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COMMENTARY
Flawed blueprint for 'war for peace'
doctrine
By Tom Barry
"Warlike intervention by civilized powers
would contribute directly to the peace of the
world."
This type of bellicose formulation
of United States foreign policy could have easily come
from any member of George W Bush's foreign-policy team.
One thinks first of hawks such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald
Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney and Richard Perle. But it could
just as easily have been a statement by the president
himself, or by the moderate conservatives such as Colin
Powell or Richard Armitage, when referring to US plans
to wage war on Iraq.
This "war for peace"
doctrine, however, came from the US president whom
neo-conservatives honor as America's model of an
"internationalist" president: Teddy Roosevelt - the hero
who led the famous charge up "San Juan Hill" in Cuba and
championed the Spanish-American War of 1898, which made
the United States an imperial power with territorial
possessions around the world. Here was a man who was
unapologetic about power and its uses. "All the great
masterful races have been fighting races," boasted
Roosevelt, "and no triumph of peace is quite so great as
the triumphs of war."
Any attempt to understand
the ideology and the type of frontier justice that
distinguishes US foreign policy today will fall short if
it does not keep in mind the heroes of the ideologues
and enforcers of the Bush foreign policy. Beginning in
the 1970s, neo-conservative groups, such as the
Committee on the Present Danger, started criticizing
mainstream scholars of international relations for their
purported misrepresentation of the history of US
internationalism. America's true internationalism is not
the liberal variety advanced by presidents Woodrow
Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, they have argued, but the
conservative, interventionist internationalism of Teddy
Roosevelt. Today, the neo-conservatives include Ronald
Reagan in their models of conservative
internationalists. At the same time, the
neo-conservatives who have set the foreign-policy agenda
of the current administration also rail against the
proponents of "realism" in international relations. They
contend that US foreign policy needs to have a "moral
clarity" (a pet phrase of the conservative camp), and
shouldn't be based just on strictly defined national or
economic interests, as the realists would have
it.
The Bush foreign-policy team has been
champing at the bit to get on with the foreign-policy
agenda laid out in the 1990s by such groups as the
American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, the
Center for Security Policy, and the Project for the New
American Century (PNAC). These and other right-wing
think-tanks and policy institutes believe that George
W's father and Bill Clinton squandered the opportunity
to fashion a truly global US hegemony or imperium in the
1990s. High on the list of priorities for the
interventionist agenda of the conservative
internationalists is overthrowing Saddam Hussein - a
case of a US foreign-policy objective where moral
clarity partners with US national interest, namely
controlling a major source of oil.
The White
House's National Security Strategy of the United States,
released in September, briefly outlines the new Bush
foreign-policy doctrine of global military domination
and interventionism. But the full scope and ambition of
the Bush foreign and military policy is more
comprehensively laid out in a book called Present
Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and
Defense Policy produced by the PNAC in 2000. In this
edited volume by PNAC founders Robert Kagan and William
Kristol, one can find what amounts to a blueprint for
the current objectives of US global engagement.
Non-state terrorism is given short shrift in the book,
which includes chapters written by such current top
foreign-policy team players as Perle, Elliott Abrams,
Wolfowitz and Peter Rodman.
It's a call for a
doctrine of frontier justice in which the top gun - the
United States - saddles up and hustles together a posse
to pursue bandits and rogues. According to the
conservative internationalists, such as Wolfowitz, we
"must descend from the realm of general principles to
the making of specific decisions". While laws, judges
and trials are what we "want for our domestic political
process ... foreign-policy decisions cannot be subject
to that kind of rule of law".
PNAC's Present
Dangers apparently functions as a playbook for the
Bush administration. In his chapter on the Middle East,
Abrams lays out the "peace through strength" credo that
has become the operating principle of this
administration. "Our military strength and willingness
to use it will remain a key factor in our ability to
promote peace," wrote Abrams, who is the
administration's National Security Council senior
director for democracy, human rights and international
operations. Like the other PNAC principals, Abrams calls
for a pre-emptive "toppling of Saddam Hussein".
Strengthening America's major ally in the region,
Israel, should be the base of US Middle East policy, and
the US should not permit the establishment of a
Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold US
policy in the region, according to Abrams.
Under
a heading "Regime Change" in the introductory chapter,
Kristol and Kagan target Iraq, Iran, North Korea and
China as challengers that need to be confronted. With
respect to Iraq and North Korea, the two PNAC founders
conclude that US "pre-eminence" in the 21st century
cannot rest on "simply wish[ing] hostile regimes out of
existence". They warn that the US will have "to
intervene abroad even when we cannot prove that a
narrowly construed 'vital interest' of the United States
is at stake".
This is precisely why the Bush
administration is having such a difficult time
explaining why it is on the warpath against Iraq. The
arguments made by the Pentagon, the State Department and
the White House about the Iraqi regime's support for
international terrorism, its obstruction of United
Nations inspections, or its repressive character don't
go to the heart of their agenda - namely to effect
"regime change" in all countries that constitute a
challenge - real or potential - to the American
"imperium", with their control of essential global
resources and its global military domination.
The Bush administration contends, like Teddy
Roosevelt, that US war-making is a strike for peace.
Writing during the last presidential campaign, Kagan and
Kristol called for a new foreign policy based on the
principles of superior military power and conservative
internationalism. "Conservative internationalists," they
said, "are the true heirs to a tradition in American
foreign policy that runs from Theodore Roosevelt through
Ronald Reagan." Fortunately, most of the international
community and growing numbers of Americans reject the
revival of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy as an
appropriate manifestation of 21st-century
internationalism.
Tom Barry (tom@irc-online.org)
is a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric
Resource Center and co-director of Foreign Policy In
Focus.
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
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