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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.
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.
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.
If we go by the President’s speeches, as well as by his unscripted remarks at press
conferences and other venues, there is not the slightest indication that today
he is any less wedded than he was at the start to any of the four commitments
that together constitute the substance of the Bush Doctrine.
A good benchmark is his
Second Inaugural Address, delivered on January 20, 2005. During the campaign
that would end by giving him the opportunity to deliver this address, and in
spite of the political considerations that might have led him to play it safe,
Bush kept reaffirming his belief in the soundness of his doctrine and his
determination to stick by all of its interrelated parts. Over and over again he
declared that, if reelected, he would go on working for the spread of liberty
throughout the broader Middle East; that he would not relent in the war against
terrorism (whose main front was now Iraq); that he would continue reserving the
right to strike preemptively against mounting threats; and that he would
steadfastly refuse to support the establishment of a Palestinian state unless
and until its leaders renounced terrorism and began pursuing democratic reform.
Nevertheless,
immediately after he was reelected on these promises, it was widely predicted
that he would retreat from them in his second term, and that he would do so
whether he liked it or not. Some said that, because of setbacks in Iraq, he
would lose the political support he needed to push the Bush Doctrine any
farther. Others posited a political “law” under which second-term Presidents
were always forced to moderate their policies. And still others foresaw a clash
with an obdurate reality that would kill off the Bush Doctrine by exposing it
as a utopian fantasy.
With all this ringing in
his ears, Bush defiantly took the oath of office for a second time with a
restatement of the doctrine bearing his name that was even more eloquent, more
forceful, and more unequivocal than the great series of speeches in which he
had originally promulgated it three years earlier.
On the rejection of
moral relativism:
We
will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: the
moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is
eternally right. . . . We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope
of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.
On the new conception of
terrorism and the political roots of the assault we suffered on 9/11:
We
have seen our vulnerability—and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as
whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny—prone to ideologies
that feed hatred and excuse murder—violence will gather, and multiply in
destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal
threat.
On the spread of
democracy as the answer to terrorism:
There
is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment,
and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and
tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom. . . . America’s vital
interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. . . . So it is the policy of the
United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and
institutions in every nation and culture.
On the nature and length
of the war that was declared on us on 9/11, and what winning it will ultimately
mean:
This
is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our
friends by force of arms when necessary. . . . The great objective of ending
tyranny is the concentrated work of generations.
On the determination to
take preemptive action:
My
most solemn duty is to protect this nation and its people against further
attacks and emerging threats.
So much for the idea
that Bush was preparing to back away from the first three pillars of the Bush
Doctrine. And what about the fourth? Framed in loftily abstract terms, the
Second Inaugural contained no reference to Israel or the Palestinians. (Nor
were Iraq and Afghanistan mentioned by name.) A few weeks earlier, however,
Bush had already made it clear that the fourth pillar of his doctrine was still
firmly in place. He did this during a post-election visit to Canada, where he
once again conditioned his support for the establishment of a Palestinian state
on the willingness of the Palestinians to renounce terrorism and embark on
democratic reform:
Achieving
peace in the Holy Land is not just a matter of pressuring one side or the other
on the shape of a border or the site of a settlement. This approach has been
tried before, without success. As we negotiate the details of peace, we must
look to the heart of the matter, which is the need for a Palestinian democracy.
As I write,
Bush’s second term has entered its nineteenth month, and on innumerable
occasions during that time he has ringingly reaffirmed his commitment to the
doctrine bearing his name. On what basis, then, is it being claimed all over
the place that he no longer believes either in its soundness or its viability?
According to the most
widely discussed elaboration of this claim, the Time cover story entitled “The End of Cowboy Diplomacy” (July 17, 2006), the first
indication that Bush has undergone a change of mind and a change of heart is “a
modulation of tone.” As an example, Time points to a press conference with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair in
which “Bush swore off the Wild West rhetoric of getting enemies ‘dead or
alive,’ conceding that ‘in certain parts of the world, it was misinterpreted.’”
“Equally revealing” to Time was
Bush’s
response to the North Korean missile test. Under the old Bush Doctrine,
defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive
U.S. action—or at least a tongue lashing. Instead, the administration has
mainly been talking up multilateralism.
Time then quotes a Princeton
political scientist who ascribes this putative change to “doctrinal flameout.”
Or, in Time’s own jazzy formulation,
“cowboy diplomacy, RIP.”
The problem with this
analysis is that it stems from a false premise about the Bush Doctrine and
about its author. To say again what—judging from the persistence of the false
premise—cannot be said too often, the “unilateralist vision of American power
and how to use it” that Time identifies as a
“plank” of the Bush Doctrine has never been any such thing. Not once in any of
the speeches in which the President spelled out his new doctrine did he
explicitly declare, or even imply, that it prescribed a course of “going it
alone,” or that it precluded seeking allies in the war against terrorism, or
that it included (once more in Time’s own words)
the
idea that the U.S. could carry out a strategy as ambitious as reshaping the
Middle East . . . without a degree of international legitimacy and cooperation
to back it up.
On the contrary. Witness
the National Security Strategy of 2002, which elaborated on the various points
the President had made in his post-9/11 speeches up till then:
We
are also guided by the conviction that no nation can build a safer, better
world alone. Alliances and multilateral institutions can multiply the strength
of freedom-loving nations. The United States is committed to lasting
institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the
Organization of American States, and NATO as well as other longstanding
alliances. Coalitions of the willing can augment these permanent institutions.
In all cases, international obligations are to be taken seriously. They are not
to be undertaken symbolically to rally support for an ideal without furthering
its attainment.
And again:
There
is little of lasting consequence that the United States can accomplish in the
world without the sustained cooperation of its allies and friends in Canada and
Europe. Europe is also the seat of two of the strongest and most able
international institutions in the world: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), which has, since its inception, been the fulcrum of transatlantic and
inter-European security, and the European Union (EU), our partner in opening
world trade.
