Doctrine From Hell

by digby

Matt Yglesias recommends this new book by Will Marshall. It is, apparently, a series of essays by various writers critiquing the Bush administration’s foreign policy ideology and offering an alternative path for progressives in the liberal, internationalist tradition. It sounds interesting.

Yglesias says, however, they the book never mentions Iraq and wonders how any candidate can possible expect to get away with not addressing that vital question:

Obviously, any candidate for office in those elections is going to be expected to say something about Iraq. Among other things, we have over 100,000 soldiers currently fighting a war there, which is a situation being are going to be asked to comment on. And, of course, while one’s view of the wisdom of the initial decision to invade hardly determines one’s view of what should be done from here, the questions have a certain obvious interrelationship.

But beyond that narrow question, it’s extremely hard to analyze the GOP’s “flawed ideology” without saying something cogent about George W. Bush’s most high-profile national security initiative and his own characterization of the same. Democrats have gotten a lot of mileage out of — and achieved a reasonable degree of unity by focusing on — the question of Republican incompetence in managing the occupation of Iraq. But, as Ed says, it’s vitally important for progressives to be able to transcend this critique and say something about the failure of conservative ideology and the availability of a superior progressive alternative.

That requires one to take a stand on whether or not the invasion of Iraq is consistent with the “internationalist tradition” in which most Democrats situate themselves.

For me, this is a no-brainer. You either repudiate the Bush Doctrine or you don’t. And if you don’t, you will not get my vote.

This concept of preventive war (which is a term of art that as with so many other words, they simply cynically changed to “pre-emptive — probably because it sounded more truthy.)

Let’s reveiw the Bush Doctrine. Originally it was a simple-minded “if it looks like a terrist, if it harbors a terrist, if it smells like a terrist — it’s a terrist!”

It wasn’t long before it evolved into a full-on neocon wetdream that included preventive war (called “preemption”), which they characterized as self-defense in that we had a right to defend ourselves against something somebody might want to do in the future.

In other words, you can kill your neighbor “in self defense” because you know he hates you, he has weapons in his house (and has talked about getting some more!) and you can’t just wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom souffle. Invade his home and kill him. (Oh and hold a gun to his kids’ heads and force them to pick a new daddy for the family. That way, it’ll be their decision.)

Which leads to the next part —- the United States is on orders from the Almighty to spread his gift of freedom and democracy to the world whether they want it or not. (They might get their hair mussed — a few hundred thousand, tops.)

The next pillar of the Bush Doctrine is that we can, and should, tear up any international law or treaty that we’ve signed that doesn’t suit our immediate needs. And we should work unilaterally if it’s more convenient rather than trying to get our stupid sluggish allies to pitch in. Fuck ’em. (And while we’re at it, let’s destroy every international institution we don’t care for too. It limits our freedom — and the Almighty’s against that.)

The final pillar of the Bush Doctrine is that the US must remain the world’s only superpower. Whatever it takes.

Now the democracy thing and the superpower thing aren’t new. They are part of what used to be a post cold war bipartisan consensus. I’m not sure anyone in the country knew that or that it was ever properly debated, but it’s not original. Nobody besides Junior took those concepts quite that literally, of course, but nobody else took John Wayne movies literally either.

The meat of the Bush Doctrine, and what must be repudiated by any Democrat, is the war of aggression (preventive war) part and the unilateral abrogation of all civilized law part.

It’s hard for me to believe that my country put those things on paper in the first place. And they just reiterated it last month, despite the iraq debacle, if you can believe that. Froomkin wrote about it at the time:

This morning’s news that President Bush is reasserting his doctrine of preemptive war is a bit of a surprise because, well, I think most people thought the Bush Doctrine was dead.

How can Bush still argue for attacking another country based on his suspicions about their intentions — when the first time he tried it, his public case turned out to be so utterly specious?

The idea that the American public or the international community would tolerate such behavior once again seems highly unlikely at this point in time. The American people, for one, won’t be keen on putting troops in harm’s way again on spec anytime soon.

Winning support for the application of a doctrine of preemption requires enormous credibility. It requires public trust in intelligence and motives. And that trust isn’t there.

The rearranging of the intelligence community’s deck-chairs has not resulted in any great surge of confidence in the nation’s intelligence gathering or, more importantly, any assurance that policymakers will not abuse that intelligence.

Yup. Which is why the proper approach to explaining the Democratic position on Iraq is by repudiating the Bush Doctrine, particularly as we see them ramp up for Iran.

Now, we know the Republicans will start jumping up and down like those monkeys at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey” at the idea of Democrats fiddling with their macho foreign policy. They will try to psych out any Dem who says he or she would change it, painting him or her as a sissified Frenchie. The Democrats should not listen to this. This doctrine is what justified our invasion of Iraq and Iraq is not supported by a vast majority of the public.

Dems have to stop being afraid of this stuff. The people do not support the Bush Doctrine — it’s unamerican and people feel this on a fundamental level. They don’t think we should do it alone. They never did. And after not finding WMD after touting them as potentially being minutes away from dive bombing Manhattan with drone planes, the case that we “know” somebody is plotting against us in the future is not likely to be received with any credulity again for quite some time. (Indeed, Bush has fucked up our credibility so much that most people won’t believe our government if it said the Wednesday followed Tuesday.)

Democrats should run against the Bush Doctrine and use it to explain why we would never have gone into Iraq without it and why it will be tossed on the dungheap of history as soon as Democrats take power. (In fact, Bush is so spectularly unpopular that anything that has his name on it should be among those things Democrats run against.)

This is a bright line difference between the two parties on foreign policy, it seems to me, most importantly the unilateralism and the “pre-emptions” portions. Those two things are going to make being an American a very dangerous thing to be in this world if we don’t stop it now. (You don’t even want to think about this doctrine in the context of nukes — unless you are Joe Klein, of course, whose only problem with it is that Junior isn’t the right guy to pre-emptively drop one.)

I’m hoping that this isn’t even slightly controversial among Democrats in congress. Is that being naive?

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