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To the Editor:

One has to admire Norman Podhoretz’s perseverance in continuing to believe in the viability of the Bush Doctrine long after the doctrine’s obsolescence has become apparent to just about everyone else [“Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?,” September]. As he himself acknowledges, there is now “a consensus that has formed on the death of the Bush Doctrine,” one that “embraces just about every group all along the ideological spectrum . . . the realists, the liberal internationalists, the traditionalist conservatives, the paleoconservatives, and the neoconservatives.”

I am named as a part of this consensus along with people as diverse as William Kristol, Charles A. Kupchan, George F. Will, Richard Perle, and Mike Allen and Romesh Ratnesar of Time. But instead of seeing this remarkable convergence as a sign that these observers may be on to something, Mr. Podhoretz insists that the Bush Doctrine is alive and well. His refusal to allow pesky facts to get in the way of a good argument is akin to Bush’s own stubborn determination to talk as if his policies were on track even though reality clearly suggests otherwise.

Where Mr. Podhoretz and I agree is that Bush and his top advisers still believe in the Bush Doctrine’s basic assumptions—America is in a war against evil; all nations must choose to be for or against us in this struggle; we must act unilaterally or preemptively when necessary; and spreading democracy is the long-term solution to the problem of terrorism. But Mr. Podhoretz refuses to admit that the strategic, political, financial, and even moral basis for implementing this program has eroded. Since the Bush Doctrine was formulated, the U.S. military has become bogged down in Iraq, the federal budget has gone from massive surplus to massive deficit, international support and respect for America have fallen to new depths, and the President’s domestic support—especially for the war in Iraq—has fallen considerably.

It is not surprising that under these circumstances the administration has reached out diplomatically to allies, backed away from military interventions and regime change as a policy tool, put pragmatic foreign-policy professionals in top positions once held by hawkish ideologues, and set aside aggressive democracy-promotion (except at the rhetorical level). The reason so many of Mr. Podhoretz’s neoconservatives allies are now attacking Bush’s foreign policy is not that they have changed their views but that the policy has changed.

The Bush Doctrine is dying not only because support for it is eroding but because it is failing. On this point, Mr. Podhoretz takes issue with a recent article I wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The End of the Bush Revolution.” He accuses me of “rehears[ing] the by now familiar litany of alleged disasters . . . that have followed from Bush’s pursuit of a ‘transformative foreign policy’: failure in Iraq, a ‘decline in legitimacy and popularity abroad,’ and a waning of political support at home.” For my part, I would say that these items may be familiar, but they are also rather significant.

Mr. Podhoretz gives me some credit for acknowledging that Bush has seen some successes, including “elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, a revolution in Lebanon followed by Syrian withdrawal, nuclear disarmament in Libya, and steps toward democracy elsewhere in the world.” But given the fact that elections in Iraq and Afghanistan have not prevented rising violence in either place; that the revolution in Lebanon has led not to stability but to serious internal strife and Hizballah’s attacks on Israel; that Libya’s disarmament seems to have resulted more from enduring international sanctions than from the Bush Doctrine; and that the steps toward democracy elsewhere in the world have gone nowhere, it is hard to agree with Mr. Podhoretz’s conclusion that the “successes” outweigh the failures.

Let me also reassure Mr. Podhoretz that, contrary to what he claims, “renewed progress in these areas” is not what I “most fear”; indeed, I wrote that such progress would be “highly desirable.” I just do not think that we are likely to achieve our goals by following Bush’s approach. What I fear is more of the misplaced optimism and wishful thinking that leads to counterproductive policies.

Perhaps the best evidence that Mr. Podhoretz’s determination to support the Bush Doctrine blinds him to any reasonable assessment of it is that he “confess[es] to being puzzled by the amazing spread of the idea that the Bush Doctrine has indeed failed the test of Iraq.” I must in turn confess to being puzzled by his puzzlement. For the price of over 2,700 American lives, 20,000 injured soldiers, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, over $400 billion and counting, and incalculable damage to America’s standing in the world, the Iraq war has produced a country on the verge of civil war, a regime under Iranian influence, inspiration to a growing number of violent terrorists, and an ongoing burden that limits America’s ability to exercise diplomatic and military influence elsewhere. If that is a success of the Bush Doctrine, I would hate to see what failure looks like.

Philip H. Gordon
The Brookings Institution
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Halfway through his paean to the Bush Doctrine, Norman Podhoretz takes words he once directed at Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the first President Bush, and redirects them at the columnist George F. Will. Will is in need of instruction, Mr. Podhoretz informs us, because he has suggested that any missionary effort to democratize the Middle East runs counter to the centuries-old cultural realities of the place.

But, says Mr. Podhoretz, the despotisms of the Middle East are not the legacy of centuries but rather of relatively recent actions by Britain and France after World War I. “This being the case,” he writes, “there is nothing ‘utopian’ about the idea that such regimes—planted with shallow roots by two Western powers—could be uprooted with the help of a third Western power and that a better system could be put in their place.”

This remarkable quotation crystallizes the essential fallacy of Mr. Podhoretz’s position that there is no reason to shrink from the grand vision of America remaking the Middle East in whatever image it desires. He utterly misses the central implication of his own words, namely, that the reason we are grappling with these problematic states is that the arrogant efforts of the British and French some 90 years ago proved a botch. Indeed, they proved a botch because (as Scowcroft put it) they ran up against “thousands of years of history.”

Mr. Podhoretz’s essay, crafted with his usual elegance of phrase and force of opinion, does not seek to make a case, with any serious argumentation, as to why those thousands of years of history do not matter. He merely states it, or rather restates it. But if he is wrong, then much of his argument simply falls of its own weight—as does the Bush Doctrine. And unfortunately for Mr. Podhoretz—and America—Scowcroft’s view is closer to reality than his.

Mr. Podhoretz describes the Bush Doctrine as having four pillars: an overriding belief in the moral imperative and inexorable advance of human freedom; the idea that terrorism should be viewed as a global threat that is tied to the nations that aid and abet it; the validity of preemptive attacks on such nations; and the convergence of America’s fight against terrorism with Israel’s struggle against Palestinian assaults on Israeli civilians. He eloquently equates this doctrine with that of Harry Truman, which led to America’s strategy for waging—and winning—the cold war. “Bolstered by that analogy,” he writes, “I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008.”

But four years after Truman’s doctrine was asserted, it had produced the Marshall Plan, saved Greece and Turkey from Communist insurgency, preserved free Berlin through the 1948 airlift, and generally saved Europe from a mortal threat. The Bush Doctrine, by contrast, has generated a war without discernible end, created a spawning ground for highly dangerous Islamist warriors of potentially global reach, inflamed the world of Islam beyond any necessity, sapped America’s leadership authority in the world, and introduced into the domestic polity stresses and strains of alarming magnitude.

Mr. Podhoretz goes to great lengths to refute those who perceive a retreat on the part of Bush from his own doctrine. He is right: Bush has not retreated—yet. But this misses the point again. The test is not Bush’s regard for his own cherished doctrine but rather the electorate’s regard for Bush and his party. Clearly, the folly inherent in the current policy has captured the nation’s political consciousness. Bush may in fact cling to it, as Mr. Podhoretz certainly will. But that does not mean the Bush Doctrine is not approaching a sure and unavoidable death.

Robert W. Merry

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