[Reader-list] The New Bush Doctrine

[Anjali Sagar]

The Nation
FEATURE STORY | July 15, 2002
The New Bush Doctrine
by RICHARD FALK 

President Bush's June graduation address to the cadets at West Point has
attracted attention mainly because it is the fullest articulation, so far,
of the new strategic doctrine of pre-emption. The radical idea being touted
by the White House and Pentagon is that the United States has the right to
use military force against any state that is seen as hostile or makes moves
to acquire weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, biological or chemical. The
obvious initial test case for pre-emption is Iraq, whose government the
United States is continually threatening to overthrow, either on the model
of the displacement of the Taliban in Afghanistan or by some other method.
Washington's war plans have evidently not been finalized, and whether the
intimations of war--despite the numerous objections voiced by neighboring
governments and European allies--are to be taken literally is still unclear.

What is certain, and scary, is the new approach to the use of international
force beneath the banner of counterterrorism and in the domestic climate of
fervent nationalism that has existed since September 11. This new approach
repudiates the core idea of the United Nations Charter (reinforced by
decisions of the World Court in The Hague), which prohibits any use of
international force that is not undertaken in self-defense after the
occurrence of an armed attack across an international boundary or pursuant
to a decision by the UN Security Council. When Iraq conquered and annexed
Kuwait in 1990, Kuwait was legally entitled to act in self-defense to
recover its territorial sovereignty even without any UN authorization. And
the United States and others were able to join Kuwait in bolstering its
prospects, thereby acting in what international lawyers call collective
self-defense. 

Back in 1956, when the American commitment to this Charter effort to limit
the discretion of states to the extent possible was still strong, the US
government surprised its allies and adversaries by opposing the Suez war of
Britain, France and Israel because it was a nondefensive use of force
against Egypt, despite the provocations associated at the time with Nasser's
anti-Israeli, anti-Western militancy. This legal commitment had evolved by
stages in the period after World War I, and when the surviving leaders of
Germany and Japan were prosecuted for war crimes, "crimes against the peace"
were declared to be even worse than atrocities committed in the course of
the war. The task of the Charter was to give this concept as clear limits as
possible. 

Pre-emption, in contrast, validates striking first--not in a crisis, as was
done by Israel with plausible, if not entirely convincing, justification in
the 1967 war, when enemy Arab troops were massing on its borders after
dismissing the UN war-preventing presence, but on the basis of shadowy
intentions, alleged potential links to terrorist groups, supposed plans and
projects to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and anticipations of
possible future dangers. It is a doctrine without limits, without
accountability to the UN or international law, without any dependence on a
collective judgment of responsible governments and, what is worse, without
any convincing demonstration of practical necessity.

It is true that the reality of the mega-terrorist challenge requires some
rethinking of the relevance of rules and restraints based on conflict in a
world of territorial states. The most radical aspects of the Al Qaeda
challenge are a result of its nonterritorial, concealed organizational
reality as a multistate network. Modern geopolitics was framed to cope with
conflict, and relations among sovereign states; the capacity of a network
with modest resources to attack and wage a devastating type of war against
the most powerful state does require acknowledgment that postmodern
geopolitics needs a different structure of security.

Postmodernity refers here to preoccupations that can no longer be reduced to
territorial dimensions. This contrasts with "modernity," born
internationally in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia with the emergence of the
secular sovereign state, and a world politics that could be understood by
reference to territorial ambitions and defense. For Osama bin Laden, the
focus has been on nonterritorial empowerment via mega-terrorism, with the
vision of an Islamic umma replacing the modern, Western-inspired structure
of distinct sovereign states. For George W. Bush, the emphasis has been on
carrying the retaliatory war to the networked enemy concealed in some sixty
countries, and on declaring war against all those nonstate forces around the
world. 

To respond to the threat of mega-terrorism does require some stretching of
international law to accommodate the reasonable security needs of sovereign
states. Prior cross-border military reactions to transnational terrorism
over the years by the United States, India, Israel and others were generally
tolerated by the UN and international public opinion because they seemed
proportionate and necessary in relation to the threats posed, and the use of
force relied upon was in its essence reactive, not anticipatory.
International law was bent to serve these practical imperatives of security,
but not broken. But the Bush doctrine of pre-emption goes much further,
encroaching on highly dangerous terrain. It claims a right to abandon rules
of restraint and of law patiently developed over the course of centuries,
rules governing the use of force in relation to territorial states, not
networks. 

To propose abandoning the core legal restraint on international force in
relations among states is to misread the challenge of September 11. It
permits states to use force nondefensively against their enemies, thereby
creating a terrible precedent. There is every reason to think that
containment and deterrence remain effective ways to approach a state that
threatens unwarranted expansion. There is no evidence to suggest that Iraq
cannot be deterred, and its pattern of behavior in relation to its war
against Iran in the 1980s, as well as its conquest and annexation of Kuwait
in 1990, were based on a rational calculation of gains that, when proved
incorrect, led to a reversal of policy. Brutal and oppressive as the regime
in Iraq is, it was accepted until 1990 as a geopolitical ally of sorts. As a
state, it acts and behaves normally, that is, by weighing benefits and
costs. It is surrounded and threatened by superior force, and any attempt to
lash out at neighbors or others would almost certainly result in its
immediate and total destruction. There is no reason whatsoever to think that
deterrence and containment would not succeed, even should Baghdad manage to
acquire biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Deterrence and containment
succeeded in relation to the Soviet Union for more than four decades, under
far more demanding circumstances.

