Against the Bush Doctrine
The National Security Network has put a nice video together of Sarah Palin not understanding what the Bush doctrine is, in contrast with John McCain who’s a steadfast supporter:
But of course this begs the question of where we as progressives stand. My basic take is that real preemption — taking action against someone you know is planning to attack you is perfectly sensible. But wars of prevention — of “anticipatory self-defense” to use the Orwellian phrase Charlie Gibson picked up — are no good. The idea here is that there’s some country out there that we don’t like. And it’s weak, so we think we could win a war with it. But we think that at some future point it might be stronger. So we decide to attack first, before the balance of power shifts. This kind of thinking has not, historically, tended to pay off well for countries that engage in it. Just look at the United States in Iraq. I believe some scholars take the view that this is what Germany was doing in World War I — using the crisis touched off by Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination to deliberately provoke a war with Russia before Russia grew to strong — and obviously that didn’t work out well either.Beyond that kind of consideration of pure prudence there’s the fact that a generalized doctrine of unilateral preventive war clearly isn’t something anyone in the United States is prepared to accept as a universal principle. If India were to attack Pakistan tomorrow on preventive grounds, we would object. And if China were to attack India, we would object. But if we try to lay down a principle of international law whereby we can engage in unilateral speculative wars but nobody else can, they’re of course going to object in Beijing and New Delhi and Moscow and they’ll be quite right to do so.
The United States got along just fine from 1776–2001 without the Bush Doctrine, the failure to take more robust action against the Taliban in the final months of the Clinton administration and the beginning months of the Bush administration had nothing to do with the issues raised by the Bush Doctrine, and the one attempt to put the Bush Doctrine into place has proved to be a bloody and expensive disaster. Under the circumstances, I don’t see any need to entrench any such doctrine in place. The extent to which many people on the progressive side seem inclined to concede at least half a loaf to Bush on this issue continues to baffle me. Preventive war is what Harry Truman was resisting in his famous dispute with Douglas MacArthur, it’s the path JFK turned away from when he defused the Cuban Missile Crisis — it’s a far-right concept that traditionally no liberals and only some conservatives have been willing to endorse. It’d be one thing if people were having second thoughts in the face of a successful application in Iraq, but that’s not the case here.
50 Responses to “Against the Bush Doctrine”
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September 12th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
This reminds me of a Philip K Dick story. If we have good information about an impending attack then of course we should take action. Had we done so in the months preceding 9/11 there may have been a different outcome that day.
However, the Bush Doctrine wants to push that out one more level. It wants us to take action against emerging threats. Again, that’s fine, but the action needs to be proportional to the threat. Invading a country in order to prevent an emerging threat is not proportional.
One of the arguments against preemption is about what happens if our intelligence is wrong. The Iraq war is a great case study in exactly what that looks like. We end up taking over a country and fighting an insurgency even though intelligence before and after the war reveals that the premise of the attacks was incorrect.
I’m always reminded of this exchange from Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carrol
..the Queen replied in a careless tone. `For instance, now, … there’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.’
`Suppose he never commits the crime?’ said Alice.
`That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?’ the Queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon.
Alice felt there was no denying that. `Of course it would be all the better,’ she said: `but it wouldn’t be all the better his being punished.’
September 12th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Let’s bear in mind that Bush Doctrine was not intended to have a life of its own — it was created for the sole purpose of justifying an invasion of Iraq that was desired long before 9/11.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
If like Matt I had been moronic enough to support the Iraq invasion back in 2003 I would be a little more humble about my “expertise” in foreign policy, and more reluctant to criticize those with whom I disagree.
Matt however, seems utterly immune to any sense of self-awareness, or any recollection of the colossal mistake he made in supporting what has turned out to be the biggest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam.
Maybe Matt should spend less time bitching about the shortcomings of his political bogeymen, and more time assessing his own failings.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Maybe Matt should spend less time bitching about the shortcomings of his political bogeymen, and more time assessing his own failings.
Good idea! He could rename the blog “Emo Matt’s Penitent Flagellations” and every post could be a long Cultural Revolution-style self-criticism.
