Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (4 page)

Furthermore, the collaboration forged between government and governed yielded more than victory abroad. At home, it dramatically enhanced the standing of the former while reinvigorating the latter. The Great Depression had undermined the legitimacy of the American political system, prompting doubts about the viability of democratic capitalism. World War II restored that lost legitimacy with interest. As a people, Americans emerged from the war reassured that prosperity was indeed their birthright and eager to cash in on all that a fully restored American dream promised. Thanks to FDR’s masterly handling of strategy, those gains came at a decidedly affordable price. War waged by the people had produced battlefield success and much more besides.

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THE GREAT DECOUPLING

After September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush inaugurated the Global War on Terrorism, he saw another such victory ahead, one that would again refurbish and restore the nation’s sense of purpose. “This time of adversity,” the president declared in his 2002 State of the Union Address, “offers a unique moment of opportunity, a moment we must seize to change our culture.” With the Afghan War seemingly all but won and an invasion of Iraq in the offing, Bush laid out his vision of renewal. “For too long,” he lamented, “our culture has said, ‘If it feels good, do it.’” No more, however. With the advent of global war, Americans were finding inspiration in heroic new role models, the president believed. The implications promised to be transformative.
“Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: ‘Let’s roll.’ In the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like … a Nation that serves goals larger than self.”

No such transformation ensued. Indeed, the way President Bush chose to wage his war ensured a contrary result. If anything, the war on terror, stretching across more than a decade, served to mask a preexisting cultural crisis while setting the stage for large-scale economic calamity. In stark contrast to the Civil War and World War II, it depleted the nation’s stores of moral capital, leaving in its wake cynicism and malaise along with chronic dysfunction. It impelled the country on a downward, not an upward, trajectory.

WHOSE WAR?

Embarking upon what he himself unfailingly described as an enterprise of vast historic significance, Bush wasted no time in excluding the American people from any real involvement. Choosing war, he governed as if there were no war.

“We have suffered great loss,” the president acknowledged in a nationally televised address shortly after 9/11.
“And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment … The advance of human freedom … now depends on us. Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.”

But who exactly was this
we?
To whom was the president referring in his repeated and fervent use of the first-person plural?
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It soon became apparent that Bush’s understanding of
we
differed substantially from Abraham Lincoln’s “we here highly resolve” at Gettysburg. It differed more drastically still from FDR’s in the post–Pearl Harbor declaration: “We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way.”
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Bush did not intend his
we
to be taken literally. It was nothing more than a rhetorical device, a vehicle for posturing. Minimizing collective inconvenience rather than requiring collective commitment became the distinctive signature of his approach to war management.

From the very outset, Bush made it clear that he wanted members of the public to carry on as before. After all, to suspend the pursuit of individual happiness (defined in practice as frantic consumption) was to hand the terrorists a “victory.” So within three weeks of the 9/11 attacks, the president was urging his fellow citizens to “enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” To facilitate such excursions, the president persuaded Congress to cut taxes, a 2003 tax relief measure coming on top of one that he had already signed into law prior to 9/11.

In effect, George W. Bush inverted the stern inaugural charge issued by John F. Kennedy in 1961: “Ask not what your country can do for you.” After 9/11, citizens had no need to ask. The Bush administration sought to anticipate their desires. To purchase support for or acquiescence in his global war (and the invasion and occupation of two countries in the Greater Middle East), the administration, with congressional approval, distributed bonuses at home.

Americans had little difficulty interpreting the president’s prompts. In short order, the
we
called upon to advance the cause of human freedom took a backseat to the
we
called upon to enjoy life, whether in Disney World or elsewhere. Thus encouraged, Americans disengaged from Bush’s war, leaving to others the task of waging it.

THE THREE NO’S

Senior military and civilian officials who managed World War II had viewed public support for the war effort as both critical and finite, an essential asset to be carefully nurtured and no less carefully expended. Throughout the war years, concern that citizens might balk at marching orders not to their liking remained omnipresent. Hence the pervasive propaganda aimed at sustaining morale on the home front while painting a bright picture of all that peace promised to bring in its wake. Hence, too, the determination of Pentagon planners to avoid asking of Americans more than they were willing to give.

After 9/11, the Bush administration freed itself of any such concerns. It did so by reformulating the allotted wartime role of the public. “We’re at war,” President Bush told his vice president on the morning of the attacks, and “someone’s going to pay.”
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What soon became clear was that the president’s definition of
someone
did not include the citizens of the United States.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, “United We Stand” held sway as something akin to a national slogan, expressing shared hurt, anger, and determination. Not for long, however. Within a matter of months, although nominally “at war,” the nation began behaving as if it were “at peace.” Americans had by then settled on three first-person-plural axioms to describe the unofficial but inviolable parameters of their prospective wartime role.

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First, we will not change.

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Second, we will not pay.

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Third, we will not bleed.

According to the first postulate, Americans, heeding their president, refused to permit war to exact demands. Instead, they remained intent on pursuing their chosen conceptions of life, liberty, and happiness, unhindered and unencumbered. They would accept no reordering of national priorities intended to facilitate the war’s prosecution.

According to the second postulate, Americans had no responsibility to cover the financial costs entailed by war’s conduct. The books need not balance. Increases in military expenditures, therefore, required neither increased revenue nor a willingness to accept reduced services. Choosing between guns and butter was neither necessary nor acceptable. To fund war, the government simply borrowed.

According to the third postulate, actual participation in war became entirely a matter of personal choice. Service (and therefore sacrifice) was purely voluntary. War no longer imposed collective civic duty—other than the necessity of signaling appreciation for those choosing to serve.

