Reading notes

I’ve been waiting for the truth-telling contained in this article for a very long time. The Bush Doctrine, aka the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” invites Hell on Earth.

The occupation of Iraq has increasingly undermined, and in some cases discredited, the core tenets of President Bush’s foreign policy, according to a wide range of Republican and Democratic analysts and U.S. officials.

When the war began 15 months ago, the president’s Iraq policy rested on four broad principles: The United States should act preemptively to prevent strikes on U.S. targets. Washington should be willing to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk. Iraq was the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism. And Baghdad’s transformation into a new democracy would spark regionwide change. …

“Of the four principles, three have failed, and the fourth — democracy promotion — is hanging by a sliver,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staff member in the Reagan administration and now director of regional strategic programs at the Nixon Center. …

As a result, Bush doctrine could become the biggest casualty of U.S. intervention in Iraq …

The Bush Doctrine stone-cold dead would be the primary, maybe the only, benefit of this ill-begotten crusade.

The most controversial tenet of Bush doctrine was also the primary justification for launching the Iraq war. In the president’s June 2002 address to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Bush said deterrence and containment were no longer enough to defend America’s borders. The United States, he said, had the right to take preemptive action to prevent attacks against the United States. …

Iraq showed the “pitfalls of the doctrine in graphic detail,” said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Preemption has been “damaged, if not totally discredited,” and the outcome in Iraq may prove to be “an inoculation against rash action” by the United States in the future, Carpenter said.

The administration is working overtime to reduce the sense of alarm that Washington is posed “on a hair trigger” to launch a new offensive against governments it does not like, said James F. Hoge Jr., editor of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The surest outcome of a doctrine of preemption has always been that other nations will ramp up their defenses, including nuclear, to guard against the U.S. “preemptively” setting yet another nation in their sights. When I say the Bush team exhibits little foresight, this is an example of what I mean.

Thanks, Robin, for this analysis.

For more on the Bush Doctrine — the “National Security Strategy of the United States” — see Wendell Berry for a brilliant response written soon after the White House published the doctrine in September 2002.

2004-07-02 update: I like how Martin van Creveld words a particular consequence of preemptive doctrine (via Melanie):

Now that the U.S. has proved it is prepared to fight anybody for no reason at all, [Iranians] should be forgiven if they redouble their efforts [to acquire nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles to match nuclear-capable American forces surrounding them].