I went to my archives and found a couple of oldies and goodies, my earliest references to the Bush Doctrine. Interesting in retrospect.
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COMMENTARY
Plainspoken Eloquence
By PEGGY NOONAN
State of the Union addresses are usually reviewed in terms of "eloquence," or "drama," or how the overnight polls register the public's reaction. But for sheer seriousness, for the depth and scope of the information imparted, the president's State of the Union the other night was, simply, staggering.
I'm not sure everyone fully noticed, but about five minutes into it George W. Bush laid the predicate for what will no doubt prove a costly war marked by high casualties some of which, perhaps many, will likely be civilian.
Ticking Time Bomb
That is what he was saying when Mr. Bush asserted that North Korea has weapons of mass destruction aimed at the West, that Iraq continues to hide its WMDs, that old allies such as the Philippines are increasingly overrun by those who want the West dead, that the Mideast and Africa are the home of similar and connected terror movements. Nineteen men caused havoc on Sept. 11, he said, but the camps they were trained in have pumped out 10,000 more, "each one a ticking time bomb."
The president was blunt in unveiling what will perhaps be known as the Bush Doctrine. And that is that the United States will no longer hope for the best in the world and respond only after being attacked; we will, instead, admit and act on the facts of the WMD era and actively search out our would-be killers wherever they are and whoever supports them and shut them down dead. The Clinton model of inadequate response based on ambivalent feeling is over; likewise the Bush I model of cat-herding coalitions and anxious diplomacy is over, though coalitions and diplomacy are nice, especially when everyone agrees to do the same thing at the same time in the same way.
This is about as big as presidential statements get. Where and when will America move next? Mr. Bush did not say. How long will it take? Ten years. Or, as he put it, this "decade" will be "decisive" in "the history of human liberty." This was not rhetoric. In fact, the speech was blessedly free of the faux poetry that is often mistaken for eloquence. Mr. Bush's eloquence is in his plainspokenness, in the fact that each word is a simple coin with a definite worth. The speech was fact-filled, dense and not airy. Its main point was to tell the American people we are in the fight of our lives and that we had better win, and will.
It was not a laundry-list speech, as State of the Union addresses usually are. It was not a laundry list because we are at war, and so there are essentially only two items on the president's list, the war and reviving the economy that, among other things, supports the war.
Mr. Bush also is not by nature given to laundry-list speeches. One senses he understands that politicians who do them are trying to obscure the fact that they don't have a philosophy. They hope the adding up of program upon program will give the appearance of philosophy. But Mr. Bush has a philosophy. It is conservative. Freedom is the God-given and natural state of man, the government exists to protect man's freedom, and the greatest and most reliable freedom protector in all of human history is: us.
That's what "Let's roll" means to him. Let's be us.
For a man who is famously not smart Mr. Bush certainly is smart. The president seems to me these days to be operating as a person of essentially two halves. The first half is Sheer Gut -- a sharp and intelligent instinct, an inner shrewdness, an ability to see the bottom line, decide priorities, and see the difference between what is desired and what is needed. The second half, as the liberal pundit Bill Schneider said on CNN after the speech, is "character." People can tell, Mr. Schneider said, that when Mr. Bush says he's going to do something he actually means to do it.
A great gut plus a reliable character is maybe the exact perfect mix for any president, but certainly for a wartime president.
On non-war issues the president continued to paint himself merrily and sympathetically as a man who stands for giving the little guy the tax cuts he needs . . . for using honest faith to answer public problems . . . for a strong defense, a strong military, a pay increase for the soldiers sailors and Marines who put themselves in harm's way so we can sleep safely at night. He put himself forward as the man who stands for winning the war and encouraging the rise in well-grounded patriotic feeling.
Mr. Bush's opposition at the moment appears to have been reduced to agreeing with the president on just about everything and then saying, "But let's make sure we don't run a deficit!" Mr. Bush is talking life and death, love and honor and they're running around talking like accountants. The Democrats of Congress seem at the moment to be acting like liberal Republicans during the Great Society, always worried about the cost of things and never the meaning. Without a message they wince; they are acting like what H.L. Mencken said of the Puritans, that they lived in constant fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time.
