Posted on 03/17/2003 5:05:50 AM PST by ~Vor~
Susan Page USA TODAY
WASHINGTON -- War in Iraq could do more than topple Saddam Hussein. Another potential casualty: the system of global alliances that has governed the world since World War II.
After Sunday's summit in the Azores, Portugal, President Bush is poised to order a U.S.-led attack on Iraq even if the Security Council fails today to approve a resolution paving the way. He is proceeding with the support of such new allies as Bulgaria but against the open opposition of longtime friends such as France, a comrade in arms since the days of the American Revolution. He is pushing ahead despite the breach that the showdown has opened at the United Nations and NATO and the political peril it poses for his chief ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
It would be the first preventive war in U.S. history, the first time the nation has attacked without being struck first. An aide says Bush sees himself as redefining the U.S. role at a moment the ''tectonic plates'' of the world order are shifting -- as they did in 1776 and 1914 and at other big moments in history.
After the war, he has told aides, he plans to seek some way to prevent more nations from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
''This is the boldest roll of the dice any president has done in the 30 years I've been a senator, and I would argue since 1947,'' as the Cold War began, says Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ''It is bold and it is dangerous.''
''It's a new era for foreign policy,'' says William Kristol, a leading Republican who helped develop the strategy while the party was out of power during the Clinton administration. ''Iraq has implications beyond Iraq and in a sense is about more than Iraq. It reflects a broader worldview. How it goes -- whether it goes well or not -- will very much affect people's judgments about what to do in the future'' in the world.
Going to war will be the first exercise of what some call the Bush doctrine. Under it, the United States is willing to use its military and economic supremacy to protect its interests and assert its values with or without direct provocation. And it is willing to act with or without the backing of the international alliances that it helped create after World War II.
That's a dramatic change from the policy of containment, adopted by President Truman in 1947, under which a united West would block Soviet expansionism until the Communist regime collapsed. Now, Bush's strategists believe, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of a new terrorist threat a decade later have created the need for new global arrangements.
''We had certain strategies and policies and institutions that were built to deal with the conflicts of the 20th century,'' Vice President Cheney said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. ''They may not be the right strategies and policies and institutions to deal with the kind of threat we face now.''
One reason the U.N. debate has been so fierce is that others in the world, especially France, also see it as being about more than Iraq. ''We are defining a method to resolve crises,'' French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told the Security Council last week.
Advocates of war with Iraq envision a quick victory, a welcoming populace and a transition to a stable democracy that provides a model for other countries in the Middle East. In the aftermath, the United States would turn less often to the United Nations and NATO. New alliances might be formed. Facing a triumphant United States, the reasoning goes, rogue nations would no longer dare support terrorism against Americans.
But skeptics caution that the war could be more protracted and more costly, and that the process of rebuilding Iraq could defy the best-laid plans. A diminished United Nations and NATO could be unable or unwilling to step in when the United States wants their involvement. Resentment of what is seen as imperialism could isolate the United States from its oldest friends and provoke more terrorism against Americans.
At stake in coming weeks is not only who rules Baghdad but also what role the United States will play in the 21st century. Ultimately, history's judgment of Bush's presidency is surely at stake.
The McCain doctrine?
Bush seems an unlikely architect of a new global doctrine.
During the 2000 campaign, the Republican contender advocating a more assertive foreign policy wasn't Bush. It was his chief rival, John McCain. The Arizona senator outlined a policy of ''rogue state rollback'' that included a willingness to use military might against outlaw nations.
Then, Bush's response to a possible nuclear threat from North Korea was to support deployment of a national missile-defense system. He eschewed the ''nation-building'' that President Clinton had pursued in Bosnia and Kosovo. He said the U.S. attitude toward other countries should be ''humble.'' His campaign promises focused on domestic and economic issues, not national security.
But the al-Qaeda attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, made fighting terrorism Bush's top priority. It also provided an opening for some advisers to persuade him to target Saddam as part of that war.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had been urging action against the Iraqi leader since soon after the first President Bush decided against pushing to Baghdad at the close of the first Gulf War. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were powerful advocates, too.
''Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle ages ago decided that Saddam Hussein was really bad news,'' says Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind. Perle -- who worked for the first President Bush, as did Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- chairs a Pentagon advisory board. ''But they had not won that argument'' with the president before Sept. 11.
Presidential declarations on foreign policy typically have been forged in the State Department. But the Bush doctrine has its roots in the Pentagon. He embraced it without extensive debate in public or apparent angst in private. Aides describe Bush as serenely confident about the course he's plotted.
