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"Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?"
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In recent months, we have been bombarded with reports of the death of the Bush Doctrine. Of course, there have been many such reports since the doctrine was first promulgated at the start of what I persist in calling World War IV (the cold war being World War III). Almost all of them were written by the realists and liberal internationalists within the old foreign-policy establishment, and they all turned out to resemble the reports of Mark Twain’s death—which, he famously said, had been “greatly exaggerated.” Nothing daunted by this, the critics and enemies of Bush are now at it yet again. This time, however, their ranks have been swollen by a number of traditional conservatives who were never comfortable with the doctrine bearing his name and who have now moved from discomfort to outright opposition.
But what is genuinely new, and more surprising, is the entry into this picture of a significant number of my fellow neoconservatives. As the Bush Doctrine’s greatest enthusiasts, they would be much happier if they could go on pointing to signs of life, but so disillusioned have they become that a British journalist can say that, to them, “the words ‘Rice’ and ‘Bush’ have all but become the Beltway equivalent of barnyard expletives.” No wonder that they have now taken to composing obituary notices of their own.
Are we then to conclude that the latest reports of the death of the Bush Doctrine are not “greatly,” if indeed at all, exaggerated, and that it has at long last really been put to rest?
So misrepresented has the Bush Doctrine been that the only way to begin answering that question is to remind ourselves of what it actually says (and does not say); and the best way to do that is by going back to the speech in which it was originally enunciated: the President’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001.
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In analyzing that speech shortly after it was delivered, I found that the new doctrine was built on three pillars. The first was a categorical rejection of the kind of relativism (“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”) that had previously prevailed in the discussion of terrorism, and a correlative insistence on using such unambiguously moral categories as right and wrong, good and evil, in describing the “great harm” we had suffered only nine days earlier. But, the President went on, out of that harm, and “in our grief and anger, we have found our mission and our moment.”
In spelling out the nature of that mission and moment, Bush gave the lie to those who would later claim that the idea of planting the seeds of democracy in Iraq was a hastily contrived ex-post-facto rationalization to cover for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction there. Indeed, the plain truth is that, far from being an afterthought, the idea of democratization was there from the very beginning and could even be said to represent the animating or foundational principle of the entire doctrine:
The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us. Our nation, this generation, . . . will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage.
The second pillar on which the Bush Doctrine stood was a new conception of terrorism that would, along with the “mission” emerging out of the rubble of 9/11, serve as a further justification for going first into Afghanistan and then into Iraq. Under the old understanding, terrorists were lone individuals who could best be dealt with by the criminal-justice system. Bush, by dramatic contrast, now asserted that they should be regarded as the irregular troops of the nation states that harbored and supported them. From this it followed that 9/11 constituted a declaration of war on the United States, and that the proper response was to rely not on cops and lawyers and judges but on soldiers and sailors and marines.
Again giving the lie to those who would later accuse him of misleading the American people as to why he had led us into Iraq, the President said that
Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them. Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.
Furthermore, this war that we were about to fight would be
a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. . . . From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
In thus promising to “pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism,” the President touched on the third pillar on which the Bush Doctrine was built: the determination to take preemptive action against an anticipated attack. But it was only three months later, in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, that he made this determination fully explicit:
I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.
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Here it is important to note what, for better or worse, the President did not say. He did not say—as almost everyone imagines he did—that he would act unilaterally, or that he would pay no attention to the opinions of our allies, or that he would ignore the UN. Nor did he say—as would later mendaciously be charged in the relentless campaign to prove that he had “hyped” the danger posed by Saddam Hussein—that the threat had to be “imminent” before preemptive action could legitimately be taken. Nor did he use that word a few months later when, in the next major address he devoted to the Bush Doctrine, he restated the same point:
If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. . . . [T]he war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.
The reason it was now necessary to act in this way, the President explained, was that the strategy we had adopted toward the Soviet Union during the cold war (or World War III in my accounting) could not possibly work “in the world we have entered”—a world in which
unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons or missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.