And I am not sure the coming deficit will have much traction as a political issue for the Democrats. The public by and large seems to know that (a) there's a war on, (b) we all want whatever defense systems or weapons that can keep us alive to be bought and deployed, and we'll worry about the cost later when we're still alive, as opposed to dead, and (c) oh heck, Ronald Reagan said we'd grow our way out of the last deficit and we did, let it go.
I quoted Bill Schneider praising Mr. Bush. After his speech, the liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said the president's words were "galvanizing." Chris Mathews compared him to Jack Kennedy. The New York Times said Mr. Bush has "soared to new heights."
In the old days elite opinion held that Mr. Bush was a scripted trust-fund dullard whose rise was greased by luck and birth. Those were the days. Those of us who stood with Mr. Bush then were a small and hardy band of criticized contrarians. It was fun. We had secret handshakes and everything. Now everyone's in on the act.
Made Dizzy by Love
It is not, in general, good for presidents to be so universally praised. Politicians are made dizzy by love. They lose their edge, their purpose, and coast. But Mr. Bush has earned this support, and in any case wartime is a good time to unify behind a president -- particularly this war, particularly this president.
And it's also true that those who once dismissed Mr. Bush and now praise him are demonstrating an honesty and high mindedness that is wonderful to behold after the sapping, sour 1990s. It really is refreshing -- literally refreshing -- to have a president people admire and can follow cleanly again.
Ms. Noonan, a Journal contributing editor, is author of "When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan" (Viking, 2001). Her OpinionJournal.com1 column appears Fridays.
URL for this article:
online.wsj.com
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Judge Dubya New Bush doctrine casts U.S. as world's moral arbiter
Zev Chafets
nydailynews.com.
President Bush continues to astonish.
A year ago, he was considered a playboy of high birth and low brow. Today he is a regarded as a serious and wartime President, a leader mentioned in the same breath as FDR.
This week, in his State of the Union message to Congress, Bush continued his transformation by delivering a lecture on moral philosophy. "America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere," he proclaimed.
This, of course, is rhetoric. But not empty rhetoric. It is a direct and radical challenge to the relativism widely and reflexively held by America's intellectual establishment and foreign policy elite. The President bumped, with great purpose, smack against one of the sophisticates' most cherished beliefs: that all nations are essentially amoral and that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Bush is not the first President to invoke American virtue.
Wartime leaders since Abraham Lincoln have done that. But Lincoln lived in a less cynical time. His nation was stirred by the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Today's tastemakers were raised on Bob Dylan's bitter ode to faith-based patriotism "With God on Their Side" and John Lennon's "Whatever Gets You Through the Night."
In this society, it takes considerable confidence to go before Congress and declare war in the name of absolute morality. But Bush, who calls Jesus Christ his favorite political philosopher, is nothing if not confident in his beliefs.
Which doesn't mean that his speech was a simple declaration of faith. It was, in fact, a subtle effort to create a Bush Doctrine that is part George Patton, part John Stuart Mill. This represents a considerable evolution. What until now has been called the Bush Doctrine began in September as a declaration of war against international terrorism and the regimes that harbor it.
But Bush has discovered some basic truths since he sent troops to Afghanistan: 1) The greatest threat to America is posed by weapons of mass destruction. 2) An "evil axis" of countries (by no means confined to Iraq, Iran and North Korea) eventually will supply terrorists with these weapons. 3) The terrorists will use them to horrible effect. 4) The only way to prevent this is by preemptive action — deposing enemy leaders before they have a chance to strike by proxy.
Bush told Congress that his policy is to prevent "the world's most dangerous regimes" from arming themselves with "the world's most devastating weapons." In other words, attack them before they attack us.
To judge by the standing ovation he received, the President's approach is popular in Washington. But it is highly controversial elsewhere. Under his doctrine, Bush may consult with his allies, but he alone will decide which regimes are dangerous.
That makes him the world's judge and jury. And its executioner as well.
The question is, what will prevent him from acting in an arbitrary and wholly self-interested way? The answer is morality.
Bush is a devout Christian, but he didn't invoke the Bible or the God of Abraham. Instead, he rested his case on Western liberalism. "We have no intention of imposing our culture," he told Congress. "But America will always stand firm for the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private property, free speech, equal justice and religious tolerance."