I don’t think I’d read it very frequently, though.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I don’t think it is quite right to say the Bush Doctrine was entirely made up to justify the Iraq War, particularly if you conceive it as including all of the new doctrines laid out in the 2002 document “National Security Strategy of the United States”. Indeed, those doctrines had been proposed by neo-cons for some time (e.g., see PNAC’s 1997 Statement of Principles). But I do think it is true, as in fact others have documented, that the bits about preventive war were given new emphasis in 2002 as a result of the neocons needing a rationale for the Iraq War they could sell to the public.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Actually, the US spent those centuries happily invading many countries in North and South America (not to mention tribal areas in the US with whom it had treaties) without anything more than, sometimes, the Monroe Doctrine.
Think Mexico, Philipines, Cuba, Guatamala,… even Canada(!)
What is new, is giving THIS rational. Manifest Destiny sometimes worked. Or no rational beyond the capacity to do it and the recognition (hope) that no bigger power would act.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Of course, before the war started the Bush/Cheney administration was selling the conflict not as a preventive war against a future threat, but as a war against an imminent threat.
When I read columns that were written back then, I’m struck by how widely accepted the “imminent threat” idea was. Even people who were staunchly opposed to the invasion thought there was some credibility to the idea that Saddam Hussein’s government had, or soon would have, WMD. Only a few people argued that Iraq posed no threat at all to US interests.
As it turned out, those few were right… the “threat” was completely phony. But at the time, I wasn’t one of those few.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
The United States got along just fine from 1776–2001 without the Bush Doctrine
Hilarious. You know we also “got along just fine” without, say, universal health care. Or the internet. Or women’s suffrage.
(I agree with your overall point but that’s an astounding non sequitur.)
September 12th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Matt says “the failure to take more robust action against the Taliban in the final months of the Clinton administration and the beginning months of the Bush administration had nothing to do with the issues raised by the Bush Doctrine” which I guess is probably true as a causal matter. There wasn’t a will to address the threat, so the doctrinal problems didn’t come up.
But the problem for Matt is that if there had been a willingness to address the threat, the doctrine he supports wouldn’t allow it. I’m glad to see Matt acknowledge the Afghanistan problem, but it would be better to actually wrestle with it instead of a dismissing it. Matt, unfortunately for him, is still committed to the view that the right thing to do in the late 1990s was nothing. As I understand it, doing nothing was a bloody and expensive disaster.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Matt: But of course this begs the question of…
No! For the love of all that is good and right in the world, it does not beg the question! It may “raise” the question, it may “ask” the question, but it does not beg!
I cannot for the life of me understand why otherwise smart and literate people whose profession revolves around writing clearly continue to get this phrase wrong.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
It raises the question. It does not beg the question.
Don’t they teach philosophy majors at Harvard this?
September 12th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Matt,
I don’t know if you noticed, but your ex-colleague Jeffrey Goldberg breezily asserts that McCain is making a mockery of this election because the American people just aren’t that into preemption these days. But still, McCain is a serious man.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Its not clear going to war in Iraq was reasonable under preventive war doctrine either. We were preventing them from getting a nuclear weapon… which would do what? There was no incentive to give the weapon to terrorists and definitely no incentive to use it unprovoked. A nuclear Iraq would certainly be bad for the Kurds and anyone interested in keeping no fly zones in place. Kuwait would have reason to worry. But in no way would a nuclear Iraq pose a threat to any Americans anywhere.
And given that the classical realist picture is no longer a representation of the world certainly I agree its a folly for the US to engage in preventative war.
But it isn’t clear that historically preventive wars (of the kind you mention, where a super power is declining and a weaker country is quickly growing and the former attacks the latter) have tended to go poorly. Germany’s failure in WWI can probably be attributed to a misunderstanding of how technology had changed military strategy. Had WWI taken place with the technology from 30 years later or 30 years before, the Germans almost certainly would have succeeded. Instead they got bogged down in a two front trench war.
A lot of times when these wars are started the super power just starts them too late, when the rising power is already too strong. The occasions when the rising power is crushed tend to be forgotten by history because… well they were crushed.
What about Japan attacking the US in WWII? This can reasonably be considered a preventive war and I’d say it was probably the only thing the Japanese could do.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Bringing today’s topics full circle…
In a January debate, Charlie Gibson himself asked Barack Obama about the Bush Doctrine. He suggested that Obama’s willingness to attack AQ in Pakistan was an extension of it. A fair question. Maybe Matt would like to tackle it.
