Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[goodluck]

This article is a couple of months old, but still quite relevant. An interesting read on the Bush Doctrine by an experience journalist who has written extensively about foreign affairs over many years.

http://www.reckonings.net/lewis_on_Bush_and_Iraq.htm

[Sarai, thanks for posting the Reckonings article.--sam]

ANTHONY LEWIS:

"BUSH AND IRAQ"

New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002



The New York Review of Books
November 7, 2002

Feature

Bush and Iraq

By Anthony Lewis

What is President Bush's ultimate objective in
Iraq? Is it to make sure that Saddam Hussein
does not have weapons of mass destruction?
Or is it to remove Saddam by force and
remake the politics of Iraq? And if the latter,
would it be the first step toward a new
American imperium?

Weeks of Bush administration rhetoric
concentrated relentlessly on Iraq have left the
answers to those questions in doubt and
confusion. Thus on October 1 Secretary of
State Colin Powell seemed to say that the
United States was following the path of United Nations inspections. He
held a press briefing to explain that, as inspectors planned a return to Iraq,
American policy was to give them "new instructions, strong instructions,
and the strongest support possible from the Security Council...." But on the
same day President Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said, "The policy is
regime change, and that remains the American position." Mr. Fleischer
went on to suggest that an efficient means to that end would be the murder
of Saddam in a coup. He said:

The cost of a one-way ticket is substantially less than [that of
an invasion]. The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take
it on themselves, is substantially less than that.

President Bush himself has sent sharply conflicting signals. At West Point
last June he introduced the idea of preemption. The cold war strategies of
deterrence and containment were no longer adequate, he said. "We must
take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst
threats before they emerge." In September, when he began his drumbeat
about the Iraqi threat and the need for "regime change," he was generally
thought to be planning a preemptive military attack.

Then, on September 12, Mr. Bush spoke in a very different way to the UN
General Assembly. His emphasis was on the need for action by the Security
Council to enforce its own past resolutions. "We want the United Nations
to be effective, and respectful and successful," he said. "We want the
resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced."
The speech disarmed many of his critics, at home and overseas. They saw
it as a step away from war as a first choice, a recognition of the inspection
process as the right way to deal with the weapons threat in Iraq.

But on September 20 the administration published its lengthy paper, "The
National Security Strategy of the United States." Much of it was a
thoughtful analysis of changed realities in the world. It said, for example,
that "America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by
failing ones." But what attracted attention was an explicit, formal statement
of the preemption doctrine. "The greater the threat," the document said,

the greater is the risk of inaction —and the more compelling
the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves,
even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the
enemy's attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by
our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act
preemptively.

Senator Edward Kennedy pointed out that the national security document
elided the historic distinction between preemption and preventive war. The
former is a military attack on an enemy who is known to be about to strike;
the classic example was Israel's attack on Egypt as the Egyptians were
marshaling their forces to strike in 1967. The latter is a war brought when
there is no certainty of the time or even the likelihood of an enemy strike.
Senator Kennedy noted that in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 President
Kennedy had been urged to strike without warning at the missiles the Soviet
Union had placed in Cuba in what would have been a preventive war; he
declined, instead going openly to the UN Security Council and imposing a
blockade on Cuba until the missiles were removed.

The national security document also declared an intention to maintain the
United States' overwhelming edge in military power. "Our forces will be
strong enough," it said, "to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a
military buildup in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the US."

On October 7, speaking in Cincinnati, the President sought to reassure
Americans that war on Iraq was not his first resort. The resolution he had
put before Congress, he said, "does not mean that military action is
imminent or unavoidable." But he painted the menace of Saddam in dark
terms, and he left no doubt that he would attack if Saddam did not meet a
long list of demands.



