually the case in U.S. elections, the contestants portrayed their differences as fundamental, notably so with regard to national security. Yet what actually ensued was a contest between different species of hawks. In one camp were those like Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin who insisted that the Iraq War, having always been necessary and justified, was now—thanks to the surge—successful as well. In the other camp were those like Barack Obama and Joseph Biden who derided the Iraq War as disastrous, but pointed to Afghanistan as a war that needed to be won. No prominent figure in either party came within ten feet of questioning the logic of configuring U.S. forces for global power projection or the wisdom of maintaining a global military presence. When it came to the use of force, the various candidates vied with one another to demonstrate their bellicosity. Inevitably in such a contest, the hawks won.
By early 2009, when Bush handed the reins of power to Barack Obama, the Washington rules had once more been restored. In expressing his determination to shift the weight of U.S. military efforts from Iraq to Afghanistan—“This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.”—President Obama put his own seal of approval on that restoration.30 The promise of change that had formed the centerpiece of Obama’s run for the presidency left the American credo and the sacred trinity untouched. In Iraq, the outcome remained uncertain. In Washington, the verdict was in: Here is where General Petraeus had left his mark.
GCOIN: SON OF SURGE
The onset of the Obama era found