IRAQ IS A TREE, NOT A FOREST

drafted by a working committee of SNOW

Americans are focused on Iraq. But huge as it is, with a price tag that may exceed $100 billion, the war on Iraq is only a small part of something much larger.

George W. Bush told the American people that he would bring a "humble" approach to foreign affairs. In the October 12, 2000 debate, he said: "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us; if we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. And our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why we've got to be humble, and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom."

He may have believed this when he said it, but his closest advisers were making other plans.

Key members of his administration like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and many others had long been working to devise a new grand strategy for the United States whose goal is to maintain global dominance indefinitely through gargantuan military investments and, where necessary, preemptive strikes.

This grand strategy of global domination is being called "the Bush doctrine."

To adopt this strategy would be to become the very thing we have long struggled against. As David Armstrong wrote in the October 2002 Harper's Magazine:

This country once rejected "unwarned" attacks such as Pearl Harbor as barbarous and unworthy of a civilized nation. . . . We also once denounced those who tried to rule the world. Our primary objection (at least officially) to the Soviet Union was its quest for global domination. Through the successful employment of the tools of containment, deterrence, collective security, and diplomacy - the very methods we now reject - we rid ourselves and the world of the Evil Empire. Having done so, we now pursue the very thing for which we opposed it.

In the end, American values are not based on the view that Americans are better and more privileged than people from other nations. We are a democratic, not an imperial, nation. The United States is made up of people coming from every continent, every race, every creed, every part of the human family. We believe in equality, not dominance. We strive to be a democratic republic, not an oligarchic empire. The American people do not desire the historic role of lording our power over the rest of the planet.

Yet on September 17, 2002, this goal became official U.S. policy. On that date, the White House promulgated an extraordinary National Security Council document entitled The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html).

This document includes a three-page introductory letter from George W. Bush that sounds the themes of strength and freedom, and asserts: "In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage."

But pressing for unilateral advantage is exactly what "The National Security Strategy of the United States" is all about. And implementation of the Bush doctrine would change the fundamental character of the United States of America.

The document published on September 17 leaves no doubt: the Bush administration is now planning to press for unilateral advantage so aggressively that no other nation will ever be able to challenge American dominance of the globe.

• On page 6, it announces an aggressive attack-first strategy of "defending the United States, the American people, and our interests at home and abroad by identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders. While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively."
• On pages 29 and 30, it describes a plan to make U.S. supremacy permanent: "To [defend the United States] effectively, our military must dissuade future military competition. Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." Thus the Fiscal Year 2003 Defense Appropriations Bill approved by Congress in November allocates $355 billion to the Department of Defense -- $37 billion more than in the previous year, and more than the next sixteen countries combined. The approximate military expenditures of other countries (Center for Defense Information, 2001 figures in billions of dollars): (to see this pie-chart of defense expenditures, download the MS Word version)

The essence of the new grand strategy, to which the Bush administration is committing the nation without any national debate, is called by some "BREAKOUT." This means leveraging U.S. superiority through massive investments in the military, including research and development, so as to make our dominance permanent. There are also plans to abandon our national commitment not to militarize outer space and to resume nuclear weapons tests.

The Bush administration's breakout strategy rejects foundations of U.S. national security policy that have existed for the past fifty years.

During the post-WWII period, American foreign policy had two sometimes contradictory foundations: the hard-nosed view that nations naturally and inevitably pursue their own interests and that the United States could be no different, and the more generous-minded view that fundamental American values dictate support for less selfish goals like international cooperation, helping poorer nations, and promoting democracy and human rights.

The first approach seeks a balance of power in order to preserve the peace; the second seeks to achieve this end through international cooperation. The Bush doctrine abandons both these approaches and seeks global domination instead, on the grounds that a new strategy is needed to address to the asymetrical threats represented by terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

These dangers are real. But other nations have confronted terrorism and weapons of mass destruction without abandoning their fundamental values. We can too.

The truth is that most Americans do not want to dominate the world. They ask only to live peacefully with their neighbors in an international system that strives to realize the same goals we hold dear at home: liberty and justice for all.

That's why the administration will always describe its goals as peace, freedom, justice, and strength. But since the stated goal of policy is domination, administration rhetoric is taking on an increasingly Orwellian tone. Those who oppose it are represented as unpatriotic or un-American.

But there is nothing un-American about criticizing the Bush administration's policies. It is the policies themselves that are un-American.

