Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The Bush doctrine in ruins
By Tom Engelhardt
On the brief occasions when President George W Bush now appears in the Rose
Garden to "comfort" or "reassure" a shock-and-awed nation, you can almost hear
those legions of ducks quacking lamely in the background. Once upon a time,
Bush, along with his top officials and advisors, hoped to preside over a global
Pax Americana and a domestic Pax Republicana - a legacy for the generations.
More recently, their highest hope seems to have been to slip out of town in
January before the you-know-what hits the fan. No such luck.
Of course, what they feared most was that the you-know-what
would hit in Iraq, and so put their efforts into sweeping that disaster out of
sight. Once again, however, as in September 2001 and August 2005, they were
caught predictably flatfooted by a domestic disaster. In this case, they were
ambushed by an insurgent stock market heading into chaos, killer squads of
credit default swaps, and a hurricane of financial collapse.
At the moment, only 7% of Americans believe the country is "going in the right
direction," Bush's job-approval ratings have dropped into the low 20s with no
bottom in sight, and North Dakota is "in play" in the presidential election.
Think of that as the equivalent of a report card on Bush's economic policies.
In other words, the Yale legacy student with the C average has been branded for
life with a resounding domestic "F" for failure. (His singular domestic triumph
may prove to be paving the way for the first African American president.)
But there's another report card that's not in. Despite a media focus on Bush's
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the record of his "war on terror" (and the Bush
Doctrine that once went with it) has yet to be fully assessed. This is
surprising, since administration actions in waging that war in what
neo-conservatives used to call "the arc of instability" - a swath of territory
running from North Africa to the Chinese border - add up to a record of failure
unprecedented in American history.
On June 1, 2002, Bush gave the commencement address at the US Military Academy
at West Point. The Afghan war was then being hailed as a triumph and the
invasion of Iraq just beginning to loom on the horizon. That day, after
insisting the US had "no empire to extend or utopia to establish", the
president laid out a vision of how the US was to operate globally, facing "a
threat with no precedent" - al-Qaeda-style terrorism in a world of weapons of
mass destruction.
After indicating that "terror cells" were to be targeted in up to 60 countries,
he offered a breathtakingly radical basis for the pursuit of American
interests:
We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly
sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them. 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. In the
world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this
nation will act ... Our security will require transforming the military you
will lead - a military that must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any
dark corner of the world.
This would later be known as Vice
President Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine" - even a 1% chance of an attack
on the US, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with
militarily as if it were a certainty. It may have been the rashest formula for
"preventive" or "aggressive" war offered in the modern era.
The president and his neo-con backers were then riding high. Some were even
talking up the United States as a "new Rome", greater even than imperial
Britain. For them, global control had a single prerequisite: the possession of
overwhelming military force. With American military power unimpeachably number
one, global domination followed logically. As Bush put it that day, in a
statement unique in the annals of our history: "America has, and intends to
keep, military strengths beyond challenge - thereby making the destabilizing
arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other
pursuits of peace."
In other words, a planet of great powers was all over and it was time for the
rest of the world to get used to it. Like the wimps they were, other nations
could "trade" and pursue "peace". For its pure folly, not to say its
misunderstanding of the nature of power on our planet, it remains a statement
that should still take anyone's breath away.
The Bush Doctrine, of course, no longer exists. Within a year, it had run
aground on the shoals of reality on its very first whistle stop in Iraq. More
than six years later, looking back on the foreign policy that emerged from
Bush's self-declared "war on terror", it's clear that no president has ever
failed on his own terms on such a scale or quite so comprehensively. Here,
then, is a brief report card on Bush's "war on terror".
