Drift

were at war in Afghanistan within weeks, but we decided to keep the tax cuts in place anyway. Less than two years later we’d shipped troops off to a second and simultaneous war, in Iraq. Weeks after that invasion, Bush signed another huge round of tax cuts. We also started massively scaling up on the secret intel side of things. Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, in their seminal 2010 investigative series, detailed more than three thousand government organizations and private companies in ten thousand separate locations at work on counterterrorism. In just less than ten years, the US federal government had deputized 854,000 people with top secret security clearances, invented or reorganized nearly three hundred government agencies, and built office space equivalent to twenty-two US Capitols to create what Priest and Arkin call Top Secret America. The country never debated the need for this vast new superstructure, and still doesn’t, mostly because we’ve never been asked to cover the massive new expense. We just added the cost to the growing deficit, like we have the trillion or two in recent war spending.

This deferred-payment plan has been one of the few bipartisan points of agreement in the last decade. After Bush’s pre-Afghanistan War tax cuts, and the second round after the Iraq invasion, his successor followed suit. In 2010, President Obama added thirty thousand more soldiers to Afghanistan, extended the military stay there until 2014, ordered up a few hundred more drones for the CIA, and then—yes—extended those Bush tax cuts.

When civilians are not asked to pay any price, it’s easy to be at war—not just to intervene in a foreign land in the first place, but to keep on fighting there. The justifications for staying at war don’t have to be particularly rational or cogently argued when so few Americans are making the sacrifice that it takes to stay. When we invaded Iraq in 2003, the first official justification from the White House was that we had to secure Saddam’s dangerous piles of weapons of mass destruction. (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” was the Bush administration line.) There was plenty of evidence at the time that this threat was bullpucky, and that was proven as soon as we got there. So then we decided we were really there to get rid of Saddam. It took three weeks for Baghdad to fall, and he was caught in his hidey-hole by December.

So why stay after that, for a whole second year? For a third, fourth, sixth… eighth? Our official stated reason for staying in Iraq after Saddam was in his grave was a moving target: we were restoring order, we were protecting Iraqi women, we were keeping the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Kurds from killing one another, we were there until the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Kurds learned how to share power in their new government, we were there to defeat the terrorists, we were trying to reform Iraq as a beacon of Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East (There would be elections! We would have an ally!), we were there to make sure Iran didn’t undercut our fledgling democracy and make Iraq its Crazy Muslim Theocrat ally. As time went on, it didn’t much matter what the president said. Eventually the Bushies quit trying to be creative and just settled on the accusation that leaving would be cowardly. The entire justification for being at war—“Withdrawal is not an option,” the Senate majority leader offered three years into the Iraq escapade, “surrender is not a solution”—fit neatly on a bumper sticker. As Ford said, we don’t cut and run.

The Bush administration did start to feel some heat about three years into the war: the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress in 2006 and polls showed as much as two-thirds of the voting public opposed the continuation of the war in Iraq. The White House turned for help to the one national institution of sufficient size and public esteem to provide necessary political cover—the military. If the country didn’t trust the president anymore on the war or on foreign policy, the president would get out of the way and let the “commanders on the ground” take the lead. And they wouldn’t simply be in charge of prosecuting the war, they’d be commander-in- chiefing it too.

Bush charged the military with more than just coming up with a plan for how to win the war; he charged them with creating something he never really had: a vision of what a win would look like. And if the military brass was becoming the foreign policy maker in the Middle East, the Pentagon—can-do central—had just the man for the job. He was regarded in most circles as the smartest general we had, David Petraeus, a PhD in international relations from Princeton. And the smartest man in the Army decided the military wasn’t going to simply win a war, it was going to win a country.

General Petraeus had already authored a textbook on how the military would execute this maximalist mission. Field Manual 3–24 was a can-do treatise on how to fight wars that were both indefinite and expandable, a full-on twenty-first-century rewrite of US military doctrine. The new doctrine— counterinsurgency—was basically a plan to double down in Iraq. The US military could do it, if the rest of America could just relax. The general judged his new plan a much easier sell now than it would have been back in the early days of his military career, when the public was so… engaged. “Vietnam was an extremely painful reaffirmation that when it comes to intervention, time and patience are not American virtues in abundant supply,” General Petraeus had written while working on his PhD. He turned out to be right, about the selling part anyway. Field Manual 3–24 was such a hit in Washington policy circles that the University of Chicago Press decided to publish it for the general public under a more marketable title: The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. You can read the reviews at Amazon: “a nifty volume”… “the most important piece of doctrine written in the past 20 years”… “has helped make Counterinsurgency part of the zeitgeist… In short, this is not your parents’ military field manual.”

Counterinsurgency Petraeus-style turns out to be a very intellectually satisfying theory. The study is full of examples of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies from modern history. Perhaps if Napoleon had had the principles of Field Manual 3–24 at hand in Spain in 1808, the study implies, all of Europe and much of the rest of the world would be speaking French and enjoying rich food and fine wine without gaining weight. Counterinsurgency doctrine is elegant and fulfilling as an academic exercise, particularly for liberals: the story of how a public entity (that is, the military) does everything the right way, anticipating and meeting a population’s every need, and thereby wins. The idea is that the Iraqis will love us in the end, and want to be like us, as long as our military applies the correct principles. Americans had already absorbed the belief that our military was our most able institution, the one we could depend on, the one that could do anything we asked; counterinsurgency doctrine went further, arguing that the military not only could do anything, it should do everything. If there was a big national mission outside our borders, the military owned it.

For this new doctrine to work, however, our soldiers were going to be asked to do a lot more than fire their weapons at bad guys, or clear a city block in Baghdad. The new field manual quotes a classic counterinsurgency expert: “To confine soldiers to purely military functions while urgent and vital tasks have to be done, and nobody else is available to undertake them, would be senseless. The soldier must then be prepared to become… a social worker, a civil engineer, a schoolteacher, a nurse, a boy scout.” Deposing a corrupt dictator, finding the proper local leadership, establishing public utilities or judicial systems, running prisons, directing traffic, hooking up sewage pipes, providing medical care was now all the work of the 82nd Airborne. “Arguably,” says Field Manual 3–24, “the decisive battle is for the people’s minds.”

It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the entire enterprise. There are no Americans more impressive or more capable than the post-9/11 generation of Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers and veterans. But they are not superhuman. They cannot do the impossible. The general problem with the entire benighted theory of counterinsurgency is that there are no examples in modern history in which a counterinsurgency in a foreign country has been successful. None! The nearest example we have is in Indochina, where we pretty decisively lost the battle for the South Vietnamese “hearts and minds.” And it seems highly unlikely that Napoleon could have overcome Spanish resistance in 1808 by understanding that the population there was “accustomed to hardship, suspicious of foreigners and constantly involved in skirmishes with security forces.” In fact, you’d have to go back to the Roman Empire to find an army that ran successful counterinsurgency operations. The Romans applied rather different methods from those suggested in Field Manual 3–24. They generally involved the Old Testament tactics of killing the able-bodied males and enslaving the women and children. There wasn’t much social work involved.

But in a can-do institution like the US military, if Washington asks for a way to “win” something like the years-long occupation of Iraq, then win we shall. With infinite resources anything is possible: open checkbook, swivel wrist. “I have always felt that success in Iraq was achievable,” Army chief of staff George Casey assured a gathering of the national press in the summer of 2007. “It will take patience and it will take will. And the terrorists are out to undermine our will, our national will to prosecute this. But as complex and as difficult and as confusing as you may find Iraq—it is—we can succeed there. And we will succeed there if we demonstrate patience and