Another key document laying out Bush's vision of the world on which his foreign policy rests is the text of the speech he gave at West Point in June 2002: Remarks by the President, 2002 graduation exercise of the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY 06/01/02. Bush told the graduates:
History has also issued its call to your generation. In your last year, America was attacked by a ruthless and resourceful enemy. You graduate from this Academy in a time of war, taking your place in an American military that is powerful and is honorable. Our war on terror is only begun, but in Afghanistan it was begun well. (Applause.)
I am proud of the men and women who have fought on my orders. America is profoundly grateful for all who serve the cause of freedom, and for all who have given their lives in its defense. This nation respects and trusts our military, and we are confident in your victories to come. (Applause.) [my emphasis]
As Wesley Clark has pointed out, one effect of the all-volunteer Army has been that it enabled an abstract sentimentalization of the military and of soldiers, a sentimentalization that for more and more people is devoid of direct personal experience of military service or of contact with soldiers. The Republicans have adopted the pretence that any criticism of their partisan foreign foreign and military policies is "dishonoring our soldiers," even when the criticism comes from veterans or former senior military officials. On the other hand, the criticisms of the military that pour from the word processing programs of the neoconservatives or the advocates of Rummy's particular brand of "military transformation" are treated as imminently patriotic.
America's mission to liberate the world
This war will take many turns we cannot predict. Yet I am certain of this: Wherever we carry it, the American flag will stand not only for our power, but for freedom. (Applause.) Our nation's cause has always been larger than our nation's defense. We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace -- a peace that favors human liberty. We will defend the peace against threats from terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies onevery continent. [my emphasis]
This notion, that America fights for grand ideals and not just for national defense - and even less for cynical or base motives - has rightly been called "Wilsonian," with reference to President Woodrow Wilson's idealistic-minded foreign policy. It's a useful comparison.
But Bush's vision seems to draw solely from the dark side of Wilsonism. Wilson's personal religiosity was probably more serious, or at least more carefully considered, than Dubya's. But, sadly, little came from his idealistic notions of the peace at the end of the Great War. In order to get the Old World powers to agree to his League of Nations, he acquiesed in a bandits' peace that laid the grounds for a new world war, one that turned out to be far more destructive.
His personal idealism also led him to react with dogmatic rejection to the Bolshevik Revolution. Whether a more flexible and less dogmatic attitude on his part could have led to substantially different outcomes in relation to Soviet Russia is certainly debatable. But the attitude he did take largely foreclosed that possibility. It's nearly forgotten by Americans now, but the US and Britain landed troops in Russia in a limited attempt to overturn the Communist government, the only instance of direct clashes between American troops and those of the Soviet Union.
Given Bush's special relationship to the Almighty, it's also worth remembering how Wilson's personal religiosity became a vehicle for at least a partial relinquishing of his reality-testing skills. Facing the prospect that the peace treaty was deeply flawed in its particulars, Wilson fastened his hopes on the League of Nations covenant, as John Dos Passos described in Mr. Wilson's War (1962):
As the drafting progressed the idea of the [League of Nations] covenant more and more assumed a mystical significance to Woodrow Wilson: through all the deep tunnels of his memory the word resounded. It carried him back to the religious dedication of his boyhood, through his father's sacred stories of the Scots Covenanters who were their forebears, to the Old Testament pact between Almighty God and His chosen people. It irked him that there were people in the world who did not appreciate the divine appointment of his dedication to the great task.
Is the mission reality-based?
Returning to Bush's description of America's (and his own) divine mission:
Building this just peace is America's opportunity, and America's duty. From this day forward, it is your challenge, as well, and we will meet this challenge together. (Applause.) You will wear the uniform of a great and unique country. America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves -- safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life.
Allegedly in pursuit of these pretty ideals, this administration abandoned the Geneva Conventions and allowed the criminal, sadistic tortures in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, tortures whose only real purpose was to spread terror and satisfy someone's sick need for revenge, whether or not the vengence was imposed on people actually guilty.
Pretty words, but in neither of Bush's wars of liberation, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have "safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life" yet to become reality. So far, they have only been pretty words to justify war, killing and torture. And the attempt to shred international law and the system of international treaties on which any serious attempt to build a genuinely peaceful "Wilsonian" order depend.