Having thus set the foundation for a new American policy in the broader Middle East, the President was left with the problem of how it could and should be applied to the narrower Middle East—that is, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In October 2001, only a month after 9/11, George W. Bush had become the first American President to come out openly for the establishment of a Palestinian state as the only path to a resolution of that conflict. But by June of 2002, he had also arrived at the realization of a glaring contradiction between his own doctrine and his support for the creation of a Palestinian state that would, as things then stood, inevitably be run by terrorists like Yasir Arafat and his henchmen. He therefore added a number of conditions to his previously unqualified endorsement of Palestinian statehood:
Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.
This, he added, required the election of “new leaders,” who would embark on building
entirely new political and economic institutions based on democracy, market economics, and action against terrorism.
And because he recognized that the Palestinians were “pawns in the Middle East conflict”—by which he clearly meant the war the Arab/Muslim world had been waging against Israel for “decades”—he broadened his demands to cover that world as well:
I’ve said in the past that nations are either with us or against us in the war on terror. To be counted on the side of peace, nations must act. Every leader actually committed to peace will end incitement to violence in official media and publicly denounce homicide bombs. Every nation actually committed to peace will stop the flow of money, equipment, and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hizballah. Every nation committed to peace must block the shipment of Iranian supplies to these groups and oppose regimes that promote terror, like Iraq. And Syria must choose the right side in the war on terror by closing terrorist camps and expelling terrorist organizations.
With these portentous words, Bush eliminated the contradiction between waging a war on terror in the broader Middle East and supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state run by terrorists in the narrower. The comment I made about this statement shortly after it was issued still seems right to me:
With the inconsistency thus removed and the resultant shakiness repaired by the addition of this fourth pillar to undergird it, the Bush Doctrine was now firm, coherent, and complete.
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Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?
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Footnotes
1 As a government official, Wehner is forced to be circumspect. But commenting on what has been learned about the Oil-for-Food scandal, Claudia Rosett, the great expert on this subject, spells things out: “It is unlikely that any of this would have come to light had not the U.S., over UN protests, toppled Saddam in 2003. Congressional investigations have since found that the UN program opened the floodgates for anywhere from $10 billion to $17 billion in graft, scams, and smuggling, some of which went to pay for Saddam’s palaces, weapons, and rewards for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.” And some of it, as Rosett has shown elsewhere, also went to French business interests.
2 Noah Feldman of NYU highlights one of them in a review of Galbraith’s new book, The End of Iraq: “Galbraith frankly concedes there is no good solution for Baghdad, with its mix of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, which includes perhaps a quarter of the whole population of the country. ‘No good solution’ is code for massacres of the kind that have accompanied breakups from India-Pakistan in 1947 to Yugoslavia in the 1990’s.”
3 I should note that both Muravchik and Boot have since indicated in different ways that their criticisms are not to be taken as a wholesale loss of faith in Bush’s dedication to his own doctrine.
4 Just as this article was going to press, a draft was released of the cease-fire resolution jointly hammered out by the United States and France (!) for presentation to the UN Security Council. In the highly unlikely event that it is adopted in its present form, it could create serious problems for Israel in the long run, and according to the analysis of Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, “it only partially addresses Israel’s concerns.” But for now, and whether adopted or not, its practical effect will indeed be to buy the IDF more time—enough, it is hoped, to finish clearing Hizballah out of the buffer zone that is being established in the south of Lebanon. Whether that buffer zone will be wide enough is another question, and one for the Israelis to decide.
5 McCarthy describes this alleged abandonment as “Bush Doctrine Out, Democracy Project In.” But the “democracy project” is not a substitute for the Bush Doctrine. As I said above, it is its animating or foundational principle. McCarthy may think that the fight against terrorism ought to be given priority over democratization, and he may even be right. But he is wrong in ascribing this view to the Bush Doctrine.
6 A recent story in the Washington Post carried a remarkably similar headline: “Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush’s Foreign Policy.”
7 This was what prompted George Will, who was then also attacking from the hawkish Right, to say of the Reagan administration that it “loved commerce more than it loathed Communism.”
8 George F. Kennan, for example, estimated that winning it would take fifteen years (as against the four of World War I and the six of World War II). Instead it went on for 42.
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