If President Bush's purpose was really just to see to it that Saddam Hussein
has no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, he greatly complicated his
problem by his aggressive rhetoric. If from the beginning he had adopted
the tone of his General Assembly speech, if he had concentrated on getting
a genuinely enforceable inspection system, if he had reached out to the
hesitant permanent members of the Security Council—China, Russia,
France—I believe they would more readily have supported his effort and
the necessary council resolution. They knew that Saddam Hussein was a
monster in whose hands weapons of mass destruction would be extremely
dangerous. But they needed to be convinced that George W. Bush would
make a good-faith effort to avoid war.

The countries whose support the President needed could hardly have been
reassured by the arrogant tone of so much that he and his associates said,
their insistence on America's right and duty to act alone. Nor could they
have been impressed by the gangster talk of Ari Fleischer about having an
enemy rubbed out. If Mr. Bush was serious about working through the
United Nations, his tactics were extraordinarily inept.

But I find it increasingly hard to believe that Mr. Bush's objective is limited
to seeing that Saddam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction. The
history and the theology of the men whose advice now dominates Mr.
Bush's thinking point to much larger purposes. I think this president wants
to overthrow the rules that have governed international life for the last fifty
years.

Ten years ago Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, and Paul
Wolfowitz, his undersecretary for policy, began assembling the doctrine of a
world ruled from Washington. They are still at it now. But instead of the
first President Bush, who was steeped in the post–World War II philosophy
of alliances and multilateralism, they are advising a President Bush with no
experience in that postwar world and, by all signs, with an instinct for the
unilateral.

One fundamental that would be overthrown is the commitment that the
United States and all other members have made in the United Nations
Charter: to eschew attacks across international frontiers except in response
to armed aggression. The idea of preemptive strikes in violation of that
provision has worried even some conservatives who would like to move
against Saddam Hussein but are concerned about the precedent an attack
would set for others—India, say.



But the danger of the Bush doctrine is really broader than that. The reach
of the doctrine, and its dangers, were well described in an article in Foreign
Affairs by Professor G. John Ikenberry of Georgetown University. The
grand strategy, he wrote, "is a general depreciation of international rules,
treaties, and security partnerships."

Yet it was those very relationships
that have so benefited this country since World War II. "The secret of the
United States' long brilliant run as the world's leading state," Professor
Ikenberry wrote,

was its ability and willingness to exercise power within alliance
and multinational frameworks, which made its power and
agenda more acceptable to allies and other key states around
the world.

He warned that

unchecked US power, shorn of legitimacy and disentangled
from the postwar norms and institutions of the international
order, will usher in a more hostile international system,
making it far harder to achieve American interests.

What we may be seeing in the Iraq strategy, then, is the rejection of the old
American view that, as Professor Ikenberry put it,

a rule-based international order, especially one in which the
United States uses its political weight to derive congenial
rules, will most fully protect American interests, conserve its
power, and extend its influence.

The key phrase in that formulation is "rule-based." For President Bush has
shown, across the board, an unwillingness for his country or himself to be
bound by the rules.

A dramatic example of this resistance to rules is the administration's
obsessive effort to destroy the new International Criminal Court, created
under the leadership of our closest European allies to prosecute those
suspected of genocide and crimes against humanity. Another is the
avoidance of the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners
of war; rather than comply with the rules that have bound us and the world
for decades, the administration unilaterally described the Afghanistan
captives it is holding at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as "unlawful combatants."
The conventions say that questions about the status of prisoners should be
referred to a "competent tribunal." The administration has declined to do
that. It might have argued that al-Qaeda fighters were so obviously
unlawful that international law would not requite the useless gesture of
reference to a tribunal. But the Bush administration did not even bother to
make the argument; it was not interested in the law. (In any event, it is hard
to see how the Geneva process could be avoided in the case of Taliban
prisoners; they were soldiers in the army of a government that controlled
nearly all of Afghanistan.)

