Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The Bush doctrine in ruins
By Tom Engelhardt
would not allow Iran to move toward the possession of a nuclear weapons program
and his administration would indeed take numerous steps, ranging from sanctions
to the funding of covert actions, to destabilize the country's ruling regime.
More than six years after his "axis of evil" speech, and endless administration
threats and bluster later, Iran is regionally resurgent, the most powerful
foreign influence in Shi'ite Iraq, and continuing on a path toward that nuclear
power program which, it claims, is purely peaceful, but could, of course, prove
otherwise. Result: Strengthened Iran. Grade: F
Unlawful enemy combatants6. Lebanon: Vowing to encourage
a "democratic," pro-Western Lebanon and crush the
Shi'ite Hezbollah movement, which it categorized not only as a tool of Iran but
as a terrorist organization, the administration green-lighted Israel's
disastrous air assault and invasion in the summer of 2006. From that
destructive war, Hezbollah emerged triumphant in its southern domain and
strengthened in Lebanese national politics. Today, Lebanon is once again close
to a low-level civil war and the influence of Syria, essentially the
unmentioned fourth member of the president's "axis of evil", is again on the
rise. Result: Hezbollah ascendant. Grade: F
7. Gaza: As part of the president's "freedom agenda", the
administration promoted Palestinian elections on the West Bank and in the Gaza
Strip meant to fend off the rising strength of the Hamas movement, which it
considered a terrorist organization, and promote the power of Fatah's President
Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas, however, won the election. The US promptly refused to
accept the results and, with Israel, tried to strangle Hamas in its Gaza
stronghold. Hamas today remains entrenched in Gaza, while Abbas is a weakened
figure. Result: Hamas ascendant. Grade: F
8. Somalia: In 2006, using US trained and funded Ethiopian
troops, the Bush administration intervened by proxy in a Somali civil war to
oust a relatively moderate Islamist militia on the verge of unifying that
desperate country for the first time in a long while. Two years later, the
situation has only deteriorated further: the capital Mogadishu is in chaos,
militant Islamists have retaken much of the south, those Ethiopian troops are
preparing to withdraw, and the Bush-backed government to fall. At least, ten
thousand Somalis have died and more than a third of the population, a jump of
77%, needs aid just to survive. Result: Catastrophe. Grade: F
9. Georgia: Promoting Georgian democracy - and an oil pipeline
running through its territory that brought Central Asian energy to Europe while
avoiding Russia - the administration armed, trained, and advised the Georgian
military, backed the country for NATO membership, and looked the other way as
its leader launched an invasion of a breakaway region (where Russian troops
were stationed). Support for Georgia was part of a long-term Bush
administration campaign to rollback Russian influence in its "near abroad,"
especially in Central Asia (where results would, in the end, prove hardly more
promising). The Russian military promptly crushed and then demolished the
Georgian military, brought the future usefulness of the oil pipeline into
question, and sidelined NATO membership for the foreseeable future. In
response, the Bush administration could do nothing at all. Result: Humiliating defeat. Grade: F
'Axis of evil' extra credit target10. North Korea: Calling
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il variously a "dwarf", a "pygmy," and simply
"evil", and his regime "the world's most dangerous", Bush targeted it in his
"axis of evil" speech. As an invasion of Iraq loomed, former secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld made clear that the US was willing to fight and win
wars "on two fronts". The administration turned its back on modestly
successful, Clinton-era two-party negotiations that froze North Korea's
plutonium-processing program, began overt - and possibly covert - campaigns to
undermine the regime, and regularly threatened it over its nuclear weapons
program. The invasion of Iraq evidently led North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il
to the obvious shock-and-aweable conclusion and he promptly upped the pace of
that program. In 2006, the country tested its first nuclear weapon and became a
nuclear power.
Result: Nuclear proliferation encouraged. Grade: F
Collateral damage11. Global Public Opinion: In the 2003
National Security Strategy of the United States was this infamous line: "Our
strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a
strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and
terrorism." In other words, the UN, the International Criminal Court, and
al-Qaeda were all thrown into the same despised category, along with,
implicitly, international public opinion. Who needed any of them? The result?
With the help of its torture policies and its prison camp at Guantanamo for
public relations, the Bush administration achieved wonders. Never has global
opinion of the US been lower (or anti-Americanism more rampant) than in these
years - and when the administration needed allies, they were hard to find (or
expensive to buy).
Result: Public diplomacy in the tank. Grade: F
12. The American taxpayer:The Bush administration estimated that
the war in Iraq might cost the US $50-60 billion, the war in Afghanistan far
less. By now, those wars have officially cost more than $800 billion, close to
$200 billion in the last year (at an estimated $3.5 billion a week). Their real
long-term costs are almost incalculable, though they will certainly reach into
the trillions. The full price tag of the "war on terror", including the costs
of extraordinary renditions, as well as the building and maintaining of
offshore prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, and elsewhere, is unknown, but
historians looking back will undoubtedly conclude that the squandering of such
sums helped push the US toward financial meltdown.
Result: Priceless. Grade: F
Evaluation
If you want a final taste of pathos - to deal with the disasters it created,
the Bush administration has finally turned to the most un-"war-on-terror"-like
diplomatic maneuvers. It rushed an envoy to North Korea to save a
disintegrating nuclear deal (while agreeing to remove that country from the
State Department's list of state sponsors of terror), is preparing the way for
possible negotiations with parts of both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban (call
it "reconciliation"), and is evidently considering setting up a "US Interest
Section" in Teheran soon after the election.
In these last years, the Bush administration's deepest fundamentalist faith -
its cultish belief in the efficacy of military force above all else - has
proven an empty vessel. With its "military strengths beyond challenge"
all-too-effectively challenged, Bush's second-term officials are finally
returning to some of the most boringly traditional methods of diplomacy and
negotiation - under far more extreme circumstances and from a far weaker
position - while their former neo-con supporters scream bloody murder from
right-wing think tanks in Washington and the editorial pages of the Wall Street
Journal. "Having bent the knee to North Korea," former UN ambassador John
Bolton wrote recently in that paper, "Secretary [of State] Rice appears primed
to do the same with Iran, despite that regime's egregious and extensive
involvement in terrorism and the acceleration of its nuclear program."
And they do have a point. This administration does now seem to be on bended
knee to the world.
As with Pandora's box, however, what the Bush administration unleashed cannot
simply be taken back. A new administration will not only inherit an arc of
instability that is truly aflame, but the paradigm, still remarkably
unexamined, of a "war on terror". Now, there is a disaster in the making for
you.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of
Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According
to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of
some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad
Bush years, has recently been published.
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