1 Boring Old Man

So, for a moment, I’ll take Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney at face value – not what they say directly, but what they might be thinking [if I suspend my belief that they are unsavory people]. We have lived our lives in a century of two World Wars in the first half, and the Cold War in the second half – playing nuclear chess with World Communism – at least that’s how we saw it. At the dawn of the new century, the threat to us, and the world [from our point of view] was the Middle East – the Islamic nations. They had been marginalized in the 20th century by the problems among the Asians, Europeans, and the Americans. Several forces brought them to the front burner – Oil, Israel, and the rise of fundamentalist Islam.

So, if I continue my musings about the Iraq War with my mind temporarily cleared of my thoughts about the background motives of our leaders, what could they have been thinking? Is it possible that their stated motives are what drove them? What do they say their motives are? What do they say their goals are? Why do they say they are doing what they’re doing? In Wikipedia, it’s called the Bush Doctrine, but I call it the Wolfowitz Doctrine because it crystalized in the early 1990’s after the First Gulf War as a white paper called the Defense Guidance that Paul Wolfowitz wrote under George H.W. Bush. It was leaked and then quashed by the first President Bush. It re-emerged in the American Enterprise Institute during the Clinton Administration among the group of Reagan/Bush exiles known, at times, as the neoconservatives, and it came to full flower in the Project for the New American Century. President George W. Bush first publicly [re]introduced it at a graduation speech at West Point in 2002, after the 9/11 bombing of the Twin Towers.

Here’s my version of their thinking. We lived through the 20th Century dealing with Wars. We fought the Germans in World War I and were on the winning side, but they came back with a vengence under Hitler. Our hands-off policy allowed Nazi Germany to try to take over the world, so we fought World War II. Before that war was even over, we had a new threat, the [Stalinist] Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – ergo, the Cold War. In the minds of the neoconservatives, we won that conflict by Reagan’s tough, strong military build-up. The rest of us thought that our policy of Containment finally worked and the U.S.S.R. fell down all by itself [at least that’s what I thought]. But, almost as the bricks of the Berlin Wall were removed, we were embroiled in the Middle East – ultimately engaging in the First Gulf War – containing Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

1. Unilateral Action: After World War I, President Wilson attepted to have us join a World Community known as the League of Nations. That attempt failed. After World War II, this idea was revived as the United Nations. The Wolfowitz Doctrine proposes that the U.N. slows us down. The focus of the U.N. on peace seemed naive to the neoconservatives, unrelated to the rogue nations of the world. Under this Doctrine, we would no longer be constrained by the U.N.
2. Pre-emptive Strikes: Hitler and Japan were allowed to mobilize huge military machines under our noses. We waited for their attack and look what happened. So the new Doctrine was to fight before the rogue nations got strong like Hitler did.
3. Strength Beyond Question: This was the Reagan contribution, though it has always been our policy in one form or another. Reagan just pushed it beyond all imagination. He stayed popular by cutting taxes and spent wildly on the military – the result was tripling the national debt. The neoconservatives were insiders then, and saw this as a very successful policy. They jumped at the idea we could be the world’s sole superpower.
4. Evangelical Democracy: American Democracy has worked for us. It keeps us "good." Therefore, it would be good for the whole world. Then the whole world would be "good." It’s kind of our version of the notion of World Communism, or World Islam. A utopian view that will solve the world’s problems.

Recall that I’m suspending my thoughts about the underhanded motives of Bush and Cheney. I’m rhetorically assuming that they are motivated by a policy they think is good for America and the world [something hard for me to do]. And I’m assuming that, under this policy, their logic about the Iraq War goes something like this. The Middle East is the problem place in the world, filled with dictators and operating outside the world community. I agree with that. In addition, unlike Russia, they’ve got the oil that makes the modern world work. Bush and Cheney unseated Saddam Hussein to flex our muscles, to show the world that we’re not putting up with any rogue nation that tries to become a military power. Now they want to establish a democratic bastion in the Middle East – a country where we have a strong foothold. That enterprise failed. Our Unilateral Action looked to the world like aggression. Our Pre-emptive Strike looked the same way. We learned like the nations throughout history that Strength Beyond Question can only be achieved as a potential strength, or a short-termed strength. A prolonged war always depletes a country. I don’t even have to say anything about the Evangelical Democracy. It’s self-evident. Government arises in a culture. Imposed government lasts for a while, then the culture picks up where it left off. The Wolfowitz Doctrine is a naive utopian idea that has worn itself out in a short four years. The Iraq War is a predictable failure.

Plus, their definition of the world’s current problems is flawed. Problem Number 1. is population control – hands down. Problem Number 2. is global warming and the petroleum economy that feeds it.  Problem Number 3. is a weakened United Nations with rogue nations like us who go off on their own, half-cocked. al Qaeda is a problem that should have been pushed down the U.N.’s throat, not taken out of its hands. And if we had to go it alone, we should have gone to war with al Qaeda directly, not with "Terror." Iraq and Iran are problems that should be pushed down the U.N.’s throat, not taken out of its hands. The Wolfowitz Doctrine is a naive, selfish, utopian idea that fails theoretically and practically – deserving to be relegated to the history books rather than elevated to the level of policy. Bush’s dad quashed it. He just didn’t stop it. The result has been a weakened National Defense and a self-destructive erosion of Strength Beyond Question.  Evangelical Democracy is as silly as World Communism, World Islam, World Christianity, or any other utopian idea. No single country or idea can dictate the fate of the world. This is not utopia.