Here’s the transcript:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200801080001
At the very least, Obama has infinitely more understanding of the concept Bush Doctrine than does Palin.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
“begs the question” “grew to strong”
I guess Harvard’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
September 12th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
This is Priceless:
McCain: Mayors & Governors Do Not Have National Security Experience! Then why did he give us Sarah Paliin?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzhFDQIgGSg
September 12th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Jack,
That was why the justification for the Iraq War required a slightly more complex claim than merely that Iraq was in the process of acquiring WMDs. Rather, if you look back, the entire claim was that Iraq was in the process of acquiring WMDs and potentially intended to use them to attack the United States or its allies, either through terrorists or directly. Some choice quotes from a speech by President Bush in 2002:
We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States. And, of course, sophisticated delivery systems aren’t required for a chemical or biological attack; all that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it.
Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.
Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction. And he cannot be trusted. The risk is simply too great that he will use them, or provide them to a terror network.
And so forth. See here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html
September 12th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
This is the sort of thinking we need to enforce in the public’s eye. Bush used 9/11 as a springboard to Iraq. I don’t think that the public truly understands this and makes that connection to the term Bush Doctrine.
…And fuck all, now that I think about it, the fact that it is a stupid ass foreign policy principle means it deserves no capital “d” on doctrine.
September 12th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I don’t think criticizing the Bush Doctrine will play with the voters. The Bush Doctrine is better described this way: “We’re f***ing Americans, and we can invade any f***ing country we want, damn it!” That’s a very popular view in America. And let’s face it, violent nationalism is popular in every county in the world. It may be wrong, but you don’t win elections by opposing such a popular attitude. Unless your message is “America, F*** Yeah!” you’re going to lose. We need to understand that rednecks vote, and that most of us are rednecks. And if the sane among us want to win, we need stop talking about rationality in foreign policy. We need to criticize Bush for being a lame-ass wimp for not having the balls to catch bin Laden. Face it, Americans love war.
September 12th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Wow. I’ve read about this exchange, but to actually see it is something else. A transcript of the words “His worldview” doesn’t do it justice. Her tone is “His worldview – duh!”
I would like to believe that on some level I am doing this woman an injustice when I dismiss her as window-dressing and a lightweight. I don’t have to agree with someone’s positions to respect them, but Palin has given me no reason to respect her on any level.
On the other hand, she is not interested in my respect, or my opinion, or my vote. I’m completely off her radar. For Sarah Palin I do not exist as an American.
September 12th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
“Begs the question”? From a former student of philosophy? I’m very surprised… I’m committed to fighting the big fight on this front and will not lay down my arms.
September 12th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
This reminds me–strongly–of “Fear’s Empire” by Benjamin Barber. The same argument about the clearly unpalatable nature of a universal doctrine of preventive war (that could be used against us–gasp!) was pretty central to his takedown of the Bush doctrine. In 2003. No less true now.
September 12th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
The United States got along just fine from 1776–2001 without the Bush Doctrine, the failure to take more robust action against the Taliban in the final months of the Clinton administration and the beginning months of the Bush administration had nothing to do with the issues raised by the Bush Doctrine, and the one attempt to put the Bush Doctrine into place has proved to be a bloody and expensive disaster.
Head in the sand. After Carter and then Reagan used Afghanistan via Pakistan to bleed the Soviet Union to death they abadoned it and it became a failed state. Then 9/11. Blowback. You can’t ignore the wider world.
We couldn’t let Iraq become a failed state after we sanctioned them to death (while Saddam built his palaces). Saddam was an aggresive dictator who unilaterally and preemptively annexed Kuwait, a fellow member of the UN. It’s good he’s out of power.
The surge has worked enough that we can pull out without Iraq collapsing into chaos (all though it still might do that. Of course if that happens we can blame it on Bush and brush off the idea that we created another failed state by neglect. We have firehouses to invest in! And investment banks to bail out!)
September 12th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
The chief idea of the Bush Doctrine is that it extends the Monroe Doctrine to the entire world. American Empire. Pre-emption flows from that. We bristled at the Russians in Georgia because the Bush Doctrine presupposes American prerogatives. The military equivalent of the droit de seigneur.
Even more than homosexuality for all the closeted-gay, gay-hating Republicans, is “imperialism” the GOP love that dare not speak its name.
Of course, the first time out of the box the American legions got banjaxed in Afghanistan and then again in Iraq.
So it goes. Nobody said empire was going to be a walk in the park.