As it was at the beginning, when “cowboy diplomacy” was allegedly riding high, so it
was two years later when the President delivered his State of the Union Address
of 2004:
As
we debate at home, we must never ignore the vital contributions of our
international partners, or dismiss their sacrifices. From the beginning,
America has sought international support for our operations in Afghanistan and
Iraq, and we have gained much support.
And so it also was the
following year, in his Second Inaugural:
[A]ll
the allies of the United States can know: we honor your friendship, we rely on
your counsel, and we depend on your help.
To this incontrovertible
statement Bush attached a caveat:
There
is a difference, however, between leading a coalition of many nations, and
submitting to the objections of a few. America will never seek a permission
slip to defend the security of our country.
In a saner political
climate this caveat would be regarded as self-evident. For who can really
believe that any nation, let alone a nation as powerful as the United States,
would hand over to other countries, whether acting on their own or through a
collective like the UN, the power to decide what it should or should not do in
defense of its own security? In the case at issue, doing so would have meant
bowing to the wishes of France and Germany and to the UN Security Council. The
folly of such a course is something else that would be regarded as self-evident
in a saner political climate. But, reminded by the Time cover story that it is not self-evident, Peter Wehner, a member of the
President’s staff, took the trouble to explain:
Should
nations be paralyzed from acting unless they receive the support of the
Security Council? How many nations need to support an action before it is
considered sufficiently multilateral and therefore justifiable? Ten? Fifty? One
hundred and fifty? And what happens if a nation, perhaps for reasons of
corruption or bad motivation, seeks to prevent a particular action from being
taken?
Good questions all,
especially the first and the last.1 And yet I would maintain that the charge of
unilateralism (like its inseparable companion, “the rush to war”) has never
been anything more than a respectable-sounding cover for an effort by the
French and the Germans (and their fellow travelers in the United States itself)
to tie the American Gulliver down. Nor can these charges have been made in good
faith when Bush, far from “rushing to war” or using it as “the weapon of first
resort,” spent eight long months in a diplomatic gavotte aimed at rounding up
support for a possible use of force against Saddam Hussein, and when he also
repeatedly pleaded with the Security Council to stop ignoring the Iraqi
tyrant’s defiance of its own long string of resolutions. It was only after the
futility of all this became unmistakably obvious to anyone with eyes to see
that Bush resorted to military action. And not even then did he act
unilaterally: in addition to Britain, a “coalition of the willing” composed of
no fewer than 49 other nations joined in the invasion.
In short, the fact that
the President has lately been talking a lot about diplomacy and entering into
multilateral negotiations has no bearing on the question of whether the Bush
Doctrine is dead, since it never ruled these out in the first place. As for the
nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran, the administration’s instrument of
choice—again for better or worse, and again including the period of alleged
cowboy diplomacy—has all along been multilateral diplomacy.
Unlike
unilateralism, the right of preemption is a real and not a
mythical “plank” of the Bush Doctrine. This one, Time tells us, has been discredited by our “travails in Iraq,” which is turning out
to be “not only the first but also the last laboratory for preventive war.”
About that we shall see in the next two years, but for now there is no sign
that the President has changed his mind about preemption as a last-resort
response to a gathering threat. If he had, why would he steadfastly refuse to
rule it out against Iran by repeating whenever asked that “all options are
open”?
So, too, with the third
“plank” or pillar of the Bush Doctrine (the one that I put first). In Time’s
account, the “goal to spread democracy as a defense against terrorism” has also
been undermined, not so much by Iraq as by “the complexity of global politics.”
The consequence has been a “dimming of the administration’s commitment to the
ideals of its . . . freedom agenda.” As evidence, Time cites the administration’s failure to put more pressure for democratic reform
on Egypt, Russia, and China, and also the fact that some of the elections it
has sponsored “are producing governments more hospitable to extremism, not
less.”
Yet whatever these cases
may demonstrate about the implementation of the
“freedom agenda” (to which I will come in due course), it is impossible to
believe that Bush can already have lost or even retreated from the faith in it
that he expressed so powerfully in his Second Inaugural only eighteen months
ago and unequivocally restated in his State of the Union message as recently as
January of this year:
Abroad,
our nation is committed to an historic, long-term goal—we seek the end of
tyranny in our world. Some dismiss that goal as misguided idealism. In reality,
the future security of America depends on it. On September the 11th, 2001, we
found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles
away could bring murder and destruction to our country. Dictatorships shelter
terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass
destruction. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of
their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror.
Which brings us again to
the fourth plank or pillar of the Bush Doctrine—its conception of how Israel
and the Palestinians fit into the larger war on Islamist terrorism. As Time sees it, “Exhibit A” of the “dimming of the administration’s commitment to its
. . . freedom agenda” is that Bush responded to the victory of Hamas (“a
group,” the magazine adds noncommittally, that “the U.S. and Europe classify as
a terrorist organization”) by leading “an international ban on aid to the
democratically elected Palestinian government.” But surely this response shows
the reverse of a dimming commitment to the Bush Doctrine. Surely it shows
rather that Bush remains true to his promise that, to repeat,
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.
And surely it also makes
nonsense of the endlessly chanted mantra that Bush “simplistically” regards
elections as the be-all and end-all of democratization, let alone that he
thinks the victorious party in a free election has, by virtue of that fact
alone, a claim on American support even if it engages in terrorism. As he put
it in his State of the Union address of 2006:
Ultimately,
the only way to defeat the terrorists is to defeat their dark vision of hatred
and fear by offering the hopeful alternative of political freedom and peaceful
change. So the United States of America supports democratic reform across the
broader Middle East. Elections are vital, but they are only the beginning.
Raising up a democracy requires the rule of law, and protection of minorities,
and strong, accountable institutions that last longer than a single vote.