Bush once dismissed a suggestion by Biden that he consider the nuances of some decision. ''Joe, I don't do nuance,'' he said.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has found himself in the role of restraining the president on some fronts -- he pushed Bush to seek a U.N. resolution before acting on Iraq, for instance -- and explaining his policy to foreign officials who have reacted with concern and in some cases open opposition.
Step by step, Bush has moved toward the sweeping worldview of his most hawkish advisers:
* On the night of the attacks on New York and Washington, he vowed in a televised speech that the United States would ''make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.''
* In the State of the Union address in January 2002, he decried an ''axis of evil'' -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- whose pursuit of weapons of mass destruction threatened the world.
* In a new National Security Strategy, released in September 2002, he outlined a policy of pre-emption, of striking before a threat had fully materialized. ''We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends,'' it said.
Now, he is poised to order more than 225,000 U.S. troops massed in the Persian Gulf to attack Iraq. The goal is to end Saddam's brutal reign and dismantle Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction programs before chemical, biological or nuclear weapons could be used against the United States or its allies.
While the White House has lobbied hard for a Security Council resolution that would put a U.N. imprimatur on an attack, Bush made it clear on Sunday that he is prepared to act without it.
Never before has the United States launched a pre-emptive or preventive war, says Scott Bennett, a political scientist at Penn State and co-author of a new study on the causes of international wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. Three of the 85 wars fought during that time were classified as preventive. None of those was launched by the United States. One of them was launched against the United States, by Japan with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
''Iraq is an optional war,'' says Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank in Washington. The attack on Iraq is intended not only to deal with a military threat but also to change the politics of the region. That is ''profoundly different'' from the way the United States has used its power before, she says.
Unprecedented in scope
In the past, some presidents have acted pre-emptively against threats. John Kennedy secretly backed Cuban refugees who sought to topple Fidel Castro in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Lyndon Johnson, alarmed by the prospect of a Communist government in the Dominican Republic, sent in U.S. forces in 1965. Dwight Eisenhower used the CIA in 1953 to help solidify the pro-Western reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran.
But none of those conflicts involved launching a war or declaring a new doctrine. ''What we're doing is not entirely without precedent, but it really is on a much larger scale,'' presidential historian Robert Dallek says.
Whether the Bush doctrine becomes enduring U.S. policy depends not on the war but on the aftermath. Some doctrines have had shorter lives than others: Truman's decision to offer aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947 began a containment policy that continued for more than a half-century and prevailed in the Cold War. But Woodrow Wilson's vision of a new order after World War I collapsed in failure and chaos.
When the war with Iraq is over, does the breach between Washington and what Rumsfeld has dismissed as ''Old Europe'' heal or worsen? Does the pre-emptive U.S. attack on Iraq become a model for dealing with other rogue nations? What role will the U.N. play?
Never before has the United States been so certain of victory and so unsure about what would happen next.
Some White House officials have long been impatient with and even contemptuous of the United Nations. Bush warns that it risks irrelevancy by failing to enforce its resolutions demanding Iraqi disarmament. A senior administration official says that Bush plans to seek a new way to control the proliferation of the world's deadliest weapons. He won't try to do so through the United Nations or some similar body.
''You need something effective,'' the official says. He dismissed the ''political correctness'' of the United Nations, where small countries like Cameroon and Chile have the same General Assembly vote as the superpower United States.
Joseph Nye, a presidential scholar and dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says Bush is likely to find he needs the support of the U.N. and other international institutions to rebuild Iraq and combat terrorism. ''You can't solve terrorism by yourself, and the military can't solve the whole problem of terrorism,'' he says. Bush says he realizes that. ''I understand the wars of the 21st century are going to require incredible international cooperation,'' he said Sunday. After the war with Iraq, if it comes, he said the United States would help the U.N. ''get its legs, its legs of responsibility back.''
He didn't elaborate on what the U.N. role would be.
If war with Iraq succeeds as envisioned, Kristol says, the United States will be in a position to pursue a more confrontational policy toward rogue regimes and move to ''remake'' the Middle East.
And if it doesn't go well? ''Then everything is up in the air.''
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How?
such as France, a comradeI wonder if the author intentionally used such precise and correct language, of if she merely stumbled into it.
Well President Bush has said all along that the goal of the war is regime change.
I keep forgetting; when did Serbia attack us?
Also... Viet Nam? Korea? Etc.
These people LOVE to piss on Bush's parade, even when it's an absolutely idiotic idea.
Let's see, what's shaping up here looks like it could be a good thing for America, so let's see....Bush JUST COULDN'T be the architect....oh, I know, JOHN MCCAIN!!!...Yeah! THAT'S the ticket!
George Bush wouldn't allow McCain to deliver the paper to the Whitehouse, and these idiots want to credit McCain for policy.
Give me a freaking break!!!
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