September 12th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Explain how you’re using “begs the question.” Between this and “enormity,” I’m beginning to wonder whether you need a crash-course on the common misuse of certain terms and words.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Obama correctly distinguished his argument for attacking AQ in Pakistan from the Bush Doctrine.
Obama was not calling for an attack on a group (or country) just because it might be a threat in the future – i.e., preventive war, which is what the Bush Doctrine justifies.
Nor was Obama even calling for a pre-emptive war, which is war to defeat an imminent threat, kind of the way the US massing troops to invade Iraq would have looked to Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Army.
Instead, Obama was arguing for hot pursuit of a group, AQ, that had already attacked the US.
We can talk about how hot pursuit over national borders is a gravely serious issue and may have big consequences (and may or may not be worth it), but this has nothing to do with the Bush Doctrine.
In contrast, the US invasion of Iraq was not preceded by an Iraqi attack on the US, nor any imminent danger of a threat to the US since Iraq had no meaningful capability of attacking the US. Sometimes the Bushies claimed it was a preventive war (can’t wait for that mushroom cloud) and, later, after the WMD lie was exposed beyond repair, they talked about grander schemes to remake the Middle East, which we could include under the heading of preventive war only in the same sense that the sneeze you are about to blow could potentially cause a massive extinction of species by riccocheting down an infinite chain of events under the terms of chaos theory. The old terms for this sort of thing were empire and dreams of world domination.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Another horrid misuse of the phrase “Begs the question.” If you want to say, “raises the question,” that would be fine. But it does not “beg the question.” If you don’t know the difference, maybe you should look it up.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
In reply to #9:
The Clinton Administration told the Taliban that if they continued to harbor bin Laden, the United States would hold the Taliban responsible if bin Laden attacked the United States. Al Qaeda subsequently attacked the USS Cole.
The Clinton Administration left the decision to attack Afghanistan to the Bush Administration because (1) the investigation into the attack wasn’t completed until after Bush took office and (2) since the incoming Administration would have to prosecute any war started at that point, it seemed prudent to let the next Administration plan the war rather than dumping a war on Bush the moment he entered office.
The Bush Administration decided not to hold the Taliban accountable for the Cole attack, instead telling the Taliban that they would be held accountable for any future attacks.
The Bush Administration didn’t need the “Bush Doctrine” to justify invading Afghanistan after 9/11. It wouldn’t have needed the “Bush Doctrine” to justify invading Afghanistan before 9/11 if it had wanted to do so. 9/11 changed the political landscape: after 9/11 Colin Powell was able to make the case for invading Afghanistan by pointing to public opinion. But the nature of the case for invading Afghanistan didn’t change: the Taliban stood between us and an organization that had declared war on the United States. The “Bush Doctrine” is, as Matt said, irrelevant to that sitution.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
“begs the question” as Matt uses it is no longer considered a misuse.
For all you picky know-it-alls, “Begs the question” was itself a misuse. It is “beggers the question”. Using “begs” instead of “beggers” reduces the phrase to a meaningless combination of words assigned a meaning that they should not produce.
Matt’s usage of the phrase at least has a modicum of logic behind it. Those who make the mistake of saying “begs” instead of “beggers” can not make such a claim.
September 12th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I think that progressives need to be clear about this:
we support Palin’s misunderstanding of the Bush Doctrine.
That is, we support the Palin Doctrine of Defence against imminent threats.
September 12th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
And speaking of mistakes, I should have said “beggars”, not “beggers”.
September 12th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Palin’s clumsiness and clear mystification when asked about the Bush Doctrine lets the McCain folks refute the claim that they are just 4 more years of Bush — “Bush? We clearly don’t know nothin’ about that!”
September 12th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Re: He suggested that Obama’s willingness to attack AQ in Pakistan was an extension of it.
Given that Al Qaida has already attacked the US, it’s hard to see that any attack on Al Qaida represents a ccase of the Bush doctrine in action.
September 12th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Njorl: For all you picky know-it-alls, “Begs the question” was itself a misuse. It is “beggers the question”. Using “begs” instead of “beggers” reduces the phrase to a meaningless combination of words assigned a meaning that they should not produce.
No, it has a very clear and precise meaning. “To beg the question” is a direct translation from the latin phrase with which it shares that meaning. If any word is misunderstood in that phrase, it is not “beg” (the meaning of which in context is exactly what it sounds like and is definitely not equivalent to “beggar”), but “question” (which means, in context, “the principle in question”). The inability of ordinarily smart people to understand this meaning and their subsequent inability to use it correctly is the problem here.