As against Time,
which is under the impression that Bush no longer believes in his own doctrine,
Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution, in an article in Foreign
Affairs (“The End of the Bush Revolution,” July-August 2006), at
least recognizes that “the President and most of his team still hold to the
basic tenets of the Bush Doctrine.” But Gordon—as befits a fellow of one
bastion of the old foreign-policy establishment writing in the magazine of its
traditional headquarters at the Council on Foreign Relations—contends that “the
budgetary, political, and diplomatic realities that the first Bush team tried
to ignore have begun to set in.” The consequence is a “reversal of the Bush
revolution” and the “return to realism” for which the old foreign-policy
establishment has been yearning since 9/11.
In backing up this
thesis, Gordon rehearses the by now familiar litany of alleged disasters—pretty
much the same ones listed by Time—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. Faced with all this, Bush has had no choice but to adopt a
more modest “tone and style” and to embrace (at long last) the kind of
diplomacy he had previously scorned, with North Korea and Iran being the prime
examples.
Unlike virtually all his
colleagues within the foreign-policy establishment, who simply ignore the
achievements that have been made under the aegis of the Bush Doctrine, Gordon
acknowledges a few of them, including
successful
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.
One might think that
this record would give him pause; and one might also think that for the good of
the country he would hope for more of the same. But no: what he most fears is
“renewed progress in these areas.” Why? Because further progress
could
give new force to the idea that a determined United States can transform the
world and new arguments to those who believe that Bush should not waver in the
promotion of his doctrine.
Better, in other words,
for the United States to suffer defeat than for the Bush Doctrine to pull a
Lazarus and then return to pursuing its hubristic goal of making the Middle
East safe for America by making it safe for democracy.
A slightly different
view is taken by Charles A. Kupchan and Ray Takeyh, both of whom are affiliated
with the Council on Foreign Relations and several other bastions of the old
foreign-policy establishment as well. To them the Bush Doctrine, though on its
death bed, still has enough life left in it to be blamed for the shooting war
that broke out this past summer between Israel and the Islamists of Hamas and
Hizballah. As liberal internationalists, Kupchan and Takeyh are forced into the
grudging allowance that the Bush administration may have been “seeking the
right end in the Middle East—the pacification of the region through economic
and political liberalization.” But its “ideological hubris and political
incompetence have succeeded only in setting the region ablaze.” If, they
contend, Bush had not “abandoned Clinton’s diplomatic efforts,” and if the
administration had actively engaged with “the peace process,” it could have
“sustained a process of reconciliation that kept an uneasy peace.”
This is an astonishing
claim, since as everyone but the denizens of the old foreign-policy
establishment recognizes, what was produced by that “process of reconciliation”
between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs was not peace, whether uneasy or any
other kind, but years of Palestinian terrorism and finally the war known as the
second intifada. Moreover, as Jacob
Weisberg demonstrates in a piece entitled “Don’t Blame Bush: The War in Lebanon
Isn’t His Fault,” the Bush administration “missed no opportunity that ever
actually existed to pursue a peace agreement.” Nor, he adds, would “less
confrontational rhetoric and flying visits from Condi Rice . . . have yielded
better results” than Bush’s policy of isolating rather than engaging with the
“rogue regimes” (the Palestinian Authority, Syria, and Iran) that are really
responsible for the shooting war between Israel and the Islamofascists of Hamas
and Hizballah.
It is utterly inconceivable that the wish for an American defeat could ever find room
in the mind or heart of a traditionalist conservative like the columnist George
Will (though it could and has taken up comfortable residence in the thinking of
rabid paleoconservatives like Patrick J. Buchanan). Even so, after many months
of expressing his unhappiness with the Bush Doctrine mainly through hints and
asides, Will’s exasperation with it has finally boiled over. This
administration, he laments in a recent column, is
currently
learning a lesson—one that conservatives should not have to learn on the
job—about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world.
In preaching this lesson
to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Will joins forces with the likes of
Philip Gordon within the old foreign-policy establishment who have long since
appropriated and adapted it to their own political and ideological purposes
(which are very far from Will’s). Unlike the realists, however, but like the
liberal internationalists, Will fears that enough life is left in the Bush
Doctrine to continue doing damage. Hence he does not, as they do, see in the
“ascendancy” of Rice one of the leading indicators of a retreat from, never
mind a death blow to, the Bush Doctrine. To the contrary, he criticizes her for
echoing the doctrine in seeming to consider “today’s turmoil preferable to the
Middle East’s ‘false stability’ of the past 60 years,” and accuses her of being
stuck in the illusion that democratization is necessarily an antidote to terrorism.
Here Will comes
perilously close to sounding like Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush’s National
Security Adviser (whose political purposes as an enemy of Israel are even
further from Will’s than are those of the old foreign-policy establishment).
Some months ago, in an argument with Rice, who is his former protégée,
Scowcroft drew an invidious comparison between the turmoil her boss’s policy
was creating in the Middle East and the “50 years of peace” the old policy had
brought us. Though I very much doubt that George Will himself would ever
describe as “years of peace” a period during which some two dozen wars were
fought, he does deride Rice’s claim that the “stability” the Middle East
enjoyed in those years was “false”; and with regard to democratization, he also
seems to agree with Scowcroft’s contention that “you cannot with one sweep of
the hand or the mind cast off thousands of years of history.”
Accordingly, I would
give the same answer to Will that I once gave to Scowcroft:
But
the despotisms in the Middle East are not thousands of years old, and they were
not created by Allah or the Prophet Muhammad. All of them were established
after World War I—that is, less than a century ago—by the British and the
French. This being the case, 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 political system could
be put in their place. And, in fact, this is exactly what has been happening
before our very eyes in Iraq.
