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.