Bush Was Not Right

Timidly at first, now boldly. Bush was right, some voices from the darkest corners of the neoconservative right are beginning to say. The democracy that will come to Arab countries, the model for people oppressed by autocracies, the demand for support ― even military ― for those who rise up: all this was already part of the strategic doctrine of George W. Bush, the conservative hero who toppled dictators by gunfire.

Contributing to this campaign is the survival of the legal limbo that is Guantánamo, despite Obama’s promise to order the closure of the prison within a year. There are many continuities between the security policies of Obama and Bush that corroborate this impression: the extraordinary renditions and the targeted assassinations of terrorism suspects on foreign soil; the inability of the two to bring the Palestinians and Israelis to negotiate peace under a two-state solution; the persistence of the terrorist mess on the Afghan-Pakistani border; and the constant nuclear challenge of Iran.

But the heart of the problem is the Bush Doctrine, whose analysis requires turning to those who know, those who helped to fabricate it at the time. This is the case of columnist Charles Krauthammer, who finds the core of the doctrine in Bush’s second inaugural address (January 2005), when Bush assured that the central mission of U.S. foreign policy consisted of spreading democracy throughout the world. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” said the president at the time.

The most practical expression, according to the neoconservative columnist, is the Freedom Agenda. This is the name with which Bush designates the strategy that led to a preventative and unilateral war against Saddam Hussein, and that should create a democratic Iraq that spreads its example and its influence towards the creation of a democratic and peaceful Greater Middle East. According to Krauthammer, the current Arab revolutions have transformed the world into “converts to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda,” while Obama’s White House “repeats the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom.”

For Krauthammer, Iraq is still the model, since it is “the only functioning Arab democracy, with multiparty elections and the freest press.” Krauthammer says that the Iraq war terrified Gaddafi, who renounced some weapons of mass destruction that would now be a very useful deterrent. The attitude of the U.S., “having taken no oil, having established no permanent bases, having left behind not a puppet regime but a functioning democracy,” has culminated, according to this theory, in the disappearance of anti-Americanism among Arabs, as the uprisings of recent weeks demonstrate.

This analysis of the Bush Doctrine permits one to avoid some uncomfortable things. The Freedom Agenda, contrary to what the columnist says, was not the heart of the doctrine, but rather the makeup, aimed mainly at the more liberal and internationalist public. The heart was the claim of legitimacy of the unilateral U.S. action in a preventative war, and its expanded version, the Global War on Terror, that divides the world into friends and enemies of Washington and permits the indefinite suspension of rights and freedoms at home and abroad in the name of presidential interests.

This agenda has failed. And more: Now we find ourselves with the terrible harvest that it has sown. Faced with a case of indisputable moral clarity, that of a defenseless people under attack from the overwhelming power of the dictatorship, they are all petty objections and discussions. Bush had in his hands an immense amount of power and circumstances of enviable prosperity, and he squandered it all for the obsession of his neocon advisors who wanted to liberate the planet of tyrants by force of money and weapons. Obama finds himself, despite his internationalist reflexes, with a chastened domestic opinion and a realist diplomatic environment, reluctant to embark on new adventures.

Bush’s flawed Agenda of Freedom is that which has led today to a paralysis generating new dangers. If the autocrat gets his way, the bad example will spread amongst dictators, Obama’s prestige will be injured, and the danger will rise ― as already pointed out by Hillary Clinton ― of a Somalia with oil. The responsibility to protect, as established by the United Nations, will also be in doubt, since despots will have carte blanche to continue making mischief for years. No, Bush was not right at all.