Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has an
review (or
here) in
The New York Review of Books, in which he considers the so-called 'Bush Doctrine', the doctrine that the United States is entitled to engage in preventative war. This is a subject worth thinking about. The Bush Administration has attempted to claim that it engages in 'preemptive war' - war that is fought in response to a direct, immediate and specific threat - a type of war which is closer to legitimacy than preventative war, which has been considered to be beyond the pale by every U. S. post-war Administration. The idea that the threat to the United States is no longer from nation states, but from terrorists, has allowed the American ideologues to blur the distinction between preventative war and preemptive war, on the basis that it is much more difficult to determine the specific nature of the threat. As Schlesinger points out, however, there is no possible way to argue that the attack on Iraq was preemptive war. It was clearly a preventative war, 'anticipatory self-defense', and was thus completely without justification under international law and norms of behavior. The doctrine of preventative war is merely the excuse used by the American ideologues to hide their real plans, which are for exploitation of the current status of the United States as the sole superpower to create global American hegemony over the world's strategic resources. Schlesinger traces the new doctrine of American global hegemony through unilateral action back to the suppressed Cheney/Wolfowitz Pentagon draft
Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, the neocon/Israeli 1996
paper entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" (a document which grows more scary with each passing day, and the probable blueprint for the military future of the United States), and the 1998 PNAC open
letter to President Clinton advocating an attack on Iraq. The Bush Administration intellectuals have tried to force the doctrine of U. S. global hegemony under the international law rubric of preemptive war, where it doesn't fit, and tried to claim that the Iraq attack was a legitimate preemptive war, when it was clearly an illegitimate preventative war. Bush himself, who we are coming to see as essentially a religious fruitcake, has managed to justify the neocon/Zionist nonsense under the idea that he has a mission from God to preserve the United States and rid the world of terrorism. Since he is on this mission, he is allowed to use U. S. power to assert American hegemony over the world in pursuit of what God wants him to do. Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neocons are almost like Bush's Rasputin, playing on his deep religious
insanity and well-deserved intellectual insecurity to convince him to run roughshod over international law in order to force through their plans for Israeli dominance in the Middle East and American corporate dominance over the world's resources. Bush's insanity and the ease with which he has been manipulated has left the United States in a terrible position, with the doctrines of international law, carefully nurtured by successive American Administrations because they were in the interests of the United States, in tatters. Schlesinger writes:
"What is the status of the Bush Doctrine today? Practically speaking, it has been sorely damaged by Mr. Bush's shrunken credibility. The entire case for preventive war rests on the assumption that we have accurate and reliable intelligence about the enemy's intentions and military capacity - accurate and reliable enough to send our young men and women to kill and die.
But 'instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy,' as Robin Cook, the former British foreign secretary who resigned from Tony Blair's cabinet over the war, said, 'we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled.'"
The most amazing thing of all is that even with:
- an easily manipulated President with an insane Messiah complex,
- the doctrine of preemptive war stretched completely out of shape to cover preventative war,
- preventative war used as a cover for the assertion of global unilateral American/Israeli hegemony, and
- the misuse of fear of terrorism to tie everything together,
the neocons were still fearful that they could not find the factual intelligence basis to justify the attack against Iraq. As Seymour Hersh points out in another of his masterful
articles (see also
here), the neocons systematically destroyed the usual checks and balances in the American intelligence system so they could have full control over the raw intelligence data. This allowed them to pick and choose what data they wanted to see about Iraq, without the use of the usual judgment of intelligence experts about the quality of the data. This process led directly to the fact that the attack on Iraq was based entirely on
lies (lies which they still won't give up, with Cheney spouting them on a regular basis and Bush prepared to spend another $600 million to send Kay back to Iraq to look for something that isn't there). The disaster is even worse because the same system of lie production supported the faulty intelligence that the Iraqis would welcome the invasion, a mistake that has led directly to the woeful problems in which American troops now find themselves, not to mention the billions of dollars the Americans will need to spend on Iraq to keep the place from falling completely apart so they can steal the oil (unilateral war means unilateral paying for the reconstruction). The doctrine of preemptive war depends on a near perfect intelligence system, so that you may be certain that you have the data that the threat to you is indeed direct, immediate and specific, and so that you may argue that you had no choice but to attack to avoid an imminent threat that could only be avoided through the use of war. The Bush Administration officials not only lacked such intelligence,
they went out of their way to ensure that the information they had was tainted by their own prejudices, and untroubled by the oversight of experts (and the problem still exists and is being used to manipulate the United States into another disastrous war against
Syria, as proven by
Bolton's recent testimony consisting of more neocon intelligence lies, the upcoming sanctions against Syria, and Bush's bizarre enthusiastic support for Sharon's recent unilateral unprovoked attack on Syria). As Schlesinger points out, this has led to three big problems on top of the immediate military and financial problems in Iraq:
- in the words of Henry the K, "It is not in the American national interest to establish preemption as a universal principle available to every nation," but that's exactly what Bush has done;
- most of the rest of the world now vehemently hates the United States (this has already started to manifest itself in the commercial problems of brand-name products associated with the United States, the failure of American to succeed in international negotiations, and an increase in the popularity of anti-American terrorist organizations); and
- the Bush Doctrine has completely messed up American constitutional checks and balances, putting way too much power in the hands of the President.
Schlesinger does a particularly good job in raising the last point, a point which has been largely ignored. The failure of the American press and Congress to serve as any opposition to Bush's plans has put the United States into what should be regarded as a constitutional crisis. Schlesinger writes:
"On February 15, 1848, during the war with Mexico, a young Illinois congressman sent a letter to his law partner pointing out the constitutional and practical flaws in what we now call the Bush Doctrine. 'Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,' Abraham Lincoln wrote William H. Herndon,
and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure . . . . If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent: I see it, if you don't.'
The Philadelphia convention, Lincoln said, had 'resolved to so frame the Constitution that
no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.'"
The whole point of the American constitutional system is to provide checks and balances on the exercise of power by any one branch of government. The hallucinations of the President are not supposed to be sufficient to lead to war. The Bush Doctrine has completely destroyed the checks and balances, and it is now possible for the bogus fear of terrorism and a manipulated intelligence system to be used to force the country into war on the say-so of the President alone. An arguably insane President has been manipulated into a disastrous war (with even more disastrous wars to follow), with the Bush Doctrine:
- destroying the international doctrines of war which have benefited the U. S.,
- destroying the international reputation of the United States,
- precluding international cooperation with America's former allies,
- increasing the danger of terrorism to Americans,
- destroying the fundamental basis of the American intelligence gathering and analysis system, and
- destroying the checks and balances at the core of the American constitutional system.
It's quite a little doctrine.