I’d love to hear a coherent explanation of what, exactly, is the criteria of the Bush Doctrine. The phrase has been tossed around for a couple of years now, and at this point, I’m afraid it’s lost all meaning.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush divided the world along clear lines: “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.” The U.S. government would make no distinction between terrorist regimes and nation’s that offered any aid to those regimes. That, we were told at the time, was the Bush Doctrine.
Bush’s canon shifted a bit in the march towards war in Iraq. The new-and-improved doctrine, we were told, was that we were prepared take pre-emptive military action against adversaries with terrorist ties and weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States. Never mind that old stuff; this was the Bush Doctrine. OK, fine. Got it.
Except Bush moved the goal posts again over the weekend. The new standards for military force have dropped to capricious levels. If I heard Bush right, the new set of principles for his administration is guided by the idea that the U.S. has the authority to strike any country that he believes may be a threat someday.
Look out, France.
In his still-entertaining interview on Meet the Press, Bush made two important points about the standards for military action.
First, Bush acknowledged that the intelligence he relied on to mischaracterize the Iraqi threat was wrong, but that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to make WMD. It was a point he emphasized, by my count, four times in the interview.
“[Hussein] had the capacity to have a weapon, make a weapon,” Bush said. He added, “He had the capacity to make a weapon and then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network.”
The point was clear: Iraq didn’t have WMD, but it possibly could have developed them at some point in the indefinite future.
Second, Bush insisted that threats need to be dealt with, whether they’re immediate or not.
“I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent,” Bush said. “It’s too late if they become imminent. It’s too late in this new kind of war.”
Taken together, Bush explained that we have waged a deadly, costly war against a country that had no deadly weapons and was not an imminent threat to the United States. In the same breath, Bush argued that the invasion was perfectly justified and “a war of necessity.”
I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t make any sense.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan considers this and concludes that the so-called Bush Doctrine is now in shreds.
First, President Bush seems to be vastly enlarging his doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. This doctrine originally declared that the United States has the right to attack a hostile power that possesses weapons of mass destruction. The idea was that we must sometimes strike first, in order to prevent the other side from striking us.
Now, however, the president is asserting a right to strike first not merely if a hostile power has deadly weapons or even if it is building such weapons, but also if it might build such weapons sometime in the future.
The original doctrine, though controversial, at least stemmed from the logic of self-defense. Bush’s expansion of the doctrine, as implied in his remarks to Tim Russert, does not.
If no commentators have noted, or perhaps even noticed, this new spin on American military policy, it may be because they don’t take Bush’s unscripted remarks seriously. (It’s just Bush, talking off the top of his head. No sense parsing the implications.) That in itself is quite a commentary on this president. But it’s not clear that these particular remarks were unscripted. Bush used the same phrase — “a capacity to make a weapon” — three times; it was almost certainly a part of his brief. Either the statement means something — that we now reserve the right to wage pre-emptive war on a hostile power that has the mere capacity to make weapons of mass destruction — or it’s empty blather. It’s unclear which would be more unsettling.