High-Value targets1. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda: The
"war on terror" started here. Osama bin Laden was to be brought in "dead or
alive" - until, in December 2001, he escaped from a partial US encirclement in
the mountainous Tora Bora region of Afghanistan (and many of the US troops
chasing him were soon enough dispatched Iraqwards). Seven years later, bin
Laden remains free, as does his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, probably
in the mountainous Pakistani tribal areas near the Afghan border. Al-Qaeda has
been reconstituted there and is believed to be stronger than ever. An allied
organization that didn't exist in 2001, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was later
declared by Bush to be the "central front in the war on terror", while al-Qaeda
branches and wannabe groups have proliferated elsewhere. Result: Terror promoted. Grade: F
2. The Taliban and Afghanistan: The Taliban was officially
defeated in November 2001 with an "invasion" that combined native troops, US
special operations forces, CIA agents, and US air power. The Afghan capital,
Kabul, was "liberated" and, not long after, a "democratic" government installed
(filled, in part, with a familiar cast of warlords, human rights violators,
drug lords, and the like). Seven years later, according to an upcoming National
Intelligence Estimate, Afghanistan is on a "downward spiral"; the drug trade
flourishes as never before; the government of President Hamid Karzai is
notoriously corrupt, deeply despised, and incapable of exercising control much
beyond the capital; American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
troops, thanks largely to a reliance upon air power and soaring civilian
deaths, are increasingly unpopular; the Taliban is resurgent and has
established a shadow government across much of the south, while its guerrillas
are embedded at the gates of Kabul. American and NATO forces promoted a "surge"
strategy in 2007 that failed and are now calling for more of the same.
Reconstruction never happened. Result: Losing war. Grade: F
3. Pakistan: At the time of the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush
administration threw its support behind General Pervez Musharraf, the military
dictator of relatively stable, nuclear-armed Pakistan. In the ensuing years,
the US transferred at least $10 billion, mainly to the general's military
associates, to fight the "war on terror". (Most of the money went elsewhere.)
Seven years later, Musharraf has fallen ingloriously, while the country has
reportedly turned strongly anti-American - only 19% of Pakistanis in a recent
BBC poll had a negative view of al-Qaeda - is on the verge of a financial
meltdown, and has been strikingly destabilized, with its tribal regions at
least partially in the hands of a Pakistani version of the Taliban as well as
al-Qaeda and foreign jihadis. That region is also now a relatively safe haven
for the Afghan Taliban. American planes and drones attack in these areas ever
more regularly, causing civilian casualties and more anti-Americanism, as the
US edges toward its third real war in the region. Result: Extremism promoted, destabilization in progress. Grade:
F
4. Iraq: In March 2003, with a shock-and-awe air campaign and
130,000 troops, the Bush administration launched its long-desired invasion of
Saddam Hussein's Iraq, officially in search of (nonexistent) weapons of mass
destruction. Baghdad fell to American troops in April and Bush declared "major
combat operations ... ended" from the deck of a US aircraft carrier against a
"Mission Accomplished" banner on May 1. Within four months, according to
administration projections, there were to be only 30,000 to 40,000 American
troops left in the country, stationed at bases outside Iraq's cities, in a
peaceful (occupied) land with a "democratic," non-sectarian, pro-American
government in formation. In the intervening five-plus years, perhaps one
million Iraqis died, up to five million went into internal or external exile, a
fierce insurgency blew up, an even fiercer sectarian war took place, more than
4,000 Americans died, hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars were
spent on a war that led to chaos and on "reconstruction" that reconstructed
nothing.
There are still close to 150,000 American troops in the country and American
military leaders are cautioning against withdrawing many more of them any time
soon. Filled with killing fields and barely hanging together, Iraq is - despite
recently lowered levels of violence - still among the more dangerous
environments on the planet, while a largely Shi'ite government in Baghdad has
grown ever closer to Shi'ite Iran. Thanks to the president's "surge strategy"
of 2007, this state of affairs is often described here as a "success". Result: Mission unaccomplished. Grade: F
5. Iran: In his January 2002 State of the Union address, Bush
dubbed Iran part of an "axis of evil" (along with Iraq and North Korea),
attaching a shock-and-awe bull's-eye to that nation ruled by Islamic
fundamentalists. (A neo-con quip of that time was: "Everyone wants to go to
Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.") In later years, Bush warned
repeatedly that the US
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