Repealing The Bush Doctrine

Robert L. Borosage

September 11, 2006

Robert L. Borosage is co-director of the Campaign For America's Future.

September 11, 2001, remains etched in memory—the crystalline beauty of that day, the gothic horror of the violation, the heroism of those who came to rescue. Americans rallied as one. The world, appalled at the crime, stood at our side. “We are all Americans,” read the headline of Le Monde.

The squandering of that moment of national unity and international solidarity by the Bush administration in the past five years rivals the enormity of the original attack. Yet the administration proceeds even to this day as if its ruinous policies are the only real choice if we are to protect ourselves from future acts of terror. They are not. It is time for a new vision that accomplishes what the administration has manifestly failed to do: neutralize terrorist networks, starve extremists of the money and motivation that fuel their activities, and build international alliances that actually leave the world safer and more secure.

The administration’s failures are apparent. Americans are divided as the White House continues to wield the war on terror as a partisan club. Allies are alienated. Fury in the Muslim world is on the rise. Osama bin Laden is free and has set up camp in Pakistan. Terrorist acts are up dramatically across the world. Our nation’s credibility is shredded by the lies leading up to the invasion of Iraq; our nation’s honor besmirched by the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the gulag of secret prisons and use of torture still coming to light. American forces are mired in a bloody and endless civil war in Iraq. The Taliban is back on the rise in Afghanistan, with the NATO commander pleading for more forces. The nonpartisan 9/11 Commission gives the administration a failing grade on homeland security. The conservative Supreme Court rebukes the president for his imperial disdain for America’s laws and constitution. Career military officials censure the administration for misleading and weakening the military. Five years later, America is more isolated, more hated and less safe.

It is worth understanding the roots of these failures. The neoconservatives who dominated administration policymaking got the threat wrong, the strategy wrong, the priorities wrong and the facts wrong. They scorned the threat posed by bin Laden and stateless terrorists both before 9/11 and after. They disdained international alliances and the United Nations, believing that the United States could act alone and others would follow. They believed that the “shock and awe” of U.S. military power would suffice to cow the terrorists. They claimed—falsely—that there were weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein was an ally of bin Laden and other Islamist terrorists. While pursuing the Iraq fiasco, which had nothing to do with 9/11 or Islamist terror, the administration turned from the attack on bin Laden in Afghanistan and shut down the unit tasked with tracking him down.

Bin Laden, as he has said repeatedly, wars on us because of our policies, not because of our freedoms. He gains adherents because Muslims see us as waging war on Islam, supporting repressive dictatorships to gain access to oil, stationing troops throughout the region, supporting brutal repression of Muslims in Chechnya and elsewhere, and arming and emboldening Israel against the Palestinians. The problem is not that the United States has intervened too little in the Middle East. Bin Laden’s appeal comes from the reality that the United States is permanently engaged in the region, supporting unpopular regimes against their own people.

The occupation of Iraq bares a grotesque similarity to the catastrophic failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Conservatives disdained the mission—nation building in Iraq, emergency relief in Katrina. As in Katrina, they utterly failed to plan sensibly, occupying Iraq without giving thought to what would happen after Hussein fell, stranding American troops without the numbers, the equipment, the training or the directions to provide order. They turned the vital reconstruction effort over to cronies and political operatives, while squandering billions in sole-source, no-bid contracts to connected companies like Halliburton and others. When their failures became evident, they focused on spinning the message, not fixing the mess.

Now the White House policy is utterly bankrupt. The president says he will stay until democracy thrives in Iraq, even as he quietly plans to reduce U.S. forces and cut off funds for reconstruction. In fact, he hopes only to stave off defeat until he is out of office, squandering thousands more lives and billions more in resources—not to defeat the enemy, but to save his own face.

It is time to change course. This requires not simply getting the troops out of the middle of a civil war in Iraq, but a renewed strategy to take on the threat posed by al-Qaida and its imitators. The elements of a new strategy are clear:

• Launch a crash Apollo Plan for energy independence. We must end our reliance on Middle Eastern oil, freeing us to end our support for vicious dictatorships like that in Saudi Arabia which is the leading source of funding and doctrine for Islamic extremism across the world.

• Revive the international alliance against bin Laden, and the Islamist terrorist networks. This requires alliance, cooperation and communication, aggressive intelligence and police work such as that demonstrated in Britain in the recent arrests. It requires focusing on stateless terror cells—that can be located in Spain, Britain or Germany as well as Asia and the Middle East. It demands reviving the intelligence unit devoted to hunting down bin Laden, and stabilizing and supporting the regime in Afghanistan.

• Strengthen homeland security by implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, screen baggage in containers and airlines, secure our ports, and strengthen the ability of our police, fire and public health systems to respond to crisis, whether terrorist attack or natural disaster.

• End the occupation of Iraq, which is weakening our military, isolating our country and generating recruits for al-Qaida across the world. The U.S. should make its best efforts to forge a national government with strong regional autonomy that might limit the civil strife, but U.S. soldiers should not be mired in the midst of sectarian violence. It is time to set a clear timeline to bring the troops home.

• Make America a source of hope rather than hatred in the world. Our contribution to humanitarian aid in the wake of the Asian tsunami did more for our security than dropping more bombs on Falluja. Reviving U.S. leadership in vital areas of global security—addressing nuclear proliferation, “loose nukes,” catastrophic climate change, proliferating pandemics, the growing trade and investment imbalances that threaten the global economy—will rebuild respect for U.S. judgment and support for U.S. policies.

• Champion democracy by the power of our example, not by the force of our arms. Use our military as a last resort, but be relentless in tracking down those who plan terrorist attacks on this country. But we should strengthen our own democracy, respect the rule of law that we proclaim, return our imperial presidency to the bounds of the Constitution, and revive the U.S. effort to champion human rights. The U.S. has unprecedented military prowess. But in the battle of ideas with Islamic extremists, our “soft powers” are far more potent than our bombs.

This is just common sense. But it is the polar opposite of the current policies and priorities of this administration. Americans sense already the scope of the failure. Now they need to understand there is another way that can make us more, rather than less, safe.