I applaud the Bush Doctrine. I think it was the right response—the only possible response—to the horror of 9/11. In light of the very real prospect that millions of Americans may be killed by biological or nuclear weapons, it would be madness to sit back and rely on the law-enforcement approach that failed on 9/11. While President Bush has improved the effectiveness of homeland-security efforts, he has correctly placed the emphasis on a forward defense strategy. This means killing or detaining terrorists even before they attack; denying them sanctuary; and trying to dry up their sources of support by promoting a constructive alternative for the Muslim world—namely, liberal democracy.
This policy has been largely successful. Who would have dreamed in September 2001 that we would soon see the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Baathists in Iraq, or the establishment of nascent democracies in their place; the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon; the renunciation by Libya of its WMD program; the breakup of the biggest nuclear-smuggling ring in history, run by Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan; the establishment of pro-Western democracies in Ukraine and Georgia; and, perhaps most importantly of all, not a single major terrorist attack on U.S. soil? Not all of these facts can be ascribed solely or even mainly to American action; some might even be due to sheer, temporary luck. But even if we are hit again tomorrow, a four-year respite is pretty good—and more than almost everyone (myself included) expected.
That said, I think there are major problems with the way the Bush Doctrine has been implemented—or, more accurately, not implemented. After 9/11, the President vowed that “you are either with us or against us.” Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia appear not to have gotten the message.
In all three of these supposed American allies, the news media—which remain under the thumb of the state—continue to spew anti-American rhetoric of startling virulence and breathtaking falsity. Pakistan is allowing Islamist extremist groups to use its soil as a base for attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Egypt has responded to U.S. demands for democracy with sham elections in which Hosni Mubarak won a Saddam-style 88 percent of the vote. And, despite some efforts to curtail terrorist financing, Saudi Arabia continues to bankroll madrassas and mosques around the world that remain breeding grounds of fanaticism. What consequences have they suffered? None that I’m aware of.
Admittedly these are hard problems; in all three cases there is reason to fear that any alternative regime might be even worse. But what about Syria? Bashar Assad—the world’s sole remaining Baathist dictator—allows jihadist killers to use his country as a transit point into Iraq, where they murder many Americans and even more Iraqis. Syria has been warned for more than two years to shape up or face the consequences. Yet none has been forthcoming. This cannot be for fear of bringing to power a Syrian government even more inimical to U.S. interests than the current one; it is hard to imagine such a regime.
The failure better to police the Iraq-Syria border—which would probably necessitate military action in Syria itself—has been one of the biggest problems with the U.S. liberation of Iraq, but it is far from the only one. The lack of pre-invasion diplomacy, the lack of post-invasion planning, the lack of ground troops, the lack of intelligence, the lack of coordination and oversight, the lack of armor, the lack of electricity—all these errors have been noted ad nauseam. There has been some exaggeration of them by the President’s political opponents, along with an implausible attempt to dump the blame on a handful of “neocon” appointees while ignoring the culpability of senior military officers and non-neocon civilians. But in essence most of the charges are true.
There is no question that the war has been bungled in many respects. And yet, that doesn’t make the Iraq war very different from any other—including World War II, where many blunders (Anzio, Dieppe, Iwo Jima) killed more Allied troops in a single day than died during the first two years of fighting in Iraq. If we win in Iraq—and, despite everything that has gone wrong, victory is still the most likely outcome—the missteps along the way will be forgotten.
To his credit, President Bush has not made the most serious mistake of all, which would be to lose his nerve. His steely determination to stay the course, notwithstanding the baying of the press and the Democrats (forgive the redundancy), is giving Iraqis the breathing room they need to build political and security institutions that might be able to survive a drawdown (though not a total pullout) of U.S. forces.
We’re finally on the right course in Iraq, though it has taken a while to get there. I am not so sure we’re on any course at all in dealing with the looming threat of the Iranian and North Korean nuclear-weapons programs. In both cases, the administration has so far been satisfied with toothless multilateral diplomacy that has merely bought time for atomic assembly lines to ramp up. There are no easy answers here, and military action is not a terribly palatable option. But why hasn’t the U.S. done more to try to bring about peaceful regime change? The President has talked eloquently about the “non-negotiable demands of human dignity.” I wish he had done more to promote those demands in the two remaining members of the “axis of evil.”
Lest I end on a sour note, some perspective is in order. No President can achieve everything or please everyone. Even as Bush’s poll ratings go south for the winter, it helps to remember how reviled Harry Truman was when he left office in 1953. His reputation revived in subsequent years when it became clear that he had set in place the containment policies that ultimately won the cold war. So, too, I suspect George W. Bush will one day be seen as the President who set us on the long road to winning the war on Islamist terror.
MAX BOOT is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard, and a weekly foreign-affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
