Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

the United States—the downing of Iran Air flight 655 in 1988 along with the CIA’s overthrow of a democratically elected government in 1953 offering two glaring examples—became inadmissible.
    Taken together, just what “story” does this bloody sequence of wars, skirmishes, and kerfuffles tell? Upon examination, three distinct threads emerge, the first relating to ideology , the second to geography , the third to operational purpose (and by extension methods). To trace these narrative threads is to appreciate just how far in the wrong direction the military exertions of the past four decades have carried the United States.
    IDEOLOGY: THE RISE OF BOYKINISM
    From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, communism provided the overarching ideological rationale for American globalism and for the deployment of U.S. military power. With the passing of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet empire, that rationale vanished. In the 1990s, the national security elite sought to define threats in nonideological terms, with rogue states, ethnic strife, and mere instability among the concepts floated. None of these provided a sufficiently robust justification for continued American globalism.
    With the advent of the Global War on Terrorism, however, ideology came roaring back. Islamism succeeded communism as the body of beliefs that, if left unchecked, threatened to sweep across the globe with dire consequences for freedom. So at least members of the national security establishment professed to believe. Yet as a rallying cry, Islamism presented real difficulties. As much as policy makers struggled to prevent Islamism from merging with Islam in the popular mind, some Americans—whether genuinely fearful or mischief-minded—saw this as a distinction without a difference. Efforts by the Bush administration to work around this problem by framing the post-9/11 threat as terrorism ultimately failed because the term offered no explanation for motive. And motive seemed somehow bound up with matters of religion.
    During the Cold War, religion had figured as a prominent component of American ideology. Communist antipathy toward religion helped invest both anticommunism and the Cold War foreign policy consensus with their remarkable robustness. That communists were godless sufficed to place them beyond the pale. For many Americans, the Cold War derived its moral clarity from the conviction that here was a contest pitting the God-fearing against the God-denying. Since we were on God’s side, it appeared axiomatic that God should repay the compliment.
    From time to time during the decades when anticommunism provided much of the animating spirit that informed policy, American strategists (culturally Judeo-Christian, although not necessarily believers themselves), drawing on the theologically correct proposition that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship the same God, sought to enlist Muslims in the cause of opposing the godless. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 seemingly presented an ideal opportunity to do just that. To inflict pain on the Soviet occupiers, Washington threw its weight behind the Afghan resistance, religious zealots that U.S. officials styled as “freedom fighters.” When the Red Army eventually withdrew in defeat, God’s verdict seemed plain to all. The God-fearing had prevailed. Yet not long after the Soviets pulled out, Afghan freedom fighters morphed into the fiercely anti-Western Taliban, providing sanctuary to Al Qaeda, formerly part of the anti-Soviet phalanx, but now claiming to act at God’s behest as it plotted attacks on the United States. 2 Previously an asset to the formulation of foreign policy, religion suddenly threatened to become a net liability.
    So where to situate God in the post-9/11 ideological frame posed challenges for U.S. policy makers, not least of all George W. Bush, who believed, no doubt sincerely, that God had chosen him to save America in its time of maximum danger. Unlike