Bush's war bill gets due finally

It's widely thought that the biggest gamble President Bush ever took was deciding to invade Iraq in 2003. It wasn't. His riskiest move was actually one made right after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when he chose not to mobilise the country or summon his fellow citizens to any wartime economic sacrifice.

Bush tried to remake the world on the cheap, and as the bill grew larger, he still refused to ask Americans to pay up. During this past week, that gamble collapsed, leaving the rest of us to sort through the wreckage.

To understand this link between today's financial crisis and Bush's wider national security decisions, we need to go back to 9/11 itself. From the very outset, the president described the "war on terror" as a vast undertaking of paramount importance. But he simultaneously urged Americans to carry on as if there were no war. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Bush certainly wanted citizens to support his war, but the support he sought was passive. It entailed not popular engagement but popular deference. Bush simply wanted citizens (and Congress) to go along without asking too many questions.

Approach

So his administration's policies reflected a business-as-usual approach. Senior officials described the war as global in scope and likely to last decades, but made no effort to expand the armed forces. It sought no additional revenue to cover the costs of waging a protracted conflict. It left the nation's economic priorities unchanged. Instead of sacrifices, it offered tax cuts. So as the American soldier fought, the American consumer binged, encouraged by American banks offering easy credit.

From September 2001 until September 2008, this approach allowed Bush to enjoy nearly unfettered freedom of action. To fund the war on terror, Congress gave the administration all the money it wanted. Huge bipartisan majorities appropriated hundreds of billions of dollars, producing massive federal deficits and pushing the national debt from roughly $6 trillion in 2001 to just shy of $10 trillion today. Even many liberal Democrats who decried the war routinely voted to approve this spending.

Bush seems to have calculated - cynically but correctly - that prolonging the credit-fuelled consumer binge could help keep complaints about his performance as commander in chief from becoming more than a nuisance. Members of Congress calculated - again correctly - that their constituents were looking to Capitol Hill for largesse, not lessons in austerity.

For both the Bush administration and Congress, this gambit has turned out to be clever rather than smart. The ongoing crisis on Wall Street has now, in effect, ended the Bush presidency. Meanwhile, a month before elections, panic-stricken members of Congress are desperately trying to insulate Main Street from the effects of that crisis - or at least to pass the blame onto someone else.

But in less obvious ways, the crisis also renders a definitive verdict on the country's post-9/11 national security strategy. When the Americans turned their back to enjoying life, their hankering for prosperity without pain deprived the administration of the wherewithal needed over the long haul to achieve some truly ambitious ends.

Even today, the scope of those ambitions is not widely understood, in part due to the administration's own obfuscations. After September 2001, senior officials described US objectives as merely defensive, designed to prevent further terrorist attacks. Or they wrapped America's purposes in the gauze of ideology, saying that our aim was to spread freedom and eliminate tyranny. But in reality, the Bush strategy conceived after 9/11 was expansionist, shaped above all by geopolitical considerations. The central purpose was to secure US pre-eminence across the strategically critical and unstable greater Middle East. Securing pre-eminence didn't necessarily imply conquering and occupying this vast region, but it did require changing it - irrevocably. This was not some fantasy nursed by neoconservatives, it was the central pillar of the misnamed enterprise that we persist in calling the "global war on terror".

At a Pentagon press conference on September 18, 2001, then Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld let the cat out of the bag: "We have a choice, either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we chose the latter." This was not some slip of the tongue. The US was now out to change the way "they" - i.e., hundreds of millions of Muslims living in the Middle East - live. Senior officials did not shrink from - perhaps even relished - the magnitude of the challenges ahead. The idea, wrote chief Pentagon strategist Douglas J. Feith in a May 2004 memo, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally".

But if the administration's goals were grandiose, its means were modest. The governing assumption was that the US military, as constituted in late 2001, ought to suffice to transform the Middle East. Bush could afford to tell the Americans to go on holiday and head back to the mall as the indomitable American soldier could be counted on to liberate (and thereby pacify) the Muslim world.

Initial success

For a while, that seemed to work: The Taliban fell quickly, with little need for the US taxpayer to shell out for a larger military. But the Bush team turned quickly to Iraq, hoping to demonstrate on an even grander scale what the determined exercise of US power could achieve. This proved a fatal miscalculation. After five-and-a-half years, Iraq continues to drain US resources on a colossal scale. Violence is down, but expenditures are not. An end to the US commitment is nowhere in sight.

Yet there is an economic lesson here as well . "We have more will than wallet," the president's father said in 1989 during his own inaugural address. That is again painfully true today. The 2008 election finds the Pentagon cupboard bare, the US Treasury depleted, the economy in disarray and the average American household feeling acute distress. Profligacy at home and profligacy abroad have combined to produce a grave crisis. This time around, telling Americans to head for Disney World won't work. The credit card's already maxed out, and the banks are refusing to pony up for new loans.

It's not surprising that people don't cotton to the idea of spending $700 billion to bail out Wall Street. Nor should they find it acceptable to spend as much as that, or more, to perpetuate a misguided and never-ending global war. But like it or not, the bill collector is pounding on the door. Bush's parting gift to the nation will be to let others figure out how to settle accounts.

- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is 'The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism'.