As long as it abided by these proscriptions, Washington could pretty much make war whenever, wherever, and however it wanted, assured of at least tepid popular consent. In this decoupling of the people from war waged in their name lay the Bush administration’s most notable post-9/11 accomplishment. In place of a Lockean social contract based on the concept of reciprocal responsibility, a promissory note now provided the basis for waging war—and the people who so casually endorsed that note had no expectation of ever having to settle accounts.

As a consequence, war became exclusively the province of the state rather than the country as a whole. Invited to indulge in cheap grace, Americans willingly complied. Virtually from the outset, George W. Bush’s Global War on Terrorism was never America’s war in the sense that Lincoln’s war and FDR’s war had been. It was—and at least in some quarters was intended to be—Washington’s war.

To appreciate this distinction, one need only note the gap between the label Washington affixed to its war and the war’s actual conduct as it unfolded. To describe the conflict as a Global War on Terrorism obfuscated existing realities. Neither global in scope nor directed exclusively against terrorists, it was both far less and much more than its name implied. According to President Bush, the events of September 11, 2001, coming out of nowhere, inaugurated the conflict. More accurately, the 9/11 attacks intensified a struggle that had been ongoing for decades. At issue most immediately was the fate of a specific region: who would determine the future of the oil-rich, strategically critical Greater Middle East? At issue in a broader sense were expectations, widely entertained in Washington following the Cold War, of an ongoing open-ended American Century—an extended period of unquestioned primacy exercised by the nation specifically charged with charting history’s course. In this sense, the stakes were not only geopolitical but also teleological. Through war, Washington set out after 9/11 to teach an object lesson to anyone tempted to challenge its writ. And through war, its reservoir of moral capital once more filled to the brim, the United States would acquire the wherewithal to sustain a global Pax Americana into the distant future. Such at least was the expectation.

Despite such lofty stakes, the conflict almost immediately became and thereafter remained a third-person-plural enterprise:
they
fought while
we
watched, uninvolved and seemingly unaffected. The fighting
they
were American soldiers, members of an institution that already existed at a considerable remove from the rest of society. With something approaching unanimity, ordinary citizens professed fervent admiration for these “warriors.” Yet admiration did not imply mutual understanding, much less intimacy. The actual relationship between soldiers and society consisted for the most part of prayers offered at Sunday services, pontificating by politicians of all stripes, and scripted rituals of respect inserted into celebratory occasions like the Super Bowl or the World Series.

In the corporate world, supporting the troops offered just one more way to sell product. “Here’s to the heroes,” Budweiser ad copy proclaimed. Depicting itself as “Proudly Serving Those Who Serve,” the beer-making behemoth promised that for every home run hit during the 2011 major league baseball season it would donate one hundred dollars “to an organization that helps the families of fallen soldiers.” This “Salute From the Stands” was something in which every fan could participate: “Please raise your Budweiser and join us in honoring those who keep our nation safe and free every Thirst Inning.”
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Inviting those preferring Miller to Bud to “give a veteran a piece of the High Life,” the Miller Brewing Company rolled out its own campaign to support the troops. “For every High Life cap or tab you drop off at participating retailers or mail in,” the brewer promised to “donate 10¢ toward High Life Experiences for returning vets,” including “sports events, concerts, outdoor adventures and more.” For patriotic beer drinkers, it was a risk-free proposition: “Live the High Life. Give the High Life.”
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So when it came to fighting and dying, not only did
we
get a free pass—we could feel good about it.
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Courtesy of Bush administration tax policies, moreover, that free pass extended to defraying the war’s financial costs. That obligation would fall on a second
they—
future generations of taxpayers, oblivious to the fate awaiting them.

Bush had inherited from his predecessor a balanced federal budget. After 9/11, increased military outlays combined with tax cuts drove that budget into the red. There it stayed. For fiscal year 2009, the year he left office, the federal deficit reached a staggering $1.4 trillion. Over the two terms of his presidency the size of the national debt more than doubled, ballooning from $3.3 trillion to $7.5 trillion. Worse still, the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude toward budgetary orthodoxy—Vice President Dick Cheney announced that “deficits don’t matter”—imparted to fiscal policy a momentum that proved exceedingly difficult to reverse.
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Trillion-dollar annual shortfalls became routine.

Outsourcing war’s conduct to a small warrior class—less than 1 percent of the total population—evoked occasional twinges of discomfort. Could such an approach to warfighting comport with authentic democratic principles? Obliging as-yet-unborn generations to foot the bill for wars in which they had no voice elicited similar expressions of concern. Were such arrangements consistent with the basic requirements of fairness? Such qualms of conscience did not produce action, however. No longer seeing war as an endeavor requiring collective effort on a national scale, adamant in refusing to curb their compulsion to consume, Americans swallowed hard, averted their gaze from the consequences of actions undertaken in their name, and did as President Bush bid them to do. So as war became permanent and perpetual, it also ceased to matter, at least as far as the great majority of Americans were concerned. Patterson’s Axiom—the very concept of rights entailing obligations—had become a dead letter.

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TALLYING UP

A post-9/11 approach to conducting war that found the country more or less AWOL while leaving the state free to do as it pleased ought to have set off alarms. Here was an arrangement rife with potential for moral and ethical mischief. Yet in politics, outcomes almost invariably matter more than issues of right and wrong. In evaluating the Global War on Terrorism, the overriding question is necessarily this one: has more than a decade of armed conflict enhanced the well-being of the American people? The wars fought by citizen-soldiers at the behest of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt did so. Can we say the same for the war launched by George W. Bush and perpetuated in modified form by Barack Obama?