These seven principles form the rationale for the Bush Doctrine. They anchor it in something more than simple American triumphalism. This is not to say that Bush is insincere in his belief that God loves America. But he is also canny enough to understand that this is not self-evident to much of the world — or even to a large segment of the American public.
By making his case in terms of moral principle, Bush accomplishes three very practical things. He defines the enemy in a way that will seem nuanced and reasonable to most Westerners: not Muslims or Communists, but regimes that don't respect women, free speech, religious diversity and so forth. He elevates and broadens his cause: America is fighting not merely for its own prosperity or security, but for human dignity. And he establishes a workable guide to American policy.
Nations that conform to his universal values — or at least publicly aspire to them — will be judged friendly and benign. Nations that reject them will be considered immoral and potentially dangerous.
Before the President's speech, some commentators predicted that he would talk primarily about domestic issues. Not losing sight of the economy was, they said, the great lesson Dubya derived from his father's 1992 defeat.
But he is a bigger man than his father, at once tougher and more farsighted. And, astonishingly, he's still growing.
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washingtonpost.com
Bush Developing Military Policy Of Striking First
New Doctrine Addresses Terrorism
By Thomas E. Ricks and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, June 10, 2002; Page A01
The Bush administration is developing a new strategic doctrine that moves away from the Cold War pillars of containment and deterrence toward a policy that supports preemptive attacks against terrorists and hostile states with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
The new doctrine will be laid out by President Bush's National Security Council as part of the administration's first "National Security Strategy" being drafted for release by early this fall, senior officials said.
One senior official said the document, without abandoning containment and deterrence, will for the first time add "preemption" and "defensive intervention" as formal options for striking at hostile nations or groups that appear determined to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States.
Bush hinted at the new doctrine in his State of the Union address in January, when he labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea an "axis of evil" and warned that he would not allow them to threaten the United States with weapons of mass destruction. The president articulated the doctrine for the first time June 1 in a commencement address at West Point.
By adopting the doctrine as part of its formal national security strategy, the administration will compel the U.S. military and intelligence community to implement some of the biggest changes in their histories, officials said. That is already touching off heated debates within the administration and among defense commentators about what changes need to be made and whether a doctrine of preemption is realistic.
But there is general agreement that adopting a preemption doctrine would be a radical shift from the half-century-old policies of deterrence and containment that were built around the notion that an adversary would not attack the United States because it would provoke a certain, overwhelming retaliatory strike.
Administration officials formulating the new doctrine said the United States has been forced to move beyond deterrence since Sept. 11 because of the threat posed by terrorist groups and hostile states supporting them. "The nature of the enemy has changed, the nature of the threat has changed, and so the response has to change," said a senior official, noting that terrorists "have no territory to defend. . . . It's not clear how one would deter an attack like we experienced."
The administration's embrace of the new doctrine has triggered an intense debate inside the Pentagon and among military strategists about the feasibility and wisdom of preemptive strikes against shadowy terrorist networks or weapons storage facilities.
It has aroused concern within NATO as well. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the United States' 18 NATO allies in Brussels last Thursday that the alliance could no longer wait for "absolute proof" before acting against terrorist groups or threatening countries with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
NATO Secretary General George Robertson, reacting to Rumsfeld's remarks, said NATO remained a defensive alliance. He added, "We do not go out looking for problems to solve."
Some defense analysts said preemption carries the risk of causing a crisis to escalate quickly by increasing pressure on both sides to act sooner rather than later -- forcing them, in the parlance of the nuclear chess game, to "use it or lose it."
"Preemption is attractive on the surface," said defense analyst Harlan Ullman. But he added: "As one gets deeper, it gets more and more complicated and dangerous."
Critics also note that a botched attack that blew chemicals, biological spores or radioactive material into the atmosphere would risk killing thousands of people, not only in the target nation, but in neighboring countries.
Even proponents of preemption inside and outside the government concede that this more aggressive strategic doctrine requires far better and far different intelligence than the U.S. government gathers -- at a time when the abilities of the CIA and the FBI to fulfill their current duties are under scrutiny.
Michele Flournoy, a former Pentagon proliferation expert now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that to be effective, the United States will need to strike preemptively before a crisis erupts to destroy an adversary's weapons stockpile. Otherwise, she said, the adversary could erect defenses to protect those weapons, or simply disperse them.