That same rejection of the rules—of the law—can be found at home. One
example is the President's order of November 2001 that noncitizens
charged with terrorism or with "harboring" terrorists be tried by military
tribunals. That order appeared to violate the holding of the Supreme Court
in the great post–Civil War case of Ex parte Milligan that there can be no
criminal trials by military tribunal in this country while the civil courts
remain open. An even more astonishing assertion of presidential power is
President Bush's claim of a right to hold any American citizen whom he
designates as an "enemy combatant" in military prison indefinitely, without
trial and without the right to speak with a lawyer. Two men are now being
held in military prisons, in Virginia and South Carolina, under that theory,
forbidden to speak to a lawyer. Government lawyers argue that no court
can examine the lawfulness of their detention.

Respect for the rule of law has been an essential element from the
beginning in the survival and success of this vast, disputatious
country—and a reason for other people's admiration of American society.
But George W. Bush, whatever else his qualities, seems to have no feeling
for the law. That was evident when he was governor of Texas, in the cruel
casualness of his handling of death penalty cases.



It might be regarded as surprising that a president who came to office with
such dubious legitimacy would undertake so radical a transformation of
America's world policy. But Mr. Bush acquired legitimacy with the terrorist
attack of September 11, 2001. He was president, and he understood that
the country looked to him for leadership in the response to terror.

He and his aides have tried hard to make Iraq part of "the war on
terrorism," but their propositions have been unconvincing. There is, so far,
no clear evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, and
Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, have all said that
connections have been found between al-Qaeda and Iraq. But their
statements have been so vague that they have had little credibility.
Moreover, the two parties are the opposite of natural collaborators.
Al-Qaeda detests secular regimes in Muslim countries, of which Saddam's is
a prime example.

A war on Saddam Hussein might in fact distract our attention from the still
urgent need for concern about terrorism. Al-Qaeda is in all likelihood a far
greater threat to Americans than Saddam Hussein. Our defenses against
that kind of terrorism, carried out by a handful of suicidal fanatics from
inside this country, remain primitive.

One puzzle about the cry for war in Iraq is its timing. Why now? Why with
such urgency? The President himself asked rhetorically, in his October 7
speech, "Why be concerned now?" His main answer was that the danger of
terror weapons in Saddam's hands was clear, and "the longer we wait, the
stronger and bolder Saddam Hussein will become."

President Bush had little or nothing to say about Iraq in the first year and
more of his administration. (But a lengthy article in USA Today this
September said that President Bush had secretly begun moving to a policy
of ousting Saddam by force soon after September 11, 2001. Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz urged that course, the article reported, at a Camp David meeting
with the President on September 15; and Bernard Lewis, the Middle East
historian, was invited to meetings with Vice President Cheney and other
officials, where he said it was time to act for the sake of the oppressed
people of Iraq.) Suddenly, as of about September 1, virtually his entire
agenda became Iraq. Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff,
explained to the Times last month why the rhetorical campaign on Iraq
started suddenly in September. His comment left many thinking that the
timing had to do with politics. "From a marketing point of view," he said,
"you don't introduce new products in August."

From the marketing point of view, the key fact is that there is a mid-term
election on November 5, with control of both houses of Congress at stake:
a matter of the greatest importance to President Bush. Republicans are
running as supporters of a war president, and it is much more effective for
them to do that than to rest on Mr. Bush's record. It is, in truth, the most
dismal record of any president in memory. That is especially so on the issue
that usually counts most with the voters, the economy. Millions of
Americans have lost a good part of their savings in the falling stock market.
The federal budget, which showed a fat surplus when Mr. Bush took over,
is now deeply in the red—and heading for more deficits. Iraq also takes
attention away from the shenanigans of corporate executives and questions
about connections between the wrongdoers and President Bush, Vice
President Cheney, and others.

Protection of the environment, another meaningful subject for many, has
taken a terrible beating at the hands of the Bush administration. The
integrity of our surroundings has repeatedly been sacrificed to the financial
interests of a few. My favorite example is the cancellation of the Clinton
administration's rules limiting the use of snowmobiles in national parks, thus
inflicting their noise and fumes on the many for the sake of a handful of
snowmobile manufacturers. But there have been more profound retreats,
such as the stripping of protection from the national forests.

