The Introduction to the National Security Strategy signed by President Bush starts off by declaring the universal nature of the desire for freedom and democracy as we understand it in the United States. And it basis itself on the starting point: "Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence."
And it invokes the frightening, uncertain nature of terrorism to justify an aggressive strategy, focusing on state sponsors of terrorism (my emphasis):
Defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government. Today, that task has changed dramatically. Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern technologies against us.
To defeat this threat we must make use of every tool in our arsenal—military power, better homeland defenses, law enforcement, intelligence, and vigorous efforts to cut off terrorist financing. The war against terrorists of global reach is a global enterprise of uncertain duration. America will help nations that need our assistance in combating terror. And America will hold to account nations that are compromised by terror, including those who harbor terrorists— because the allies of terror are the enemies of civilization. The United States and countries cooperating with us must not allow the terrorists to develop new home bases. Together, we will seek to deny them sanctuary at every turn.
This policy was issued in thefall of 2002, as the administration had its campaign for war in Iraq in full swing. The most immediatefocus of this policy was Iraq itself. The following paragraph has been much quoted, which provides therhetorical justfication for the Bush Doctrine of preventive war (my emphasis):
The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. We will build defenses against ballistic missiles and other means of delivery. We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain, and curtail our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed. We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies’ plans, using the best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation. History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action.
Official adminitration statements have been careful to call it "pre-emptive war," which is legal in international law, versus "preventive war." But as applied in Iraq and apparently as envisioned by this this administration in a larger perspective, it means preventive war, with all that implies.
As the official statement of the broad outlines of American foreign policy, this document is more bland than some of the speeches by Bush and Cheney or the opinion pieces by others advocating various aspects of the policy. But it does give a view of how Bush frames the world for his foreign policy.
So its worth noting that the policy of preventive war is framed in terms of Wilsonian rhetoric about spreading the benefits of democracy to other nations of the world (my emphasis):
This is also a time of opportunity for America. We will work to translate this moment of influence into decades of peace, prosperity, and liberty. The U.S. national security strategy will be based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests. The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better. Our goals on the path to progress are clear: political and economic freedom, peaceful relations with other states, and respect for human dignity.
This formulation of the notion is also worth noting (my emphasis):
America must stand firmly for the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law; limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property.
These demands can be met in many ways. America’s constitution has served us well. Many other nations, with different histories and cultures, facing different circumstances, have successfully incorporated these core principles into their own systems of governance. History has not been kind to those nations which ignored or flouted the rights and aspirations of their people.
The phrase "nonnegotiable demands" for democratic rights is particularly jarring, since the US has to conduct business of various kinds with countries that observe both lower and higher standards of democratic rule and respect for law than does the US. This was well before the Abu Ghuraib torture scandal hit the press, of course. But now it's much more clear - at least to anyone willing to see it and who gets information from something more reliable than Fox News - that one of the biggest problems for the US in the world now is the perception of administration's conduct as lawless and lacking in restraint.
In the context of the buildup to the war in Iraq, this passage stands out in the strategy paper's discussion of terrorism: "Our immediate focus will be those terrorist organizations of global reach and any terrorist or state sponsor of terrorism which attempts to gain or use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or their precursors." (my emphasis)
The emphasis on terrorism as a problem of state sponsors of terrorism is also evident when the doucment says that the US will deny "further sponsorship, support, and sanctuary to terrorists by convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities." It also talks about deligitimizing terrorism so that it will come to be regarded as "behaviorthat no respectable government can condone or support." (my emphasis)
The document invokes the Cold War atmosphere in which American security concerns, even though defined in terms of the so-called Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), are directed at combatting threats from state actors (my emphasis):
But new deadly challenges have emerged from rogue states and terrorists. None of these contemporary threats rival the sheer destructive power that was arrayed against us by the Soviet Union. However, the nature and motivations of these new adversaries, their determination to obtain destructive powers hitherto available only to the world’s strongest states, and the greater likelihood that they will use weapons of mass destruction against us, make today’s security environment more complex and dangerous.
The following list of criteria that provided a general background for the claims made against Iraq are worth noting as the administration escalates its confrontational stance against Iran. It defines "rogue states" as those which:
And, the paper says, again articulating the preventive war stance, "We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends."
The paper makes a definite gesture toward at least defensively justifying preventive war under international law (my emphasis):
For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack.Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat—most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.
We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction—weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning.
The targets of these attacks are our military forces and our civilian population, in direct violation of one of the principal norms of the law of warfare. As was demonstrated by the losses on September 11, 2001, mass civilian casualties is the specific objective of terrorists and these losses would be exponentially more severe if terrorists acquired and used weapons of mass destruction.
The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction— and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.
The paragraphs just quoted are an example of ways in which the Bush administration sought to create a linkage in the minds of public between the preventive war on Iraq, justified by the threat of WMDs that did not exist, and the attacks of 9/11/2001 by Al Qaeda, which had no connection with Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
The paper contains a fair amount of diplomatic boilerplate on American positions on free trade, NATO and various other issues. The anxiety of the Bush administration over the International Criminal Court is reflected in this statement:
We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.We will work together with other nations to avoid complications in our military operations and cooperation, through such mechanisms as multilateral and bilateral agreements that will protect U.S. nationals from the ICC.We will implement fully the American Servicemembers Protection Act,whose provisions are intended to ensure and enhance the protection of U.S. personnel and officials.
It's unfortunatley appropriate that an official document laying out a general justification of preventive war, with a think attempt to present it as "pre-emptive" war redefined, also focus on the ICC as a potential danger to Americans implementing the Bush national security strategy.
The National Security Strategy of 2002 was the official codification of the process we saw unfold in reality from the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11/2001 to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Robert Jay Lifton describes that process well in Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation With the World (2003), which I'll be discussed further in a later post:
The war on terrorism, then, took amorphous impulses toward combating terror and used them as a pretext for realizing a prior mission aimed at American global hegemony. The attack on Iraq reflected the reach not only of the "war on terrorism" but of deceptions and manipulations of reality that have accompanied it. In this context, the word "war" came to combine metaphor (as in the "war on poverty" or "war on drugs"), justification for "preemptive" (preventive) attack, conventional military combat, and assertion of superpower domination.
No comments:
Post a Comment