In defending the peace, we face a threat with no precedent. Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger the American people and our nation. The attacks of September the 11th required a few hundred thousand dollars in the hands of a few dozen evil and deluded men. All of the chaos and suffering they caused came at much less than the cost of a single tank. The dangers have not passed. This government and the American people are on watch, we are ready, because we know the terrorists have more money and more men and more plans.
This aspect of the President's speech is remarkable, and illustrates Bob McElvaine's remark that Bush "has such a Vision that it blinds his vision." Yes, the 9/11 attackers, like most other Al Qaeda operations, are very cost-effective. They are being carried out on a budget that's tiny, infinitessimal compared to the US military budgets, which is something like half the military budgets of theentire world. Spending more money on more of the same, more Star Wars boondoggles, more colonial-stylewars, more high-tech toys that let us see the details of tattoos on the bodies of nekkid sunbathers but couldn't provide the right information about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" - maybe instead we should be focusing our efforts on something more effective against the jihadists.
But Bush's grand vision of wars of liberation by which divinely-appointed America brings the blessings of liberty and democracy to the lesser peoples by bullets, bombs and torture requires endless expansions of military spending to finance the endless wars of liberation and the counterinsurgency wars to which they give rise. And we can do all this killing and torturing and liberating with pride, sure that only a few evil and deluded men oppose our great mission to transform the world into God's image, which of course closely resembles America's image.
If my characterization of the Bush Doctrine as it looks in practice seems harsh, it's because the realities created in Iraq and Afghanistan with actions justified by Bush's pretty words about America's noble mission are harsh ones. Harsh for those being "liberated" by the US in those countries, harsh for our soldiers condemned to fight in impossible tasks with too few troops, too few allies and too little good sense on the part of their leaders.
The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology. When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology -- when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations. Our enemies have declared this very intention, and have been caught seeking these terrible weapons. They want the capability to blackmail us, or to harm us, or to harm our friends -- and we will oppose them with all our power. (Applause.)
For much of the last century, America's defense relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply. But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence -- the promise of massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.
These two sentences show the way in which Bush and his crew make the ideological leap of faith from the realities of jihadist terrorism to their preferred view of terrorism as a problem of state sponsors of terrorism. Bush says that America must adopt the doctrine of preventive war, because the Cold War view of the world is inadequate. But the idea of fighting terrorism by seeing it as a problem of state sponsors of terrorism is at the center of the Bush Doctrine ideology used to justify the invastion and occupation of Iraq. And that notion is a dangerously outmoded Cold War relic.
See if you can fix any limit...
We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. 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. (Applause.)
Homeland defense and missile defense are part of stronger security, and they're essential priorities for America. Yet the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront theworst threats before they emerge. (Applause.) In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act. (Applause.) ...
Long before the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials prosecuted leaders of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan for the crime of "aggressive war", also known as preventive war, one of the crucial problems in the doctrine of preventive war was described very well by Abraham Lincoln, with reference to the Mexican War. In a letter to William Herndon of 02/15/1848, he wrote:
But to return to your position: Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If to-day, he should choose to say he think it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, "I see not probability of theBritish invading us" but he will say to you "be silent; I see it, if you don't."
I've seen that paragraph quoted a number of times by critics of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. But the following paragraph in Lincoln's letter is also well worth considering in this context:
The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kinds have aloways stood.
Although this particular letter was framed in terms of the Congressional war-making power compared to that of the President, Lincoln also focused on the substantive issues behind the procedural question. What has become too much obscured in our recent discussions of the Bush Doctrine in the United States is that war can the most potent instrument of oppression in the hands of bad rulers.
In Lincoln's words, kings had usually if not always claimed that their unjust wars were necessary for the good of their people. And in the eyes of the the Framers of the American Constitution, he said, this was the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions.
Now, we should never lose sight of the fact that wars of liberation can and do occur. Lincoln himself, by freeing the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation, converted the Civil War from a conventional war into a revolutionary war, a war of liberation. Lincoln is one of the most successful practitioners of the politics of war, and he knew the difference between the rare case of genuine wars of liberation, and the danger to freedom represented by unnecessary wars waged by irresponsible leaders, claiming all the while the wars were for the good of their people.