This is not an answer,
however, that would cut any ice with William F. Buckley, Jr., the other major
traditionalist conservative who has, after much hesitation, decisively given up
on the Bush Doctrine. The reason my argument would fall on deaf ears if
directed at Buckley is that his own break with Bush’s policies has not
primarily been driven by the apparent conflict between Bush’s “ideological
certitudes” and sound conservative principles. The main factor is what Buckley
has become convinced is the failure of these policies to pass the acid test of
Iraq. True, his indictment includes other putative failures of the Bush
Doctrine to deliver the goods. Nor does he ignore the (to him unfortunate and
definitely unconservative) role played by the evangelism of its “universalist
aims.” Yet I would guess that if he thought the effort to plant the seeds of
democracy in Iraq was succeeding, he would not be telling us that the Bush
Doctrine has for all practical purposes been killed off everywhere else as
well.
I must confess to being puzzled by the amazing spread of the idea that the Bush Doctrine has
indeed failed the test of Iraq. After all, Iraq has been liberated from one of
the worst tyrants in the Middle East; three elections have been held; a decent
constitution has been written; a government is in place; and previously
unimaginable liberties are being enjoyed. By what bizarre calculus does all
this add up to failure? And by what even stranger logic is failure to be read
into the fact that the forces opposed to democratization are fighting back with
all their might?
Surely what makes more
sense is the opposite interpretation of the terrible violence being perpetrated
by the terrorists of the so-called “insurgency”: that it is in itself a tribute
to the enormous strides that have been made in democratizing the country. If
this murderous collection of diehard Sunni Baathists and vengeful Shiite
militias, together with their allies inside the government, agreed that democratization
had already failed, would they be waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it?
And if democratization in Iraq posed no threat to the other despotisms in the
region, would those regimes be sending jihadists and material support to the
“insurgency” there?
Perhaps, then, what the
sectarian murderers and their foreign allies are trying to prevent is less the
democratic project as such than the emergence of an Iraq which would be unified
under the loose federal system prescribed by the constitution adopted last
year? Perhaps what the Sunni “insurgency” is trying to do is prevent the Shiite
majority from becoming dominant? Perhaps the Shiite militias are mainly engaged
in reprisals for recent Sunni atrocities (not to mention being bent on revenge
for the relentless oppression they suffered at the hands of the Sunnis under
Saddam Hussein)? Perhaps all this is leading to a breakup of the country into
three separate entities, with a fully independent Kurdistan in the north, with
the Sunnis ruling in Baghdad and its environs, and with the Shiites in power in
the south?
The Israeli political
theorist Shlomo Avineri and Clinton’s ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith
have long contended that such an outcome is the best that can be hoped for, and
that in any event the vision of an Iraq unified under a democratic system is
nothing more than a mirage. From this glum analysis it follows that the United
States should scrap the Bush Doctrine and resign itself to a tripartite
division as the least bad alternative to complete chaos and an all-out civil
war.
This position (which in
the latest variant proposed by Galbraith has been endorsed as “second best” by
a disillusioned neoconservative in the person of David Frum) comes at us with
all the trappings of what looks like a hard-headed assessment of the sectarian
facts on the ground in Iraq. But in common with many such apparently
hard-headed assessments of other facts on other grounds, it poses intractable
problems of its own.2 Worse yet, its
plausibility depends on the ruling-out of the new possibilities that can
materialize out of popular aspirations for something different, and something
better.
Only yesterday we saw
such aspirations vividly expressed in the flocking of millions of Iraqis to the
polls, and all the world marveled at the sight. Now, because the enemies of
these aspirations within Iraq and their foreign supporters are mounting a
last-ditch campaign to blow them to smithereens, we are being told that it is
useless to go on giving our support to what is clearly a lost cause. Shades of
how George W. Bush’s father treated the Shiites whom he had encouraged to rise
up against Saddam Hussein at the tail end of the first Gulf War, only to sit by
as many thousands of them were slaughtered by this merciless despot who had
been left in power by the “realism” of American policy. (It was, incidentally,
only because some of us had forgotten the bitterness this betrayal had planted
in the Shiites of the South that we were surprised when they greeted our troops
in 2003 with surly suspicion instead of cheers and flowers.)
Well, having through the
Bush Doctrine repudiated his father’s “realism” as, precisely, unrealistic,
George W. Bush is hardly likely to welsh on the promises he in his own turn has
made to the people of Iraq. And since most of them—Sunnis no less than
Shiites—know very well that their lives literally depend on making the new
system work, they have the greatest imaginable stake in fending off the evil
forces that are dedicated to destroying its chances.
In opposition to Will and Buckley, and with at least the partial exception just noted of
David Frum, my fellow neoconservatives are still heavily invested in the Bush
Doctrine. But an increasing number of them also charge that it is being killed
off—not by the obdurate realities of the Middle East; and not by any conceptual
flaws; and not by its enemies at home and abroad, but rather by its author’s
loss of nerve in seeing it through. For the more aggressive remedy they
prescribe, they have been cast out of the conservative community by no less an
erstwhile political friend and ally than George Will himself. Neoconservatism,
he has now concluded, is “a spectacularly misnamed radicalism”—a dirty word in
Will’s vocabulary. Though he thinks this administration richly deserves severe
criticism, the kind it is getting from the neoconservatives is “so untethered
from reality as to defy caricature.”
What Will is referring
to in this uncharacteristically fevered attack is a July 24 piece in the Weekly
Standard by its editor William Kristol, advocating an immediate
military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Going all the way, Kristol
denounces the administration’s delay in launching such a strike as a form of
appeasement.