What is at stake with pre-emption, as tied to the "axis of evil" imagery, is
more hidden and sinister. What is feared in Washington, I think, is not
aggressive moves by these countries but their acquisition of weapons of mass
destruction that might give them a deterrent capability with respect to the
United States and other nations. Since the end of the cold war the United
States has enjoyed the luxury of being undeterred in world politics. It is
this circumstance that makes Bush's "unilateralism" particularly disturbing
to other countries, and it must be understood in relation to the moves of
the Pentagon, contained in a report leaked last December, to increase US
reliance on nuclear weapons in a variety of strategic circumstances. At West
Point, Bush declared with moral fervor that "our enemies...have been caught
seeking these terrible weapons." It never occurs to our leaders that these
weapons are no less terrible when in the hands of the United States,
especially when their use is explicitly contemplated as a sensible policy
option. There is every reason for others to fear that when the United States
is undeterred it will again become subject to "the Hiroshima temptation," in
which it might threaten and use such weapons in the absence of any prospect
of retaliation. 

Bush goes further, combining empire with utopia, reminding his West Point
audience that "the twentieth century ended with a single surviving model of
human progress based on nonnegotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of
law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women and private
property, and free speech and equal justice and religious tolerance." The
clear intention is to suggest that America is the embodiment of this model.
And while Bush does concede that "America cannot impose this vision," he
does propose that it "can support and reward governments that make the right
choices for their own people," and presumably punish those that don't. Not
only does the United States claim the right to global dominance but it also
professes to have the final answers for societal well-being, seeming to
forget its homeless, its crowded and expanding prisons, its urban blight and
countless other domestic reminders that ours may not be the best of all
possible worlds, and especially not for all possible peoples.

This vision of postmodern geopolitics is underwritten by a now-familiar
strong message of evangelical moralism. Bush notes that "some worry that it
is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and
wrong. I disagree," and adds that "moral truth is the same in every culture,
in every time, and in every place." Such moral absolutism is then applied to
the current global realities. Bush insists that "we are in a conflict
between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. 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." Aside from occupying
the moral high ground, which exempts America from self-criticism or from
addressing the grievances others have with respect to our policies, such
sentiments imply a repudiation of dialogue and negotiation. As there can be
no acceptable compromise with the forces of evil, there can be no reasonable
restraint on the forces of good. We may lament fundamentalism in the Islamic
world and decry the fulminations of Osama bin Laden, but what about our own?

In contemplating this geopolitical vision for the future, one wonders what
happened to candidate Bush's rhetoric about the importance of "humility" in
defining America's role in the world. Of course, he was then trying to
downsize the humanitarian diplomacy attributed (mostly wrongly) to
Clinton/Gore, but the contrast in tone and substance is still striking. One
wonders whether the heady atmosphere of the Oval Office has fed these
geopolitical dreams, or whether our President, well-known for his lack of
foreign policy knowledge, has been manipulated into a crusading mode by
bureaucratic hawks who seized the opportunity so tragically provided by
September 11. 

Many influential Americans share this dream of a borderless global empire
but adopt less forthright language. For instance, the respected military
commentator Eliot Cohen, writing in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs,
suggests that "in the twenty-first century, characterized like the European
Middle Ages by a universal (if problematic) high culture with a universal
language, the U.S. military plays an extraordinary and inimitable role. It
has become, whether Americans or others like it or not, the ultimate
guarantor of international order." To make such an assertion without apology
or justification is to say, in effect, that the imperial role of the United
States is no longer in doubt, or even subject to useful debate. To
acknowledge that it makes no difference whether Americans or others support
this destiny is to reveal the fallen condition of democracy and the
irrelevance of international public opinion. Along similar lines of
presupposition, Stephen Biddle, in the same issue of Foreign Affairs,
observes in relation to the problems of the Balkans, and specifically
Kosovo, that "Americans do well in crusades," but then he cites Cohen and
Andrew Bacevich to the effect that "they are not suited...to the dirty work
of imperial policing to secure second- or third-tier interest." Such an
outlook makes the fact of an American global empire a foregone conclusion.

But pre-emption and double standards were not the only troubling features of
this postmodern geopolitical outlook outlined in the West Point speech.
There is first of all the issue of global dominance, a project to transform
the world order from its current assemblage of sovereign states in the
direction of a postmodern (that is, nonterritorial) global empire
administered from Washington. Bush misleadingly assured the graduating
cadets that "America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish," and
then went on to describe precisely such undertakings. The President
mentioned that past rivalries among states arose because of their efforts to
compete with one another, but insisted that the future will be different
because of American military superiority: "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." The ambition here is breathtaking and imperial--nothing
less than to remind all states that the era of self-help security is
essentially over, that America is the global gendarme, and that other states
should devote their energies to economic and peaceful pursuits, leaving
overall security in Washington's hands. One can only wonder at the reaction
of foreign ministries around the world, say in Paris or Beijing, when
confronted by this language, which dramatically diminishes traditional
sovereign rights, as well as by the reinforcing moves to scrap the ABM
treaty, to build a missile defense shield and to plan for the weaponization
of space. 

Whether it is Bush at West Point, or the more sedate writings of the foreign
policy elite writing for each other, or for that matter intelligent and
progressive criticism, useful analysis must proceed from the postmodern
realization that we are addressing a menacing nonstate adversary concealed
in a network that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. These new
circumstances definitely call for new thinking that adapts international law
and global security in an effective and constructive manner. But the
adjustments called for by Bush do not meet the specific challenge of
mega-terrorism, and they unleash a variety of dangerous forces. What is
needed is new thinking that sees the United States as part of a global
community that is seeking appropriate ways to restore security and
confidence, but builds on existing frameworks of legal restraints and works
toward a more robust UN, while not claiming for itself an imperial role to
make up the rules of world politics as it goes along. Given the bipartisan
gridlock that has gripped the country since September 11, positive forms of
new thinking will almost certainly come, if they come, from pressures
exerted by the citizenry outside the Beltway. We as citizens have never
faced a more urgent duty.



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