362 a fterword
the presidency in wartime. Th is refl ected a pre-9/11 sensibility that peace
was the norm (even though the frequency of U.S. military interventions
abroad had increased since the end of the Cold War a decade earlier).
When I began to examine the presidency at war in the years fol-
lowing the invasion of Iraq, I started from a familiar point. As I noted
in Chapter 4, the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had
coined the term “Imperial Presidency” toward the end of the Vietnam
War to characterize the long-term trend toward the concentration of
military and police powers in the Oval Offi ce. Th is theme seemed timely
again in the wake of the Iraq invasion, especially when no evidence of
weapons of mass destruction was uncovered. Th e Bush administration
also defended an expansive interpretation of executive emergency
powers to meet a national security crisis, echoing and amplifying claims
to extraordinary presidential power asserted by earlier wartime leaders.
It appeared, as administration critics on the political left (and a few on
the right) charged, that a president could lead the nation into a military
confl ict with no eff ective restraint from Congress, the public, or other
nations. My initial writing on the subject argued that presidents have a
free hand to either start hostilities or position American troops in a way
that makes confl ict inevitable.
Events in Iraq and at home, however, suggested another dimension
to the argument. Following the initial success of the American invasion,
U.S. troops faced a widening insurgency for which they were poorly
prepared. Casualties among Iraqi civilians and American forces
increased, while American diplomats made no headway in resolving
the differences among Iraqi sectarian leaders. Back in the United
States, public opinion began to turn against the war, contributing to
Republican defeats in the 2006 midterm elections that gave control
of Congress to the Democrats. Rather than too much power, it now
seemed Bush had too little—that is, he could no longer infl uence the
course of the confl ict to achieve the political objectives he had iden-
tifi ed in going to war. Where he had framed a transformative mission in
Iraq—to replace a brutal dictatorship with an open liberal society that
would serve as a beacon of change across the Middle East—the United
States by 2007 would settle for a reduction in the sectarian bloodletting.
Th e reduced ambition never became offi cial policy, but U.S. military
and civilian offi cials in Iraq clearly understood the change.