Wheels falling off US "First Strike" War Doctrine by Marian Wilkinson The Age / The Guardian 2:09pm 20th Mar, 2004   March 20, 2004    A few weeks before the war against Iraq began, US Vice-President Dick Cheney paid a visit to the home of the French ambassador in Washington. Despite weeks of intense diplomatic pressure, France, along with more than half the Security Council, was refusing to bow to America's demands to support a second UN resolution authorising the war.    Cheney confronted ambassador Jean-David Levitte with a simple question. "Is France an ally or a foe?" The ambassador insisted France was an ally. Cheney disagreed. "We have many reasons," he said, "to conclude that you are not really a friend or an ally."    The exchange was a vivid expression of one of the guiding principles of the Bush doctrine, the national security policy that emerged in the aftermath of September 11. The policy authorises the use of pre-emptive strikes against states or groups perceived as being terrorist threats. The principle is simple: "You're either with us, or you're against us."    One year later, 157,000 US troops are tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the largest American troop rotation since World War II is under way. The cost of the Iraqi mission to the US taxpayer is $US1 billion ($A1.33 billion) a month. There are fears that Iraq could collapse into civil war. No weapons of mass destruction have been found there despite an exhaustive search. Terrorist bombings continue to exact a savage toll worldwide. And, according to former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, US credibility has been "shot to hell".    All this has prompted a fierce debate in Washington over the Bush doctrine. Democratic contender John Kerry calls it "the most inept and reckless" foreign policy in the nation's history. Bush says he is a "war president" and defends his pre-emption doctrine as the right response "for a new kind of war".    Security analyst James Mann, who first revealed Cheney's exchange with the French ambassador in his new book, The Rise of the Vulcans, says the Bush doctrine represents a dramatic break with the past. He describes how it was fashioned by a small group of Bush advisers who see American military power "as so awesome that it no longer needs to make compromises or accommodations (unless it chose to) with any other nation or group of countries".    Led by Cheney, these Bush advisers dubbed themselves "the Vulcans" after the Roman god of fire and metal. They include Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Their vision, Mann writes, is of an America "whose values and ideals would prevail throughout the world because the United States was so powerful no other country could afford the costs of competing with it, and no one would even begin to try".    Once viewed as a hawk among the Democrats, when he worked in Jimmy Carter's White House, Brzezinski has become a vocal critic of the Bush doctrine. The first person to use the phrase, "If you're not with us, you're against us", he says, was the Bolshevik revolutionary, Lenin. He calls it "an absolutely paranoid perspective on the world".    Brzezinski also challenges the Bush war on terrorism. Bush repeatedly talks about terrorism as an ideology, like Nazism or fascism. But Brzezinski, who fought passionately against communism, strongly disagrees. "What does it mean, the war on terrorism?" he asks. "Terrorism is a technique for killing people", not an ideology.    "If you want to deal with terrorism, you don't generalise about it." He argues that while security forces must eliminate individual terrorist cells, America and its allies must also get to the root causes of different terrorist movements in countries around the world.    "Just imagine what the situation would be today if our response to the whole phenomenon of racial inequality in America had been limited to the suppression of the Black Panthers and we had said, 'the Black Panthers are terrorists, we are going to wage war on terrorism and just eliminate them'."    Bush first spelt out the doctrine in a now famous address to West Point military academy in June 2002. "We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge."    The toppling of Saddam Hussein has been the high point of the Bush doctrine. Bush declared victory after the swift military campaign that captured Baghdad. But his triumph has been short-lived. Almost 600 US troops have died in Iraq, most since the end of major hostilities. The US General in charge of the Persian Gulf, John Abizaid, is fighting insurgents who are slaughtering hundreds of Iraqis in terrorist bombings. The insurgency involves both foreign Islamic terrorists and members of the local Sunni minority who lost power after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is likely to get worse before the planned transfer of power to an Iraqi administration on June 30, says Abizaid.    Soon after the recent bombings in Karbala and Baghdad that killed more than 140 people, Bush's CIA chief, George Tenet, told US senators that despite America's victories in the war on terror against al-Qaeda's top commanders, the group's ideological influence was spreading globally. "Even as al-Qaeda has been weakened, other extremist groups within the movement it influenced have become the next wave of terrorist threat. Dozens of such groups exist.    "For the growing number of jihadists interested in attacking the United States, a spectacular attack on the US homeland remains the brass ring that many strive for, with or without encouragement from al-Qaeda's central leadership."    For Brzezinski, this is exactly why America needs to reject the Bush doctrine. He argues terrorism is just one face, albeit the savage face, of the powerful political and economic pressures released by globalisation. These pressures, he says, have generated both great expectations in the developing world and great envy and instability. "We live in an age which I define as the age of unprecedented political awakening of mankind," he said. The communications revolution, a great benefit of globalisation, has also put on unprecedented strain on social and religious life from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia.    "The global political awakening has the makings in it of massive global disorder and it represents the real challenge to our hegemony," says Brzezinski. Rather than American democracy spreading throughout the Arab world, as Bush hopes, Brzezinski fears anti-Americanism may be spreading.    "There is no country that in the next 25 years can challenge us," he says, "but I think if we fumble, global chaos can overwhelm us."    March 20, 2004    "Legacy of recklessness "(The Guardian/UK).    Oranges in Iraq are half the price they were a year ago, it was reported this week. Apples, all but unobtainable under Saddam Hussein, are now also easier to come by. Benefits such as these do not "justify" the invasion of Iraq that was launched so prematurely and divisively by George Bush a year ago today. Nor do they make the world safer from a terrorist threat that never had much connection with Saddam's tyrannical rule in the first place. They are, though, a new part of the evolving reality - small signs that life in 2004 is getting better for the people of the broken and repressive state over which the dethroned dictator ruled for so long. There are bigger signs too. Iraq's power grid produces more electricity now than it did under Saddam. Schools are open regularly and teachers are being paid. Medical supplies are more plentiful. There are more and better goods in the shops. Wages are rising.    Not all the news is for the better. Iraq has far less drinking water than it did a year ago. Jobs, ultimately the key to so much, are still hard to come by in large parts of the country. Inflation is a looming problem. Security is a nightmare in many places. The pace of improvement is slower than Iraqis demand and than the Americans, lamentably underprepared, promised. Nevertheless, the popular mood catches and matches these gradual material improvements. A survey for the BBC this week found a majority of Iraqis think things are better now than before, and a large majority who think things will improve further in the year to come. Twelve months on, moreover, more Iraqis say the invasion was right than wrong.    Material improvements, especially halting and incomplete ones like these, are never the whole story. More than anything else, they tell the pollsters, Iraqis want security. The best long-term guarantee of that, they add, surely rightly, is jobs. But jobs do not materi alise on demand, even in a society stable and motivated enough to provide them, as east Germans found after unification. In a nation like Iraq, where social, ethnic and religious divisions are profound, lethal violence in places almost endemic, and corruption a latent menace, the requisite combination of material investment and physical security is proving much harder to ensure. It is especially hard when, in the absence of the UN, the only force even plausibly able to supply both elements is a United States invader in whom few Iraqis - see the poll again - have confidence. Humiliated and liberated at one and the same time, and still faced with daily dangers, Iraqis yearn both for democracy and a strong leader. That they should want such an unstable combination is an understandable reaction to their circumstances. But it also casts doubt on the extent to which Iraqi society is robust enough to withstand either its current or its future challenges.    The Iraqi people's new opportunities, real though they are, have been won at an enduringly high price, not just for themselves but for the rest of the world. The invasion was launched in response to a terrorist threat that has, if anything, worsened as a result of the war. Istanbul and Madrid have already experienced terrible violence, while London and other cities await a similar fate. Even if there was no other case to make against the war, this is an outcome that, from an international point of view, casts doubt on the validity of the whole enterprise. In fact, of course, the damage went far wider than that. Mr Bush's determination to invade, and Tony Blair's determination to support him, have put global institutions and international process at risk, to say nothing of the credibility of the Labour government at home and abroad. The Iraq war was an act of exceptional recklessness a year ago. It remains that today, even though life in Iraq is in many ways the better for it.
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