WE'RE ALL INTERVENTIONISTS NOW:

America Unlimited: The Radical Sources of the Bush Doctrine (Karl E. Meyer, Spring 2004, World Policy Journal)

The new outlook was formally enshrined in a robust state paper, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, promulgated on September 19, 2002. Notable both for its global aspirations and its absence of any sense of limits, its tone was established in President George W. Bush’s prefatory sentences: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single, sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise.” The paper maintained that America’s unparalleled supremacy had to be sustained beyond challenge to counter the terrorist threat and to expand democracy and free markets. Most striking was the president’s affirmation of America’s right to wage preventive or preemptive war. In his words: “We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain and curtail our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed [because] the only path to peace and security is the path of action.”

Hence the consternation among those, like myself, who supported President Bush’s justifiable intervention in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors. Iraq was a different matter. It was different because Washington failed to establish a credible casus belli; because having prevailed in Afghanistan, the Bush team showed perfunctory concern with rebuilding a shattered country; and because the United Nations and its inspectors in Iraq were not merely bypassed but scorned. Finally, because a war launched to forestall a hypothetical threat provided a dangerous precedent for others. [...]

It is not the purpose of this essay to berate President Bush or to inveigh against his senior advisors. My aim instead is first, to examine why important voices on the center and left supported the Iraq War, voices like those of the Harvard scholar Michael Ignatieff, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the socialist writer Paul Berman, the British author William Shawcross, and the gifted polemicist Christopher Hitchens. Along with other liberals and moderates, they joined in endorsing the war for the worthiest of reasons. Thus a proper response requires judging Iraq in the round, against the broad screen of history. Who cannot lament the inability of the grandly miscalled “international community” to rid itself of despots like Saddam Hussein? One can share the understandable anger over the West’s past indulgence of the Iraqi dictator; and one can agree and regret that “Arab democracy” remains an oxymoron, not least because Americans have preferred doing business with feudal autocrats. Moreover, it is neither irrational nor paranoid to fear the transfer of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to religious zealots claiming divine license for mass murder.

What underlies my own dissent is not the new doctrine’s declared goals but the absence of any harness on America’s interventions and the shallow reasoning put forward to justify unilateral resort to force. Set aside the post-invasion dispute over the exaggerated intelligence reckoning of Iraq’s arms program cited by President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Ignore the embarrassing inability of coalition forces to discover the weapons of mass destruction whose imminent deployment was the ostensible casus belli. More interesting and significant for this analysis was the overall tone of political rhetoric that pervaded the war’s approving chorus: the caustic dismissal of valid reservations and the unabashed assertion of imperial entitlement.

This rhetoric too had an interesting antecedent. During the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War, a similar revolutionary fervor spread through Greek city-states. In the reproving account of Thucydides, the very meaning of words seemed to change: “Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man.... The cause of all these was the love of power, originating in avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked on a contest.”2

A similar infectious extremism seemed to pervade Washington before and after Baghdad’s unexpectedly swift fall on April 10, 2003. “Axis of Evil,” “Let’s Roll,” “Wanted Dead or Alive,” “Shock and Awe,” “Bring ’em On,” “Mission Accomplished,” “Top Gun,” and “Stuff Happens” became headline catchwords. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran” was the inside-the-Beltway aphorism of the hour. Going further, Michael Ledeen, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, called for regime change in Syria and Iran as well. As he wrote in the London Spectator: “We should now pull the political lanyards and unleash democratic revolutions in Damascus and Tehran.”3

Before the fighting began, Kenneth Adelman, a former assistant to the secretary of defense, predicted that liberating Iraq would prove “a cakewalk.” As sanguine was a sentence attributed to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: “The road to peace in Jerusalem leads through Baghdad.” Still, in this writer’s view, nothing better expressed the moment’s radical rapture than the acclaim greeting a short, pithy best-seller, Of Paradise and Power, by Robert Kagan.

A well-respected writer on foreign affairs (and son of Yale’s Donald Kagan, a leading authority on Thucydides), Kagan compressed his book’s thesis in a brilliant opening paragraph. On essential matters of power, he writes, the United States is mired in history, exercising authority in a Hobbesian world where laws and rules are unreliable, while Europeans are turning from power and entering a post-historical paradise of peace and comparative prosperity: “That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. They agree on little and understand one another less and less.”4

Kagan, a longtime political comrade-in-arms of William Kristol, editor of the forward-school organ, the Weekly Standard, then offered a parable to illustrate his thesis: “A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling in the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative— hunting the bear only with a knife—is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn’t have to? This perfectly normal human psychology has driven a wedge between the United States and Europe.”5

It is wonderfully clear, outwardly reasonable, and wholly misleading. A moment’s thought reveals the flaw in Kagan’s parable. In our polity at least, a bear has no standing in human law, and its violent demise can have no reverberation beyond the forest. But imagine that the creature in the woods is a fellow human, with friends and kinfolk in an adjacent wood. By what right could a hunter armed with a rifle slay a stranger on sight without sanction of law or, absent that, without prior agreement among neighbors on the pressing need to act? A nation, even a rogue nation, is not a bear; it enjoys rights under existing international usage. And unlike the bear, a slain stranger is likely to have armed human allies elsewhere who may seize on his death as justification for vengeance. Even a Martian should grant a certain cogency to this objection.

Still, on this count, advocates of radical intervention have an impressive rejoinder— that the amoral state system itself provides a sanctuary for monsters like Saddam, and has done so for scores of tyrants since 1648, the year the rising potentates of Europe agreed to the Treaty of Westphalia. It was this pragmatic pact that ended the Thirty Years’ War and foreshadowed today’s state system. Under the Westphalian code, a country’s internal affairs are the lawful concern only of its rulers. The code still prevails at the United Nations under a charter that enshrines the sovereign inviolability of its members, effectively undermining the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Save in extraordinary circumstances, i.e., Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait in 1991, the United Nations has avoided military confrontation with sovereign evildoers. On the rare occasions the organization has acted, its forces have been constrained by cautious rules of engagement and by the failure of its members to honor nonbinding pledges of support. Yet this suits most members, most of the time.

Hence the frustration that impels the liberal-minded to welcome an assertive American policy, an example being William Shawcross. Only America was able to stop the bloodletting in Bosnia and Kosovo, he contended in a London lecture in 2003, shortly before the Iraq war, and only America could have liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban: “The results in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan today are not perfect. But all those countries are better off than they were, and only America could make those changes. American participation is essential to the world. American power is often the only thing that stands between civility and genocide, order and mayhem.”

Mr. Meyer is a tad behind the curve here; even Kofi Annan has punted on the notion of state sovereignty where human rights are implicated.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2004 10:57 PM