The Doctrine of Infallibility

Matthew Iglesias posts the following and I quite disagree:

The other day I saw someone all upset by some kind of poll indicating that most American don’t think we need to find any WMDs in Iraq for the war to have been justified. I found myself actually agreeing with this proposition — whether or not the invasion was a good idea has almost nothing to do with whether or not we find WMDs.

For one thing, the whole WMD issue only speaks to the narrow topic of legal justification. As long as we’re on that topic, however, only one thing matters: compliance with UN resolutions. As everyone knows, Iraq was not in full compliance with the relevant resolutions and the United States did not receive authorization to enforce the resolutions by invading. You can make of that what you will (it was blogged to death about a month ago) but it has no relationship to whether or not we’re able to find any WMDs in the country. Saddam was supposed to comply with the inspectors, and he didn’t. We were supposed to get yet another UN resolution, and we didn’t.

This is truly perverse. One of the fundamentals of the Bush Doctrine is the doctrine of “preemption,” stating that the US has an obligation to invade and depose any regimes that are developing weapons of mass destruction. “We can’t wait for a smoking mushroom cloud.” This, and the doctrine of overwhelming US military dominance, rejection of deterrence as a strategy, keeping Europe from presenting a military challenge and Mid-east and China regime change are what make up the global security guarantee envisioned as the Pax Americana. The worry about selling or giving WMD to terrorists was tacked on recently but it more or less fits with the overall construct and provides a powerful (if phony) argument post 9/11.

The threat of asymmetrical warfare and terrorists getting their hands on WMD is a real one. This is why the administration makes the argument that the preemption doctrine must be stretched to say that any existing WMD program in an unstable regime presents an “imminent” threat, merely by presenting an opportunity for terrorists to obtain fissionable material or small amounts of deadly chemicals and toxins. I don’t agree that this situation presents an explicit rationale for invasion, and it seems clear that it is little more than a fig leaf for what is otherwise a doctrine of preventive war, but I can at least see some logic in the argument. But, if there is no evidence that such a program exists then we have no justification other than an arbitrary decision by our government to depose the rulers of a sovereign nation (and kill a bunch of their citizens in the process) for no better reason than that it suits our strategic objectives. (The “liberator” rationale so favored by the media is really only suitable for children and really dumb Republicans like President Bush.)This is a very dangerous concept and Americans should not accept it unless we actually believe that our leaders are all ordained by God and therefore always know what is right and just and need never present their rationale or evidence for taking action. This does not sound like liberal democracy to me.

If we do not need actual evidence of a regime’s WMD development program and if this entire project relies instead on the idea that our government can be trusted to have total prescience of a regime’s future intentions then the Bush Doctrine is a straight up doctrine of preventive war.

And, while the Bush Doctrine clearly backs into an embrace of preventive war, even the neocons aren’t going to openly admit that and for good reason. Their mission is to establish global military dominance to ensure American hegemony (and not incidentally ensure Israel’s security.) Therefore, even on their own terms it is in their best interest to at least appear to adhere to international norms that everyone understands.

A policy of straightforward preventive war would be intolerable to most of the world, which will justifiably feel threatened by a huge and powerful nation that believes it can reject agreed upon international law and tradition (which are far more longstanding than any UN resolutions) simply because it is powerful enough to do so. The United States does not, by virtue of its military power, really have any unusual claim to righteousness. If we do not adhere to the rules that have been designed to set guidelines of tolerable behavior for the nations less amenable to democratic values — especially in the name of those same democratic values — we will have become incoherent and unpredictable. We will have no allies who don’t operate solely from fear and opportunism which is an invitation to perfidy. Nobody will share our “values,” because our values are no longer known and predictable. And we will have taken a giant leap into creating an anarchic global system that no matter how powerful we are, we cannot hope to unilaterally control through force alone.

Even wild-eyed neocons have to adhere at least on some level to the rule of law and international norms if they truly believe in a Pax Americana. They cannot rely on a puerile notion of being selective “liberators” nor can they straightforwardly propose a policy of preventive war. Therefore, they must produce evidence of “imminent” threat (even as they elastically define it) before taking action like that in Iraq. And if they are proven wrong after the fact, the war should rightly be deemed illegal and immoral, on the terms the neocons themselves set forth.

.

Update: I see Kevin Drum has already posted a more cogent response.