The Terror narrative served as the organizing axis of US debate on national security for a decade. One might have expected it to have met its end in the sands of Iraq. The Bush administration had sold the Iraq War by binding it tightly into the War on Terror, and setbacks in Iraq might have reflected poorly on, and perhaps even delegitimized, the Terror narrative. This outcome would have been consistent with the theoretical conventional wisdom. Because inertia is a powerful force in policy and in the institutions, discourses, and ideas that underlie it, we tend to think that only large-scale shocks produce change. Significant unexpected failures, as in Iraq, unsettle settled minds and discredit dominant ideas. In their absence, and certainly in the wake of success, change in policy, let alone in more foundational ideas and narratives, is highly unlikely.

The conventional wisdom is intuitive, and it would seem to be backed by the historical record. Notably, it appears to fit the Cold War consensus. Broad agreement on ideology and policy supposedly so took hold in the United States by late 1947 or 1948 that alternatives to militarized global containment could not get a hearing. Pre-eminent for two decades, the consensus was blamed for numerous errors and tragedies of US policy – from military brinkmanship to imprudent intervention, most notably in Vietnam, to alliance with rapacious autocrats and brutal rebels to an inflated defense budget. According to the standard history, it finally unraveled only amidst the trauma of the Vietnam War: Americans lost faith in the Cold War as its military floundered in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

The Terror narrative took a seemingly different course: it survived public frustration with the failures of Iraq. The usual theory supplies an explanation: those failures were not clear or great enough to shake the war's narrative foundation. However, this explanation does not specify a priori how substantial failure must be to drive change. Equally important, it presumes that events speak for themselves, that the fact, magnitude, and sources of failure are clear to all. Part II builds on Part I 's account of the rise of dominant narratives of national security to advance a provocative theory of when they endure and when they fall.