Now as it happens, there
is a split among neoconservatives on the desirability of military action
against Iran. For reasons of their own, some—including Michael Ledeen of the
American Enterprise Institute—are just as opposed to such a course as is Will
himself. They do not, however, agree with Will (who here again joins hands with
the old foreign-policy establishment) that a nuclear Iran can just as
successfully be contained as the Soviet Union was in World War III. As Eli Lake
writes (New York Sun, August 1, 2006):
There
are those of us who have long endorsed a plan to bolster Iran’s opposition as
an alternative to a war with Iran, and there are sound arguments that bombing
Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would scuttle the efforts of Persian democrats to
rescue their country from the mullahs. But let’s not pretend that Iran is not
at war with America and Israel. If it was true that Iran could be contained
with a nuclear threat capability, then how does one explain its emboldened
recklessness with regard to its proxies, Hizballah?
Moreover, the fervent
commitment of this group of neoconservatives to the democratization of the
entire Middle East must similarly strike Will as tainted by the sin of
radicalism and as “untethered from reality.” So, at least, one is entitled to
infer from another argument he makes against Rice:
America’s
intervention was supposed to democratize Iraq which, by benign infection, would
transform the region. . . . But elections have transformed Hamas into the
government of the Palestinian territories, and elections have turned Hizballah
into a significant faction in Lebanon’s parliament, from which it operates as a
state within the state. And as a possible harbinger of future horrors, last
year’s elections gave the Muslim Brotherhood 19 percent of the seats in Egypt’s
parliament.
But listen to what the
exiled Iranian columnist Amir Taheri has to say about this argument:
Disappointed
by the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian election and the strong showing of
the Muslim Brotherhood in last year’s polls in Egypt, some doubt the wisdom of
pushing for elections in the Muslim world. . . . The holding of elections,
however, is a clear admission that the principal basis for legitimacy is the
will of the people as freely expressed through ballot boxes. In
well-established democracies, this may sound trite; in Arab societies, it is a
revolutionary idea.
And listen also to the
corroborative testimony of Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins. Speaking with the
authority of one born and raised in Lebanon who is also an eminent student of
the history of the Middle East, Ajami flatly asserts that “while the ballot is
not infallible,” it has “broken the pact with Arab tyranny.”
Where Iran is concerned, those neoconservatives who oppose military action, and detect no
possibility of even relatively free elections there, have instead placed their
hopes in an internal insurrection that would topple the mullocracy and replace
it with a democratic regime. They also keep insisting that the failure of this
long-predicted insurrection to materialize is largely the fault of the Bush
administration, whose own failure to do everything in its power to help the
democratic opposition is in their eyes a blatant betrayal of the Bush Doctrine.
On this account, Richard
Perle, one of the most influential of the neoconservatives, is furious with the
President (in whose administration he formerly served as chairman of the
Defense Policy Board). “Why Did Bush Blink on Iran? (Ask Condi)” reads the
headline of a piece he recently published in the Washington Post.
Here Perle charges that Bush has “chosen to beat . . . an ignominious retreat”
by yielding to the State Department’s wish “to join talks with Iran on its
nuclear program.” In thereby betraying the promises of his own doctrine, Perle
adds, the President has crushed the hopes that his “soaring speeches” had once
aroused in the young democratic dissidents of Iran.
Other neoconservatives
focus on what they see as other betrayals. In his column in the Los
Angeles Times (July 12), Max Boot singles out Egypt as a prime
example of “the downsizing of President Bush’s democracy-promoting agenda.”
Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute, in “A Democracy Policy
in Ashes” (Washington Post, June 27),
likewise concentrates on “the bitter disappointment that Egypt’s democrats feel
over the apparent waning of the Bush administration’s ardor for their course.”3 Moving beyond Iran and Egypt, Michael Rubin,
the editor of the Middle East Quarterly,
begins a piece entitled “Fight for Mideast Democracy Failing” (Philadelphia
Inquirer, July 14) by offering examples of how, thanks to the
Bush Doctrine, “democracy took root in what many once dismissed as infertile
ground,” but ends by showing how, “in the face of Bush’s reversal,” democratic
dissenters throughout the region, who were emboldened by the President’s pledge
“to seek and support the growth of democratic movements,” are now being
silenced and repressed once again, while “U.S. allies who once considered
reform now abandon it.”
According to still other
neoconservatives, it is not only in the Middle East that the administration,
instead of carrying on with the struggle to “end tyranny in our world,” has
inexplicably pulled down this pillar of the Bush Doctrine by adopting a new
policy of “coddling despots” like the repressive leaders both of Russia and
China. North Korea makes for a comparably strong argument that the third
pillar—the pledge to move preemptively against gathering threats—has also been
blasted out from under the Bush Doctrine. Thus Nicholas Eberstadt, a neoconservative
expert on that country, charges that Bush’s policy toward the regime of Kim
Jong Il is, if anything, worse than Clinton’s:
Apparently
unwilling to move against North Korea’s nuclear challenges by itself, and
evidently incapable of fashioning a practical response involving allies and
others, the Bush administration’s response to Pyongyang’s atomic provocations
is today principally characterized by renewed calls for additional rounds of
toothless diplomacy.
Kenneth Adelman, yet
another strong partisan of the Bush Doctrine, adds insult to injury by telling
an interviewer that its day is done, and that the administration’s handing of
North Korea (and Iran) amounts to “the triumph of Kerryism.”
Two
extraordinary features mark the consensus that has formed on the
death of the Bush Doctrine. One is that it embraces just about every group all
along the ideological spectrum, critics and friends of Bush alike: the
realists, the liberal internationalists, the traditionalist conservatives, the
paleoconservatives, and the neoconservatives. The other extraordinary feature
is that the only group that has refused to join in this unprecedented consensus
is made up of Bush’s enemies on the Left.
