The failure of the Bush Doctrine

The notion that democratic values could be imposed by force was doomed from the outset

The Bush Doctrine was the product of three interacting conditions: American hegemony, American exceptionalism and American outrage. The first encouraged the belief that anything the United States willed was achievable. The second insisted that what should be willed was the remaking of the world in America’s own image. The third created an enormously powerful pressure for immediate and drastic action.

Taken together, these three conditions constituted a combustible mixture, one not conducive to calm deliberation, the careful weighing of options, and alertness to the danger of unintended consequences. A mature and experienced president might have been able to resist, modify or deflect the pressure. Bush not only yielded to it but gave it authoritative voice, reducing the complexity of the international situation to simple and dangerous Manichean terms: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” (Can you imagine Churchill ever uttering such words?)

Thus was the Bush Doctrine born. My basic objection to it has been its utter lack of balance. There is nothing wrong with including the promotion of democracy and its associated values as one goal among many in the foreign policy of the US, one to be pursued with care and modest expectations when it does not conflict with more demanding goals, and when the conditions for its implementation are favourable. There is everything wrong with pretending (or, even worse, genuinely believing) that it can and should be the overriding purpose of policy, one that must be achieved in quick time and by the application of American force.

Nothing demonstrates the imbalance more clearly than the language used in the President’s three-page introduction to the National Security Strategy document of September 2002. In this first authoritative statement of the doctrine, the President uses the words liberty and freedom, or some variation of them, 28 times; the word interest occurs only twice. This in a document purporting to set out the nation’s security strategy.

The defenders of the doctrine insist that this criticism wrongly assumes a conflict between American interests and American values, that the two are, in fact, mutually reinforcing, if not identical. Indeed, the President claimed as much in his second inaugural address: “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” This being so, no hard choices, no setting of priorities, are deemed necessary.

Samuel Huntington long ago suggested that the “pleasant conjuncture of blessings” in their history inclined Americans to believe in “the unity of goodness: to assume that all good things go together” . Unfortunately this is not the case. Desirable goals can, and often do, conflict and collide. Hard choices do have to be made and priorities established, and the most inspirational goals are not always the most important ones.

The Bush Doctrine links the promotion of freedom and democracy to the active use of American military might. The danger of such a linking has often been spelled out by both realists and liberals. Here is the late Robert Osgood, a much-respected realist, on the subject: “Military force is not only ineffective as an instrument for achieving transcendent moral ends: it is morally dangerous as well … the use of force with a view to such grandiose ends tends to become an end in itself, no longer subject to either moral or practical restrictions, but merely to the intoxication with abstract ideals.”

And for those allergic to realism, here is John Stuart Mill, on the same subject: “To go to war for an idea, if the war is aggressive, not defensive, is as criminal as to go to war for territory or revenue; for it is as little justified to force our ideas on other people, as it is to compel them to submit to our will in other respects.”

What of the record of the doctrine in action? It has to its credit the removal of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, which is not inconsiderable. As against that, tens of thousands of innocent people, and 2000 American servicemen, have been killed, and both countries remain in a state of violence and turmoil. While some kind of democratic apparatus has been set up in both countries, the prospect of genuine and viable democracy in either remains remote.

The American military, which three years ago seemed an irresistible force, has had its limitations exposed. While its power to crush and destroy is great, its capacity to control and maintain order, to administer honestly and efficiently, is very limited. Eliot Cohen, an expert on the subject and a supporter of the war, believes the US Army and Marine Corps have been strained “to the breaking point” by the implementation of the doctrine.

The international standing and influence of the US are much lower than they were four years ago. The country is more deeply divided than at any time since the early 1970s.

Precedents have been set that will come back to haunt us and our children: among them a ready resort to preventive and preemptive wars, the setting aside of the Geneva Convention and habeas corpus, the blatant insistence on the right to double standards, and exceptionally low standards of truth-telling on vital questions of policy.

The application of the doctrine has also highlighted the contradiction between a conservative domestic policy that seeks to reduce the power of government and a conservative foreign policy that must greatly increase it.

All that said, America has great powers of self-correction, a historically proven capacity to rebound from adversity and error. Indeed, I believe that the first great test of the Bush Doctrine in Iraq is also likely to be its last. Failure there will restore balance and prudence to American foreign policy. With reasonable luck, it will lead to the conclusion that the smartest way of being hegemonic is to be content with appearing to be primus inter pares in a concert of powers.

The greater disaster in America’s Iraq venture would have been something plausibly resembling a quick and decisive success. What dangerous excesses would that have led us to by now?

Owen Harries is a veteran diplomat and senior fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. This article appears in the November issue of Commentary , published by the American Jewish Committee.