“Notwithstanding the caricature of the Bush Doctrine, portrayed by its critics as a menacing unilateralism serving a crusade to impose democracy by force, Bush has correctly understood that the dictatorships and autocracies of the Middle East are the soil in which lethal extremism and the passion for holy war have taken root and spread. He is under no illusion that democratic reform will come quickly or easily, or that it can be imposed from outside by military means. In pressing for reform, he has stood up against the counsel of inaction, self-designated as sophistication, from foreign offices around the world—including those of our European and ‘moderate’ Arab allies—and rather too often even from our own diplomatic establishment. Such counsel would leave the dictators in place for as long as they can cling to power or, worse still, have us collaborate with them and their secret services, or negotiate for their voluntary restraint, in the vain and by now discredited hope that we can thereby purchase safety for our citizens.”
Another longtime observer, Richard Pipes, comments, “I do not recall a period in modern history when United States foreign policy has been under such relentless attack from abroad and at home as in the administration of George W. Bush.”
Pipes’s next sentence, at first, struck me as too partisan: “At home, the criticism is mainly inspired by Democratic frustration over Republican electoral triumphs and the feeling that the Republicans’ aggressive foreign policy is what makes them vulnerable.”
But then, Senate Democrat Minority Leader Harry Reid pulled the U.S. Senate into secret session to demand, “a searching and comprehensive investigation about how the Bush Administration brought this country to war.”
In doing so, Reid ensured that November 1, 2005, would forever be remembered as the day that the Democrat Party officially declared war on the war in Iraq. They’re now repeating their 1972 game plan of openly coalescing around eviscerating the war policy for which they’ve lost guts.
As Henry Kissinger reflected back in August, “America’s emotional exhaustion with the [Vietnam] war and the domestic travail of Watergate had reduced economic and military aid to Vietnam by two-thirds, and Congress prohibited military support, even via airpower, to the besieged ally.”
Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz reflects, “If we are eventually beaten back, it will not be by the terrorist insurgency over there but by the political insurgency here at home.” Daniel Henninger, of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, chimes in, “The U.S. and Western European media are together the most potent driver of doctrinaire pacifism since the idea emerged with force in the twentieth century.”
Paul Johnson, as befits such a sweeping scholar of the entire history of religions and countries, concludes, “We must ask ourselves this question: how much more fearful and violent would our world be if America did not exist?”
Yet, what’s missing from the Commentary symposium is an in-depth examination of whether the Bush Doctrine is a blueprint for action, or a formulation for reactive coping in the post-9/11 world.
While far more assertive than Clinton’s national security strategy, I contend that the Bush Doctrine is still excessively reactive and doesn’t present a sufficiently aggressive blueprint for ultimately winning the war against terror, its state sponsors, and the threat of WMD’s. Moreover, even the Nixon Doctrine may have been more forward-looking.
So what’s needed? On the domestic front, far more is required to strengthen our foreign policy, for no such strategy can succeed absent a strong domestic policy. In turn, the self-strengthening domestic policies must be directly linked to our specific foreign policy goals:
To relieve the downward pressure of oil dependence on the American economy, and to free ourselves to more forthrightly confront the Saudi and other Arab League sycophants of Islamic extremism, we must go full tilt into conservation and alternate fuel technologies.
To sustain our ability to deter and meet armed challenges, we must build a larger and more robust military and simultaneously demand that university recipients of federal dollars not impede research or recruitment.
To pay for these measures, we must phase in dissuasive-level fossil fuel taxes. Strict budget rules must be honored for a multi-year moratorium on increases in existing discretionary and new spending programs. Responsible Congresses and administrations imposed such measures during World War II and Korea. We can demand no less now. Irresponsible “guns-and-butter” Johnson administration policies during Vietnam excused Americans from the national commitment and fed enervating inflation in the 1970s.
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