Take the inveterate Bush
hater Fred Kaplan who, in the Left-liberal webzine Slate,
argues that “reports of the death of ‘cowboy diplomacy’ are greatly
exaggerated,” and that while there has been a “moderating tone in Bush’s
rhetoric . . . his actual policies have barely changed.” It is in Slate,
too, that its editor Jacob Weisberg (the same Jacob Weisberg who has devoted
himself to collecting “Bushisms” supposedly proving how stupid the President is
and how adept at finding “new ways to harm our country”) posted his article
acknowledging Bush’s persistent refusal to engage with “rogue regimes.” Moving
further to the Left, we come upon Mother Jones,
where one Ehsan Ahrari also denies that “cowboy diplomacy” has really ended.
No doubt, both Ahrari
and Kaplan would very much prefer to agree that Bush has abandoned his wicked
ways, and to congratulate the Left on this great accomplishment. But the best
they can do is concede that he is now “drifting” rather than pushing forcefully
ahead (Kaplan) and to hope that Iran and North Korea will eventually force a
real change in his overall approach (Ahrari). As for me, unaccustomed as I am
to finding myself siding with my ideological enemies on the Left, I have no
honest choice but to admit that I think Fred Kaplan’s analysis of where the
Bush Doctrine now stands is closer to the mark than any of the others discussed
above, including the ones offered by some of my fellow neoconservatives.
Of course, there are
plenty of leftists around for whom the true “axis of evil” still does and
always will consist of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. In my opinion such people
are worthy of contempt, as are all those who, whether or not they admit it even
to themselves, are rooting for an American defeat in World War IV. My own
heart—it should go without saying—is with those neoconservatives who have been
pressing for a more aggressive implementation of the Bush Doctrine. I even
think that there is at least some merit in many, or perhaps even most, of the
arguments they offer to explain why they have concluded that American foreign
policy is no longer true to the doctrine’s promises. Without denying that the
President is still talking the talk, they contend that his actions demonstrate
that he has ceased walking the walk; and it is by stacking those actions up
against his own language that they seek to justify the charge of, at best, a
loss of nerve and, at worst, an outright betrayal of the goals they formerly
believed he meant to pursue and to which they themselves are as dedicated as
ever.
Nevertheless, I think
they are wrong—less wrong than the old foreign-policy establishment, which
agrees with them that the President has abandoned his own doctrine, and is
gleeful instead of angry about it, but still wrong.
To begin with, the neoconservatives who have given up on Bush or are in the process of
doing so overlook one simple consideration: that he is a politician. This
ridiculously obvious truth has been obscured by the fact that Bush so often
sounds like an ideologue, or perhaps idealist would be a better word. But here
an old Jewish joke applies that I used to tell in connection with the same
mistake that was also made about Ronald Reagan.
“Why are you dressed
like that?” asks the Jewish mother of her son when he visits her wearing the
uniform of a naval officer. “Because, Mama,” he explains, “I just bought a
boat, and I’m the captain.” To which, smiling fondly, she replies, “Well, by
you you’re a captain. And by me you’re a captain. But by a captain are you a
captain?” Which is to say that, like Ronald Reagan before him, George W. Bush
may be an ideologue “by” most politicians (who believe in nothing much and are
always ready to trade a principle for a political gain), but “by” an ideologue
he’s no ideologue.
In other words, while he
is certainly driven by ideas and ideals to a far greater extent than are most
politicians, in implementing these ideas and ideals he is still subject to the
same pressures by which all other politicians are constrained: pressures coming
at him that, as President, he can ignore only at the peril of totally
alienating the support his policies need both at home and abroad if they are to
be sustained. And what this, in turn, means is that prudential considerations
inevitably come into play whenever a major decision has to be made.
There are utopians to
whom pursuing a principled or idealistic policy necessarily precludes the
prudential judgment that determines which fights to pick at a given moment and
which to delay until the time is ripe, when to pause and when to advance, and
which tactic is the right one to use in maneuvering on a particular front.
There are also “realists” who take the necessity of prudential judgment as
proof that a policy driven by ideals is altogether incapable of being executed
and can only lead to disaster if its proponents are naïve enough to try putting
it into practice.
In pointing this out, I
am not suggesting that those of us who share Bush’s ideas and ideals, but who
labor under neither utopian nor realist delusions, are barred from questioning
the soundness of his prudential judgment in this or that instance. But I am
suggesting that, by the same token, we have an intellectual responsibility to
recognize and acknowledge that he has already taken those ideas and ideals much
farther than might have been thought possible, especially given the ferocity of
the opposition they have encountered from all sides and the difficulties they
have also met with in the field. Indeed, it is a measure of his enormous
political skills that—at a time in 2004 when things were not looking at all
good for the Bush Doctrine’s prospects in Iraq—he succeeded in mobilizing
enough support for its wildly controversial principles to run on them for a
second term and win.
In maintaining that Bush has done more
to implement those principles than might reasonably have been expected, I would
recall to the stand two highly credible witnesses on whom I have frequently
relied in the past. The first is the Lebanese radical Walid Jumblatt, who had
always been violently anti-American, who had therefore opposed the invasion of
Iraq, and who had even declared that the killing of American soldiers there was
“legitimate and obligatory.” But as he watched a process of change beginning to
take hold throughout the Middle East, Jumblatt underwent a change of his own:
It’s
strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the
American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi
people voting [in January 2005], 8 million of them, it was the start of a new
Arab world.
The second of my two
witnesses is the Egyptian democratic activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who had also
opposed the invasion of Iraq but who later had to admit that it had
unfrozen
the Middle East, just as Napoleon’s 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq
force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only
to fight against us [reformers]. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush
could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be
midwives.
Since these statements
were made, the theocrats and the autocrats have, just as Ibrahim predicted,
fought back, and the successes they have scored have understandably distressed
Max Boot, Joshua Muravchik, Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, Richard Perle, and
other like-minded neoconservatives. Beyond being distressed, they are also
angry at George W. Bush for doing things that they believe helped trigger these
setbacks and for failing to do the things that could reverse them.