The foreign policy of fear without end
Returning to Bush's speech:
Because the war on terror will require resolve and patience, it will also require firm moral purpose. In this way our struggle is similar to the Cold War. Now, as then, our enemies are totalitarians, holding a creed of power with no place for human dignity. Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control everylife and all of life. ... [my emphasis]
This is an example of the sort of bad historical analogies that have been the window-dressing of the Bush Doctrine. This is just a rhetorical attempt to link the Bush version of the so-called War on Terror, and his doctrine of preventive war, with the Cold War, which has taken its place in official memory as the Good Old Days.
Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. (Applause.) Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. (Applause.) Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. (Applause.) Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong. (Applause.) There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. (Applause.) By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it. (Applause.) [my emphasis]
The "some worry" is a typical Bush device, very similar to the Foxist "some people say" that Fox News commentators use to introduce some Republican Party talking point. In this instance, Bush is setting up a rhetorical straw man. Human rights and the spread of democracy have always been in some way an element of American foreign policy.
And, as an abstract moral point, who could argue with a comment like this? "There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty." But in a world where at least those of us in the Coalition of the Reality-Based can see that there are rarely if ever any purely just vs. unjust causes, or international conflicts between the totally innocent and the totally guilty, it's meaningless as any guide to foreign policy in the real existing world.
And everyone in the world, Americans especially, are right to wonder which side was the just and which the cruel in the torture chambers of Abu Ghuraib and Guantanamo. And when one country, the one whose government is headed by George W. Bush, invades and occupies another to combat "weapons of mass destruction" that didn't exist, was it only the target of the preventive war that was acting as an "evil and lawless" regime? What kind of moral perspective is it that says America can disregard international law and any "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" and go to war, kill people and occupy another country under completely false pretexts?
What kind of morality is it that requires our volunteer soldiers to fight in a war like that, in this case a war that is unwinnable in any normal meaning of the term? What kind of justice is it to consript the unwilling to fight in a war like this, as Bush will surely do if he is elected next week?
As we defend the peace, we also have an historic opportunity to preserve the peace. We have our best chance since the rise of the nation state in the 17th century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war. The history of the last century, in particular, was dominated by a series of destructive national rivalries that left battlefields and graveyards across the Earth. Germany fought France, the Axis fought the Allies, and then the East fought the West, in proxy wars and tense standoffs, against a backdrop of nuclear Armageddon.
Competition between great nations is inevitable, but armed conflict in our world is not. More and more, civilized nations find ourselves on the same side -- united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos. America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge -- (applause) -- thereby, making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace. [my emphasis]
In fact, what Bush and his "neoconservative" ideologues have in mind is a world order built not on peace, law and stability, much less justice. They envision a world dominated by the fear of American military power. And an America dominated by the fear that some country somewhere may start to challenge that power.
Going back to the question Lincoln asked of the preventive war doctrine, once we define our goal not as reasonable national self-defense but of endless military domination of the world, not as the preventing of military conflicts through disarmament but the crushing of any potential future rival through military threats and war, see if you can fix any limit to what Americans have to fear.
Look at the current justification for the Iraq War. Not the 25,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, and the nuclear weapons program that Bush talked about in his 2003 State of the Union address just prior to invading Iraq. (As I've suggested before, go to www.WhiteHouse.gov and see how long it takes you to find the actual text of that speech searching from the home page.) " It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known," said the President. He was assuring us that "the good of the people was the object" of his concern, as Lincoln noted of the Kingly oppressors of the world. A day of horror like none we have ever known.
Now, the justification is that Saddam had the intention to someday have programs that might someday make such weapons. And here we see the relevance of Lincoln's comment to Herndon, not in any phony historical analogy, but in the good sense of someone who knew that starting wars with no good reason was a horrible thing: "If to-day, [the President] should choose to say he think it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see not probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you 'be silent; I see it, if you don't.'"
And if the only justification needed for war is for the president to say that he knows that a foreign dictator (or king or democracy) has the intention to someday have programs that might someday make weapons that could be used against Americans, how can we fix any limit to the justification for war?
For all the Wilsonian rhetoric about morality and justice and defending innocence and fighting for Good against Evil, the Bush vision of America's future is a nightmare vision of unending fear, an unending arms race and an unending series of wars.
[See also Bush's Vision: The PNAC manifesto 10/11/04.]
2 comments:
Congratulations on being an Editor's Pick this week!
Thanks for the compliment and thanks for reading. - Bruce
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