Reading notes

Editorial title refers to The National Security Strategy of the United States, aka The Bush Doctrine, “whose unraveling across the board we are now witnessing” —

Condoleezza Rice likened the post-September 11 moment to the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the cold war. President Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson titled his memoir of the period Present at the Creation. The Bush doctrine was self-consciously patterned upon it. Now, less than two years later, we are present at the dissolution.

The commentary goes on to say (italics mine),

The Bush policy has failed in Iraq. The Iraq war gave life to every one of the main tenets of the Bush doctrine: It was an exercise in the raw, overwhelmingly unilateral use of American military power; its chief justification was stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction (the Congressional resolution passed last October authorized forcing compliance with UN resolutions, which dealt almost exclusively with the disarmament issue); and it was preventive par excellence. Now the weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found. To the arguments that preventive war is illegal (a clear violation of the UN Charter) and strategically reckless (if taken as a model by other states, it is a formula for international anarchy), we must add that it is unusually prone to catastrophic error.

And finally,

The United States needs to choose cooperation over coercion; multilateralism over unilateralism; respect for international opinion over defiance; defense over offense; containment and deterrence over prevention; diplomacy over force; peace over war.

IOW, the kinds of community- and peace-oriented choices I believe Jesus commends to us as a nation, as these choices represent the group manifestation of behaviors he specifically commends to us as individuals. The choices we’ve made so far are instead group behaviors to which he might reasonably say — all Southern Baptist protestations to the contrary — “You brood of vipers!”