…it is no longer considered a misuse.
Yes, it most assuredly is.
September 12th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Using “begs the question” to mean “raise the question” is a confusing vulgarism. The only correct use of “begs the question” is to refer to the logical fallacy related to circular reasoning, whereby the speaker uses a premise that implies his conclusion. But you really can’t stop the deterioration of language, which accompanies the deterioration of thought.
September 12th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Jer,
In the English language, “it begs the question” has no possible meaning outside of idiom.
Consider the most common example:
Mr.A: Is there a God?
Mr.B: Look around at the magnificence of his creation and you can see there is.
Mr A: That’s begging the question.
What is doing the begging? What is being begged for?
The wonderful thing about the English language is that it changes very fast so that people can say what they want to express and others will be able to understand. Matt’s usage is accepted now. In another generation or two, it will be the only acceptable usage. It is no more good or bad than dinosaurs dying off.
English is ruled by linguistic Darwinism. There are a few spaces in the literary zoos for words and phrases that can’t cut it, though, so maybe it will stick around.
September 12th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
I am just shocked that a former philosophy major at Harvard misused the phrase “beg the question” that way.
(Sorry if someone else raised this already. I can’t read the whole thread.
September 12th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
While I most certainly believe that the phrase “beg the question” (used in place of “raise the question”) has become a horrible bastardization of its original meaning, I would have to sadly agree that it has – through sheer force of repetition, become accepted use.
This is much like the word “disinterested”, which has always meant impartiality, but through misuse has come to be synonymous with “uninterested”. It has been misused so frequently in this context that dictionaries are now accommodating its new meaning.
September 12th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Although I’m (overall) sympathetic to descriptivist theories of correctness, there are limits. We have a perfectly fine old usage of ‘begs the question’ in philosophy (see links above if you’re not familiar with it), and it’s very useful to have a shorthand for referring to this type of fallacy. On the other hand, we also have a perfectly fine way of talking about “raising the question,”: i.e., “raising the question.” So using the phrase “begs the question” to mean “raises the question” needlessly muddles things.
It’s like using “literally” to mean “very much so (but metaphorically),” e.g., when Biden says “McCain’s lies literally made my head explode.” It’s a common usage, but worth pushing back on.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
E. O’Neal (#35) did a fine job paraphrasing the entry for “begs the question” on wikipedia.
September 13th, 2008 at 12:05 am
roddy piper, I looked up the Wikipedia entry and it’s nothing like what I wrote, except the part about “begs the question” being a logical fallacy involving circular reasoning. This is common knowledge. I’ve been interested in logical fallacies for a long time and often annoy people by pointing them out.
If people think “begs the question” means raising a question, they won’t even know there is such a fallacy. When someone says,”You’re begging the question”, they’ll say, “What question? I don’t have any questions”. Not that there aren’t bigger problems in the world.
September 13th, 2008 at 5:52 am
A few years ago I left a comment on your blog saying that I thought Iraq was salvageable. I acknowledged that I might be wrong- that Iraq might be too far gone to be worth fighting for. But I said that I thought that the right strategy in Iraq might work, and that it was too early to abandon Iraq. I was clearly right about that.
I was never a fan of invading Iraq in the first place- but having invaded I wanted the US to win. About all I was looking for was a country where people could go out in the street.
I think you ought to acknowledge that I was right. I was ridiculed by your commenters, and I pretty much took the ridicule in silence- it would have been foolish of me to argue much with them.
But now, a few years later, Iraq is what I said it could be (for the moment, at least). I agree with a lot of criticisms of the war- I think that Bush was unforgivably sloppy. I was yelling about that back then.
I didn’t argue much with you back then- I decided to wait and see. But I want an apology now. Or at least an admission that you were terribly wrong, and that I was right. The facts are clear- I just want you to say it. I was willing to expose myself to ridicule then. I would like to hear you acknowledge that I was right and that you were wrong.
September 13th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
The Obama campaign has to scare the shit out of Americans by doing “One Heartbeat Away” commercials that focus on Palin’s ignorance.
One.
Heartbeat.
Away.
September 13th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
The GOP would counter with “No heartbeats away” ads aimed at The One. Yesterday’s AP poll found that 47% of Americans believe he lacks the experience to be president, compared to 15% for McCain and 36% for Gov. Palin.
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