X Manifest Destiny and the Bush Doctrine: A conservative view

by David Warren

[Author David Warren is a born-again Christian and former publisher of Canada’s conservative Idler magazine, which folded in 1993. He now writes books from his home in Toronto and says one of his goals as a writer is to “reverse the terrible moral and intellectual slide of the West.”]

Anyone who thought President George W. Bush had lost the thread of the “war against terror” over the summer is welcome now to retire from punditry. The time was spent making large preparations, as far as possible from the public eye. Especially through the traditional dead month of August, he left sceptics and opponents to make their best case, without a hint of objection; with judicious leaks to lead them as far from the scent as possible. They complained that he didn’t have his ducks in order, all the while he was lining up his ducks.10

Now he has returned to the saloon of world opinion, with surprise, to say nothing of all guns blazing. Say what you please about Bush as cowboy; the barrels are loaded.

On Thursday he put before Congress a resolution that would, prior to any decision of the United Nations, authorize him to order the U.S. military to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. There is nothing ambiguous in this resolution, and it will certainly pass. The Democrats are hardly willing to throw November’s mid-term elections over it; and besides most of the Democratic leadership are convinced, after private and public briefings with the Bush administration, that it is the right course.

There will of course be considerable opposition, even in the States. The dissension in Europe and among the “moderate” Arab states will remain audible. But whereas three short weeks ago the opposition appeared to be gaining strength, it is now in disarray. Mr. Bush came out of the bullpen like a valkyr. And he is still coming, like a train.

Yesterday, in a written document tabled with Congress, the President went considerably beyond the Congressional resolution, to articulate in much greater detail than he could in his speech at West Point in June, or the previous anticipations of it, the “Bush Doctrine” through the conflict ahead. Given the present facts of life, exposed on 9/11 — the very real threat of sudden and annihilating attacks with biological, chemical, nuclear or even imaginatively-used conventional weapons, the U.S. must henceforth try to pre-empt. Moreover, the U.S. may be compelled to act sometimes without warning, upon intelligence information that must not be compromised, who knows, even on the territory of allies. (Canada, for example.) The stakes are actually high enough, to waive certain diplomatic niceties: for war is war.

This is a logic to which ultimately, I hope, almost everyone will agree. For as we have seen, opponents of the Bush administration have tried to make much of the possibility that the 9/11 attacks could have been foreseen. It makes sense to them, that if the catastrophes could have been foreseen, something should have been done to stop them. Think this through and the light will soon twinkle. Future attacks are indeed foreseeable, and something will indeed be done to stop them. Dangerously armed, mass-murdering psychopaths — in the Middle East or elsewhere — will no longer receive the benefit of the doubt. They can make themselves entirely transparent to U.S.-led weapons inspectors (and forcible disarmament), or, they may contrive to become entirely extinct. There will be no “third way”.

By what right may America do this? By the fundamental right of survival, in this quite imperfect world. And the U.S., for all its frequently enumerated flaws, is a liberal democracy; its lethal enemies are vicious dictatorships. Such regimes as those of Iraq and Iran, given to public chants of “Death to America!” and to privately harbouring terror networks, will now be taken at their word. As they are smashed, their disagreeable neighbours will learn how unwise it would be to emulate them.

The document in question, “The National Security Strategy of the United States”, is worth reading with attention. It does not require Congressional approval, it is a plain statement by the Administration. And it is to our times as the Monroe Doctrine of 1822, but extended now from the Western Hemisphere round the rest of the planet. It begins with an echo of “manifest destiny” (the phrase coined later, in 1845) — announcing that in the 21st century, the U.S. will unambiguously and consistently take sides, will in fact crusade on behalf of that “single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise.” American diplomacy and foreign aid will be turned positively to that end. There is a candid acknowledgement that the U.S. has inherited the power of the world; and thus inherits the responsibility to make it better.

But at the heart of this document is the cudgel of “strike first.” The old policy of deterrence is formally discarded in this sentence:

“The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons, do not permit that option.”

As Mr. Bush said last January in his state-of-the-union, and passim, this is a war that is very likely to outlast his term or terms in office. The doctrine will be binding on future Presidents, unless they explicitly renege; and they are unlikely to renege, unless the U.S. is actually defeated in the battle, and is itself compelled to sue for peace on its enemies’ terms. (And a world in which the U.S. is defeated, is a world in which liberal democracy is dead, and tyranny reigns triumphant.) The choice is not between war and peace. It is instead between defeat and victory.

10 David Warren, “Manifest Destiny,” DavidWarrenOnline, 21 Sept. 2002 .

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