But Flournoy said she favors moving toward a doctrine of preemption given the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons among states supporting terrorists. She said the policy may offer the best of a series of bad choices.
"In some cases, preemptive strikes against an adversary's [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities may be the best or only option we have to avert a catastrophic attack against the United States," she said.
Under the doctrine, nuclear first strikes would be considered weapons of last resort, especially against biological weapons that can be best destroyed by sustained exposure to the high heat of a nuclear blast, Pentagon officials said. But the focus of the effort is finding new ways of using conventional weapons to detect and destroy weapons arsenals, and especially the missiles used to deliver them.
To do that, the Pentagon is studying how to launch "no warning" raids that go far beyond quick airstrikes. The key tool to execute that mission is a new "Joint Stealth Task Force" that pulls in the least detectable elements of every part of the armed forces, including radar-evading aircraft, Special Operations troops and ballistic submarines being converted to carry those troops and to launch cruise missiles.
Beyond changes in weapons, doctrine and organization, Rumsfeld and his top aides are trying to alter the U.S. military mind-set. "Preemption . . . runs completely against U.S. political and strategic culture," defense expert Frank Hoffman said in an essay published this year by the Center for Defense Information.
In the past, the United States has viewed surprise or "sneak" attacks as dishonorable, the kind of thing inflicted on the American people, not initiated by them, analysts have noted.
One senior defense official responded that 21st century security threats can no longer be assessed in terms of the past. "In the world in which we live, it's not enough to deter," the official said. "You need more capability, more flexibility, more nuanced options and choices."
Defense scientists and war planners are hard at work developing new weapons and capabilities to give Bush "options different than those he may have had in the past," the official said.
At the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a $1.1 billion defense agency created in 1998 to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction, scientists are studying how to attack and destroy hardened and deeply buried bunkers containing chemical, biological and radiological weapons with advanced conventional bombs, low-yield nuclear devices and even high-yield nuclear weapons.
"There was a time during which we really didn't know what phase we were in, so we called it the 'post-Cold War phase,' " said Stephen M. Younger, the agency's director. "And it wasn't clear what kind of weapons we were going to need for the conflicts of the future. September 11 clarified that. And we are getting a better understanding of the types [of threat] we may face in the future and the types of weaponry that will be required [to counter] them."
Younger said his agency is working on advanced conventional explosives with hardened warheads that could penetrate underground concrete bunkers and destroy biological agents with a sustained level of extremely high heat.
"We want to use the minimum force to achieve the military objective, if at all possible, with a conventional weapon," Younger said. "We do not want to cross the nuclear threshold unless it is an example of extreme national emergency."
But there are some bunkers that are "so incredibly hard," Younger said, "that they do require high-yield nuclear weapons." Low-yield nuclear warheads could be useful in certain scenarios, he said, but they run the risk of spreading biological agents across the countryside.
Rumsfeld's Nuclear Posture Review, completed at the end of last year, stated that "new capabilities must be developed to defeat emerging threats such as hard and deeply buried targets." It also said "several nuclear weapons options" that could be useful in attacking such facilities include "improved earth penetrating weapons."
But senior administration officials said the tactical use of nuclear weapons is being studied, not actively contemplated. "There is no one anxious to think about the employment of tactical nuclear weapons," a senior defense official said. "That's not what we are trying to do."
What the Pentagon is most focused on, the official said, is a method of "advanced conventional strike."
Inside the Pentagon, some officials suspect that the new doctrine may be acted upon sooner rather than later.
"I think the president is trying to get the American people ready for some kind of preemptive move" against Iraq, said a Pentagon consultant. He said it would not necessarily be against Iraqi weapons sites but might instead involve a seizure of Iraqi oil fields.
But a senior administration official dismissed the idea of a "bolt from the blue" attack on Iraq. "I want to caution that [the president] was not making an announcement about imminent action" in his West Point address, the official said. "Some people have quite frankly said, 'Oh, this must have been about Iraq.' He was not making an announcement about imminent action, but this was a doctrinal statement."
Rumsfeld may have captured this situation best when he declined to discuss preemption last week. Asked in an interview whether the U.S. government is contemplating preemptive moves against other nations' weapons of mass destruction, he replied: "Why would anyone answer that question if they were contemplating it?"
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