There's an uncomplicated tale many Americans like to tell themselves about recent U.S. foreign policy. As the story has it, the nation was led astray by a powerful clique of political appointees and their fellow travelers in Washington think tanks, who were determined even before the 9/11 attacks to effect a radical shift in America's role in the world. The members of this cabal were known as neoconservatives. They believed the world was a dangerous place, that American power should be applied firmly to protect American interests, and that, for too long, U.S. policy had consisted of diplomatic excess and mincing half measures. After 9/11, this group gave us the ill-conceived Global War on Terror and its bloody centerpiece, the war in Iraq.

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This narrative is disturbing. It implies that a small cadre of officials, holding allegiance to ideas alien to mainstream political life, succeeded in hijacking the foreign-policy apparatus of the entire U.S. government and managed to skirt the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution. Perversely, though, this interpretation of events is also comforting. It offers the possibility of correcting course. If the fault simply lies in the predispositions of a few key players in the policy game, then those players can eventually be replaced, and policies repaired.

Unfortunately, though, this convenient story is fiction, and it's peddling a dangerously misguided view of history. The American public at large is more deeply implicated in the design and execution of the war on terror than it is comfortable to admit. In the six years of the war, through an invasion of Afghanistan, a wave of anthrax attacks, and an occupation of Iraq, Americans have remained largely unshaken in their commitment to a political philosophy that demands much from its government but asks little of its citizens. And there is no reason to believe that the weight of that responsibility will shift after the next attack.

THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE

Since at least the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, a political philosophy known as neoliberalism has dominated the American political landscape. Defined by a commitment to tax reduction, discipline in fiscal and monetary policy, light regulation of the private sector, and free trade, it has risen above party politics. Leading Democrats have advocated the neoliberal creed, even if they did not use the phrase. It was former President Bill Clinton, after all, who promised the American people in 1996 that "the era of big government [was] over"; that the federal bureaucracy would shrink; and that the federal government would adhere to a program of fiscal balance, regulatory restraint, and trade liberalization.

This neoliberal philosophy is built on a bedrock of skepticism about the role of central government and the effectiveness of grand governmental projects. As a consequence, politics got small. Political leaders learned to shy away from policies that threatened to disrupt the status quo and make great demands of the American polity. A hallmark of the Clinton administration in its later years, after the Democrats' drubbing in the 1994 midterm elections, was its enthusiasm for "micropolicies" -- initiatives that could be linked to great themes but did not incur great costs.

This rejection of sacrifice on a national scale contributed to the bungled war the United States finds itself in today. The war on terror is not simply a neoconservative project. It is as much a neoliberal project, shaped by views about the role of government that enjoy broad public support.

It may seem extraordinary, given the experience of the past six years, to suggest that President George W. Bush’s administration pursued a Clinton-style strategy of accommodation to neoliberal realities. After all, key Bush advisors flaunted their determination to throw off the constraints that bound the executive branch. And the Bush administration's policies have had cataclysmic consequences -- in Iraq alone, there are tens of thousands dead and more than a million people displaced. How can we call this "small politics"?

However, we must first recognize the critical distinction between what the Bush administration intended to do, and what actually transpired. The material point about the planned invasion of Iraq was that it appeared to its proponents to be feasible with a very small commitment of resources. It would be a cakewalk, influential Pentagon advisor Kenneth Adelman predicted in February 2002. The cost of postwar reconstruction would be negligible. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz suggested that it might even be financed by revenues from the Iraqi oil industry.

Of course, there were critics inside and outside the U.S. government who warned that these forecasts were unduly optimistic. But the administration's view was hardly idiosyncratic. There were many Americans who believed, based on the experience of the previous decade -- including the first Gulf War, subsequent strikes on Iraq, and other interventions such as Kosovo -- that the U.S. military had acquired the capacity to project force with devastating efficiency. Consequently, it wasn't hard to imagine that the invasion and occupation of a nation of 27 million, more than 6,000 miles away, could be accomplished without significant disruption to American daily life.

Even the larger war on terror remains a relatively small affair, asking for little from its masters. Although U.S. defense expenditures have grown substantially during the Bush administration -- by roughly 40 percent in inflation-adjusted terms between 2001 and 2006 -- it is growth from a historically low base. In the five years after 9/11, average defense expenditure as a share of gross domestic product (3.8 percent) was little more than half of what it was during the preceding 50 years (6.8 percent). The proportion of the U.S. adult population employed in the active-duty military (roughly 0.6 percent) remained at a low not seen since before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This determination to execute policy without disrupting daily life was maintained even as it became clear that the war on terror was faltering. The U.S. "surge" of troops in Iraq beginning in January 2007, designed to wrest control of the country from insurgents, was advertised as a substantial increase in U.S. commitments in Iraq. In August, the New York Times called it a "massive buildup." But by historical standards, it has been negligible. The United States had more boots on the ground in Japan 10 years after its surrender in 1945 and in Germany at the end of the Cold War. It deployed twice as many troops in South Korea and three times as many in Vietnam.

In 2003, the conflict in Iraq might reasonably have been described as George W. Bush's war. In 2007, however, it has become a bipartisan war -- that is, a conflict whose course is shaped by the actions of a Republican president and by Democratic majorities in Congress. The stakes are substantial: Continued failure in Iraq is bound to have tremendous human and diplomatic costs. Yet the range of policy options is still arbitrarily limited to a token "surge" or various forms of "phased withdrawal." No major political actor, Democrat or Republican, dares to contemplate a genuine surge that would raise the U.S. commitment in Iraq to the level said to be essential by several military leaders before the invasion. Similarly, there has been no serious consideration of a return to the draft, despite strains on the U.S. military. This, the New York Times said -- echoing the argument made by Milton Friedman during Vietnam -- would be inconsistent with the "free-choice values of America’s market society."

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