ROBERT KAUFMAN
Contributing Writer
As the world marks the third anniversary of the American led invasion of Iraq, criticism of President Bush’s conduct of the war has intensified. The overwhelming number of commentators have rushed to pronounce the enterprise a failure, citing a variety of rationale for their scathing judgment of the President: the failure to find Iraqi weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD); the persistence of sectarian violence; the loss of more than 2,300 American lives with no clear exit in sight; and the damage to the United States’ international standing the president inflicted by using force to remove Saddam without the imprimatur of the United Nations or the NATO alliance.
Undaunted, the president has not only reaffirmed the Bush Doctrine, but also pledged to finish the mission in Iraq with complete victory. He is right. For all the legitimate criticism of the planning and implementation of the American occupation of Iraq, the rationale for using force to promote a free and democratic Iraq remain as compelling today as they were three years ago. Critics’ objections to the Bush Doctrine and its specific application in Iraq cannot withstand close scrutiny.
First, we know from history that it is unwise to object to the preventive use of force as a categorical imperative. When and where force is appropriate depends on the circumstances: the interplay of the gravity of the potential danger; the probability of its realization; and the availability of other plausible effective alternatives.
We know that had the Western democracies heeded Winston Churchill’s advice and stopped Hitler at various watersheds in the 1930s, we could have averted the most destructive war in history. We know from Sept. 11, that many of our enemies in the war on terror do not calculate risk cautiously, among them Saddam Hussein.
Saddam had not only operated a tyranny brutal by even the low standards of the Middle East, but had displayed an alarming propensity for aggressiveness that made conventional deterrence of his grandiose ambitions imprudent.
He was indeed a symbol of defiance to American power in a region emboldened to defy it, especially in the aftermath of Sept. 11. We know Iraq once possessed WMDs. Moreover, Saddam had used them liberally. In 1981, he initiated a reckless eight-year war against Iran, resulting in millions of casualties. He had invaded Kuwait, and launched SCUD Missiles against Israel in the First Gulf War of 1990-1991. He had mounted an assassination attempt against the first President Bush. He had brazenly defied 17 U.N. resolutions and refused to admit the U.N. weapons inspectors after illegally barring their access since 1998. Although the Iraqi WMD capability was not as ripe as virtually every intelligence service in the world thought it was on the eve of the American invasion, Saddam was bent on getting these weapons. The Kay Commission and the Duelfer Report concluded that Iraq would have acquired these weapons eventually. There also was no viable domestic Iraqi opposition that could have transformed the regime internally without the seismic shock of American power.
Second, the United Nations can never serve as an effective substitute for an American-led alliance system. What Samuel Johnson said of a second marriage applies to those who believe the United Nations should be the arbiter of international legitimacy: It is a triumph of hope over experience.
The United Nations inability to operate effectively against aggressors is intrinsic to the institution. Those who say that the United States must receive U.N. approval for the use of force would effectively make American foreign policy hostage to the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council, including France, Russia and China. That is obviously untenable, to say the least. With mounting frequency since the 1990s, the French, Chinese and Russians have invoked the veto or threat of it to inhibit necessary exercise of American power.
Third, the Bush Doctrine’s call for spreading stable liberal democracy in the Middle East represents the higher and more enlightened realism than that of his critics. U.S. presidents since Woodrow Wilson have rightly identified the regime type of our adversaries as the root cause of aggression against us.
They have defined democratic regime change as a war aim. In World War II, the great democratic war leaders, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, rightly defined the odious natures of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regime as the root cause of aggression; after the war, we imposed stable liberal democracy there and elsewhere to address this root cause. We succeeded magnificently.
During the Cold War, our wisest and most courageous cold warriors rightly identified the odious nature of the Soviet regime as the root cause of the struggle: the policy of vigilant containment sought to bring down the Soviet regime by long-term and comprehensive pressure. That strategy succeeded magnificently, especially during the final phase of the Cold War under President Ronald Reagan.
Consistent with that grand tradition, President Bush considers regime change a fundamental part of American strategy in the war on terror, a war that we did not initiate but our adversaries thrust upon us. Granted, we should not minimize the cost and serious difficulties that lie ahead in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. The domestic situation in Iraq remains dangerous, shifting and precarious.
Yet we should not exaggerate the costs, minimize the benefits of what we have already achieved, or downplay the risk of failure to persevere. For all the problems in Iraq, we face a far less dangerous situation now that Saddam is gone than we did before; the Iraqis have a decent constitution and free elections. There are other positive signs of democratic reform in the Middle East. Our relations have remained excellent with Japan and have improved dramatically with democratic India, which shares a common interest with the United States in constraining Islamic radicalism and containing a potentially expansionist China.
After the terrorist bombing in London and Madrid, and the Islamic riots over a cartoon in a Danish newspaper unflatteringly depicting Muhammad, there is even a growing awareness in much of Europe that American success in Iraq is critical to staving off the rise of Muslim radicalism in European states. The first phase of the Iraqi war went much better than expected; even this more difficult phase we should have anticipated better has been less costly by far than past wars of comparable or lesser magnitude.
Also, critics who focus on the cost of action have slighted the costs of inaction. How would our allies, adversaries and those on the fence have reacted had the United States remained paralyzed in a corrupt U.N. with Saddam still flouting 17 U.N. resolutions? We should breathe a sigh of relief that President Bush has courageously rendered this a harmless, hypothetical question.
Critics of the president have exaggerated as well the damage our actions have caused to our alliances. Our problem with France in particular is deep, structural and long predated the Iraq War. In the final analysis, most of Europe, including Germany where the pro-American, Christian Democrats have returned to power, wants no part of France’s ultimate agenda to weaken the United States.
Unfortunately, the bloodshed in Iraq will continue to prevail. Our adversaries cannot beat us on the battlefield, but are trying to win psychologically, sapping American will.
Pray that Americans have the courage and wisdom to persevere in this grand strategy President Bush has conceived and implemented.
The Bush Doctrine stands a good chance of succeeding, not only in Iraq, but ultimately throughout the Middle East. The alternative is also far worse: an American withdrawal from Iraq would be a moral and geopolitical disaster, emboldening radicalism and demoralizing the forces of decency in the region.
Dr. Robert Kaufman is Professor at Pepperdine University’s School
of Public Policy.
Parts of this editorial are
excerpted from his upcoming book “Moral Democratic Realism and the Bush Doctrine.”
03-23-2006