Yet to me it is by no
means self-evident that the course urged upon Bush by his neoconservative critics
in this or that instance has—all factors considered—necessarily been right or
viable. Paul Mirengoff of the blog Power Line,
taking account of the role of prudential judgment in a variety of countries
with differing circumstances, does a good job of defending Bush’s record in
this area against his neoconservative critics:
In
each instance, the administration tilts toward democracy, with the degree of
the tilt dictated by its perception of our ability to control events and the
viability of the status quo. . . . In short, the administration’s policy in the
Middle East is to attempt to promote democracy to just the extent that doing so
makes sense in light of facts on the ground. Since these facts vary from
situation to situation, so too do the manifestations of our policy.
Besides, as a glance at
the the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reveals,
the reformist impulse aroused by the Bush Doctrine is still very much alive
throughout the region. Which tells us that not all those committed to reform
have lost heart, as, according to Muravchik and Boot, some have done in Egypt
(and not even everyone there, as recent demonstrations attest).
But even if it could be shown that the disillusioned neoconservatives’ judgment of “the
facts on the ground” has been right in every instance, the really tremendous
fact—the overriding fact—would remain that it is entirely thanks to the Bush
Doctrine that the Middle East has been “unfrozen.” And even if its author
should for one reason or another prove unable to advance the process of
political change that his policies have set into motion, there will be no
return to the old arrangements and the old ways—no return, to repeat the words
of Fouad Ajami, “to the old pact with tyranny.”
Furthermore, as the
President has demonstrated in his response to the Israeli counterattack against
the terrorists of Hamas in Gaza and the terrorists of Hizballah in Lebanon,
there will be no relapse into the old moral equivalence between Israel and the
forces striving to destroy it. As he has also demonstrated in the same
response, he is holding firm to the fourth pillar of the Bush doctrine by
emphasizing that Israel’s struggle is yet another front in the global struggle
against terrorism, which is to say World War IV. In his own words:
[We]
must recognize that Lebanon is the latest flashpoint in a broader struggle
between freedom and terror that is unfolding across the region.
Not only that, but by
openly identifying Hizballah as a creature of Iran and Syria, he has demonstrated
that he has not forgotten what he had come to realize early on: that the
conflict between Israel and the Palestinians cannot be understood in isolation
from the larger context of the war that the Arab/Muslim world has been waging
to wipe the Jewish state off the map, literally since the day it was born.
Indeed, so firmly has
Bush held on to the fourth pillar of his doctrine that gloomy second thoughts
have arisen about the “end of cowboy diplomacy.” Thus, when Condoleezza Rice,
at a meeting in Rome this past July, refused to buckle to the European demand
that Israel be forced into an immediate cease-fire, the New York Times reported that in
the
space of one hour, . . . the view around the world that the United States may
now be more willing to play nice with others may have been undone. Once again,
it seemed, the United States had reverted to its my-way-or-the-highway
approach.
Yet not even this is
enough to satisfy a devoted friend of Israel like Frank Gaffney of the Center
for Security Policy. In “Cross Hairs” (New York Sun,
August 1, 2006), Gaffney looks at the diplomatic maneuvering of the Bush
administration in buying the Israelis more time and translates it into an
insistence that they “negotiate with and try to appease [Islamofascist totalitarians]
when they are in the Islamofascists’ cross hairs.” But this interpretation
simply ignores the steadfastness of Bush and his people in refusing, against
enormous pressure, to endorse a cease-fire except under the very conditions
that the Israelis themselves proposed. Nor does Gaffney seem to notice that
Bush was tacitly encouraging the Israelis to use the additional time he was
buying them to be more, not less, aggressive in the fight against Hizballah. On
this point, Shmuel Rosner, the Washington correspondent of the liberal Israeli
daily Ha’aretz, asks and answers the right question:
How
much longer will the administration be willing to toe a line that it considers
justified, but whose positive outcomes are late in coming? A senior diplomat
said yesterday that this will depend on the degree to which the U.S. “trusts in
Israel’s ability to win the battle.”
And what of the charge that the President has refused to extend the Bush Doctrine to
Russia and China, in spite of its pledge to “end tyranny everywhere in our
world”? My answer is that everyone knows, or should know—just as everyone knew
about the targets of analogous promises made by Franklin D. Roosevelt in World
War II and John F. Kennedy in World War III—that the primary and immediate focus
of the Bush Doctrine is on the tyrannies in the Middle East, and not on every
despotic regime on the face of the earth. And just as everyone understood
during World War II that defeating the evil regime in Germany justified an
alliance with the equally evil regime in the Soviet Union, so it ought to be
clear that our de-facto alliance with Pakistan, a hotbed of Islamist
radicalism, is necessary to the successful prosecution of the war against
Islamofascism throughout the Middle East.
And Iran? Andrew McCarthy
of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies goes so far as to blame
Tehran’s decision to unleash its proxy Hizballah against Israel on the
American
abandonment of the Bush Doctrine in favor of offering the kitchen sink to the
mullahs in a surely futile plea that they drop their nuclear ambitions.
To be sure, there is no
denying that Bush’s dealings with Iran seem to belie one of his most forceful
early statements about such negotiations:
We
cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our
faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and
then systematically break them.
But it beggars belief
that Bush decided to go along with the European approach to Iran because he
suddenly discovered that there is wisdom in “hoping for the best” and putting
“our faith in the word of tyrants.” To me (pace Richard Perle), it has seemed more likely that he has once again been walking
the last diplomatic mile, exactly as when he spent so many months and so much
energy working to get the UN to endorse an invasion of Iraq. The purpose, now
as then, is to expose the futility of diplomacy where the likes of Saddam
Hussein and the Iranian mullocracy are concerned, and to show that the only
alternative to accepting the threats they pose is military action.