Criticism of the Bush doctrine is coming from the very center of the foreign policy establishment. Many well-respected analysts of this grand strategy have identified some of its implications. Among them:

• The Bush administration reserves the right to act unilaterally, and regards international pacts like the ABM treaty, international institutions like the United Nations, international agreements like the Geneva Conventions, and multilateral agreements like the Kyoto Accord as relatively less important commitments that can be dispensed with if necessary, and rejects the very concept of the International Criminal Court.
• The Bush administration has reduced key partnerships (Europe, Japan, etc.) to the status of expendable assets rather than foundations of policy.
• The Bush administration is redefining the notion of sovereignty, making respect for the sovereignty of other nations conditional upon cooperation with U.S. concerns.
• The Bush administration is reinterpreting the U.S. Constitution, enhancing the authority of the executive at the expense of Congress, the courts, and to the detriment of civil liberties (USA Patriot Act, military tribunals by executive order, Homeland Security Act, increased secrecy, Total Information Awareness, etc.).

That's the essence of the Bush doctrine. What's wrong with it?

1. It's an arrogant strategy. It amounts to hubris, an ancient Greek word describing wanton insolence or arrogance resulting from excessive pride - the flaw of tragic heroes. Strategies like the one described in "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" end in disaster for one reason or another.

2. The Bush doctrine commits the United States to the classic mistake of imperial regimes: overreaching. It is impossible to calculate the demands that such a program will impose upon the U.S. armed forces and the resources of the American economy, which are vast, but finite.

3. The Bush administration's national security strategy is destabilizing. It professes to be worried about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, yet it is intent on invading a region on the other side of the globe where our intervention will provoke profound hostility in one of the most volatile areas of the planet. And it offers a justification for aggression that other nations will be all too eager to adopt.

4. The professed goals of American strategy - freedom and prosperity for all - are not credible in the eyes of most nations. They see this high-flown rhetoric as a thin veil disguising the pursuit of U.S. national interests, like control of oil supplies.

5. The policy is morally misguided. It prescribes a role for others that we would certainly be unwilling to accept for ourselves. It violates the most elementary of moral notions, the Golden Rule: Do unto to others as you would have them do unto you, replacing it with the Emboldened Rule: Do unto others before they do unto you - a doctrine of preemptive attack that distorts the just war principles that have long guided national policy with regard to the use of violence, both here and abroad.

6. "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" is inconsistent with our basic national values. George W. Bush claims to be a "conservative," but his policies, if pursued, put the very character of the American republic at risk. If we as a people embrace this strategy, we will be abandoning our fundamental ideals, among them:

• "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" and a belief in the right of all people to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Declaration of Independence);
• "the blessings of liberty" (the Constitution of the United States of America);
• "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" and the right not to be "deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law" (Bill of Rights);
• a "nation conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" (Lincoln's Gettysburg Address);
• "liberty and justice for all" (Pledge of Allegiance).

We appeal to Americans to awaken from their sleep and attend to a long train of abuses and usurpations that threaten the core values of the nation. We do so in the name of freedom, of justice, and of those who have given their lives to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic." *

*The oath taken by all enlisted personnel of the U.S. armed forces, the National Guard, all U.S. attorneys, all U.S. Senators and Representatives, and all Cabinet secretaries.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

1. "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America." Released on September 17, 2002 by the National Security Council, with an introduction by George W. Bush: http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html

2. "Joint Vision 2020." Published in June 2000 under the approval authority of General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Office of Primary Responsibility: Director for Strategic Plans and Policy, J5; Strategy Division, and defining the goals of the U.S. military as achieving "full spectrum dominance" by militarizing outer space: http://www.dtic.mil/jv2020/jvpub2.htm

3. John Lewis Gaddis, "A Grand Strategy," Foreign Policy (October-November 2002). An analysis by a well-known military historian specializing in the study of Cold War period who had a distinguished career at Yale Univ. and recently spent two years at the Hoover Institute: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_novdec_2002/gaddis.html

4. G. John Ikenberry, "America's Imperial Ambition," Foreign Affairs (September/October 2002). An analysis by a professor of geopolitics and global justice at Georgetown Univ. on the "imperial" or "neoimperialist" character of the new U.S. grand strategy: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20020901faessay9732/g-john-ikenberry/america-s-imperial-ambition.html (This article is not available on-line in its entirety without a $5.95 payment, but this issue of Foreign Affairs can be found in any public library.)

5. David Armstrong, "Dick Cheney's Song of America," Harper's Magazine (October 2002). An investigative reporter looks into the origins of the Bush doctrine in the last years of the first Bush administration, when Paul Wolfowitz supervised the preparation of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document that articulated the essence of the new grand strategy: that "the first objective" of U.S. defense strategy should be "to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival": http://www.its.caltech.edu/~johnsonm/harpers/

Invite your neighbors and friends to read these documents. Then get together and discuss them!

* * S.N.O.W. (Sound Nonviolent Opponents of War) / www.snowCoalition.org * * Document approved at Nov. 25, 2002 S.N.O.W. meeting