Also suggestive of politics has been the violent reaction to criticism of
President Bush on Iraq. When former vice-president Al Gore made a
critical speech on September 23, Michael Kelly, a columnist whose
obsession used to be hatred of Bill Clinton, called the speech "dishonest,
cheap, low...hollow...wretched...vile, contemptible" and full of
"embarrassingly obvious lies." When Brent Scowcroft, who was national
security adviser to the first President Bush, questioned the case for war on
Iraq, he was excoriated by The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal.



The chief ideological designer of the case for war on Iraq, Deputy Defense
Secretary Wolfowitz, has a different motive. An illuminating piece on
Wolfowitz, "The Sunshine Warrior" by Bill Keller, appeared in The New
York Times Magazine on September 22. It gave a sympathetic view of his
belief that the assertion of American power can turn Iraq into a democracy
and help transform the entire Middle East. I was moved by his optimism as
I read, but I kept thinking of one thing: Vietnam. Here, as in Vietnam, the
advocates are sure that American power can prevail—and sure that the
result will be a happy one. But here, as in Vietnam, so many things could go
wrong. Iraq is a large, modern, heavily urbanized country. If we bomb it
apart, are we going to be wise enough to put it back together? Have Mr.
Wolfowitz and his fellow sunshine warriors calculated the effects of an
American war on feelings among Arabs and other Muslims? What would
follow Saddam? The nature of a post-Saddam government in Iraq is a
crucial concern for Iran, Turkey, Syria, and others; but the Bush
administration has shown no sign of having an answer to that question.

Jane Perlez of The New York Times spoke with women students at the
United Arab Emirates University, an island of modern education in the
Persian Gulf world. She found that although they saw Saddam Hussein as a
dictator, they felt strongly that a war on him would be a war on them. Mr.
Wolfowitz should read her story. He might also look at a September 17
Financial Times interview with Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister of
Malaysia for the last twenty-one years and no softy. War on Iraq "will
lengthen the anti-terrorist campaign," he said:

It will undermine the world economy, it will create a sense of
uncertainty and fear throughout the world. If America
persists in removing Saddam Hussein by military means it
will only anger the Muslim world.... There will be more
willing recruits to the terrorist ranks.

American business leaders and economists have started to express their
fears about the effect of rising oil prices resulting from a war on Iraq.

Mr. Wolfowitz may mean well. But he and his colleagues are members of
that most dangerous breed of men, utopians. They think they can straighten
out the untidy world in which we live, and they know they are right. To
others, their certainty is arrogance. They have in George W. Bush an
untutored believer in the verities of American goodness and American
power. The odds are that, one way or another, he will press for war on
Iraq. He will see it as the beginning of a great new opportunity for the
United States to impose its views on the world: the Bush doctrine.

The power of a president to take this country into war is enormous. The
fear of looking unpatriotic inhibits dissent, as congressional Democrats
have demonstrated. But around the country there are a great many
Americans who are fearful of this war. Opinion polls consistently show
opposition to a unilateral American attack on Iraq, but polls cannot show
the anguish being expressed at town meetings here and there.



Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, writing in the
London Review of Books, said the aim of the planned war on Iraq is not just
to remove Saddam Hussein but to create there a ramshackle coalition of
ethnic groups and warlords utterly subservient to the United States. The
larger goal, he said, was "unilateral world domination through absolute
military superiority." Then he wrote:

The American people would never knowingly support such a
programme—nor for that matter would the US military.
Even after September 11, this is not by historical standards a
militarist country; and whatever the increasingly open
imperialism of the nationalist think-tank class, neither the
military nor the mass of the population wishes to see itself as
imperialist.

We can only hope he is right.

—October 10, 2002

Notes

See Foreign Affairs, September–October 2002.