Robert Kagan—a
neoconservative who has not given up on Bush—puts this well in describing the
negotiations as “giving futility its chance.” Kagan also entertains the
possibility that the negotiations are not merely a ploy on Bush’s part, and
that his “ideal outcome really would be a diplomatic solution in which Iran
voluntarily and verifiably abandoned its [nuclear] program.” However that may
be, once having played out the diplomatic string, Bush will be in a strong
political position to say, along with Senator John McCain, that the only thing
worse than bombing Iran would be allowing Iran to build a nuclear bomb—and not
just to endorse that assessment but to act on it.
The problem of North
Korea is different. Precisely because the Clinton administration’s diplomatic
strategy failed to prevent that country from going nuclear, military
action—difficult though possible in the case of Iran—is no longer an option
against North Korea. The only remaining hope is that its neighbors, and
especially China, will in their own interests force it to disarm by threatening
to cut off the aid by which the Kim Jong Il regime remains afloat. This is
clearly what Bush is trying to accomplish, and, thin as the prospect of success
may be, it is hard to see what else he can do short of risking a nuclear war.
In thinking about George W. Bush’s neoconservative critics, I am guided by the lesson I
learned from the fate of my own very similar criticisms of Ronald Reagan: not
the hagiographical Reagan celebrated in conservative song and story, but the
real Reagan, the Reagan who both did and failed to do many things that his
idolatrous admirers have chosen to forget.
The first critique I
produced was published early in Reagan’s first term. This was a long article
for the New York Times Magazine to which
its editors gave the ungainly title, “The Neoconservative Anguish Over Reagan’s
Foreign Policy.”6 Two years
later I wrote another long article, this one for Foreign Affairs,
called “The Reagan Road to Détente.” I also kept up a steady barrage of
criticism in a syndicated column I was doing in those days.
It was as a passionate
advocate of Reagan’s declaratory policies that I repeatedly blasted him for one
betrayal after another: for reacting tepidly to the suppression (yes, by the
evil empire) of the anti-Communist Solidarity movement in Poland;7
for cutting and running when Hizballah (yes, the same Hizballah with which
Israel is now at war) blew up a barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 American servicemen;
for trading arms for hostages with Iran (yes, the same mullocratic Iran we
confront today); for entering into arms-control negotiations with the Soviet
Union (yes, the same species of negotiation at which he had once scoffed as a
dangerous delusion spawned by détente).
Rereading these pieces
today, I am amazed to discover that they were right in almost every detail even
though they were dead wrong about the ultimate effect. For what these acts of
Reagan’s turned out to be was a series of prudential tactics within an overall
strategy that in the end succeeded in attaining its great objective.
At the certain risk of
offending worshipers of the hagiographical Reagan, some of whom are in the
habit of using him as a stick with which to beat up on Bush, I confess that the
betrayals of which the latter is being accused seem to me much less serious
than those committed by his historical predecessor. Be that as it may, however,
these supposed betrayals, too, ought to be regarded as prudential tactics within
an overall strategy.
And there is another
consideration that needs to be taken into account. By the time Reagan became
President, we had been fighting World War III for 33 years; by contrast, World
War IV started only after Bush entered the White House. In this respect, it is
not Reagan to whom Bush should be compared, but Harry Truman.
In 1947, at a time when
many denied that the Soviet Union was even a threat to us, Truman saw it as an
aggressive totalitarian force, which was plunging us into another world war. If
Truman had done nothing else than this, he would deserve to be ranked as a
great President. But he did more: he also recognized that this new world war
differed from the two that had preceded it, and could not be fought in the same
ways, or in as brief a time.8 Out of these two recognitions
flowed the Truman Doctrine, and out of that doctrine came the new strategy
known as containment.
Consider the
similarities with Bush. Even after 9/11, many pooh-poohed the threat of
Islamofascism and, seeing its terrorist weaponry as merely a police matter,
denied (and continue to deny) that we were even really at war, much less in a
new world war. But Bush understood that Islamofascism was “the heir of all the
murderous ideologies of the 20th century”—an aggressive totalitarian force
that, like Nazism and Communism before it, could only be defeated through a
worldwide struggle. It was a struggle that, in its duration and in its mix of
military and non-military means, would bear a greater resemblance to World War
III than to World War II. But it also carried novel features with which
containment had not been designed to cope. Out of these twin understandings,
Bush promulgated his own doctrine, and out of that doctrine came the new
military strategy of preemption and the new political strategy of
democratization.
So far as the implementation of this new strategy goes, it is still early days—roughly
comparable to 1952 in the history of the Truman Doctrine. As with the Truman
Doctrine then, the Bush Doctrine has thus far acted only in the first few
scenes of the first act of a five-act play. Like the Truman Doctrine, too, its
performance has received very bad reviews. Yet we now know that the Truman
Doctrine, despite being attacked by its Republican opponents as the “College of
Cowardly Containment,” was adopted by them when they took power behind Dwight
D. Eisenhower. We also know now that, after many ups and downs and following a
period of retreat in the 1970’s, the policy of containment was updated and
reinvigorated in the 1980’s by Ronald Reagan (albeit without admitting that
this was what he was doing). And we now know as well that it was by thus
building on the sound foundation laid by the Truman Doctrine that Reagan
delivered on its original promise.
It is my contention that
the Bush Doctrine is no more dead today than the Truman Doctrine was cowardly
in its own early career. Bolstered by that analogy, 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. And encouraged by the
precedent of Ronald Reagan, I feel almost as confident in predicting that,
three or four decades into the future, and after the inevitable missteps and
reversals, there will come a President who, like Reagan in relation to Truman
in World War III, will bring World War IV to a victorious end by building on
the noble doctrine that George W. Bush promulgated when that war first began.
—August 7, 2006
Norman
Podhoretz is the editor-at-large of Commentary and the author of ten books, the most recent of which is The Norman
Podhoretz Reader, edited by Thomas L.
Jeffers (2004). His essays on the Bush Doctrine can be found at
www.commentarymagazine.com.
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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