ON JUNE 28, 2004, a front-page article by Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright declared the Bush Doctrine dead, or at least on life-support. “The occupation of Iraq has increasingly undermined, and in some cases discredited, the core tenets of President Bush’s foreign policy,” she wrote, sourcing “a wide range of Republican and Democratic analysts and U.S. officials.” The article was the culmination of months of media claims that the Bush administration had decided to abandon, or at least scale back, its bold foreign policy agenda.
For example, a week before, New Republic senior editor Lawrence Kaplan had asserted that we were entering a “Springtime for Realism.” Dick Cheney was getting advice from Henry Kissinger. Condi Rice was channeling her mentor, Brent Scowcroft. Gary Hart, then advising John Kerry’s presidential campaign, mocked the idea of democracy in the Arab world. “The extravagance, not to say arrogance, of this epic undertaking is sufficiently breathtaking in its hubris to make Woodrow Wilson blush,” he said. Other Kerry advisers scorned efforts to democratize Iraq as “too heroic” and dismissed Bush’s objectives as “sloppy neo-Wilsonianism.” “It appears nearly everyone in Washington is a realist now,” Kaplan concluded.
But someone forgot to tell George W. Bush.
That was the president on January 20, 2005, in his second inaugural address. There was much more like it. “We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.”
So, having failed to bury the president’s principled foreign policy, the media have now decided that his current embrace of lofty goals is disingenuous. The Bush administration is now accused of changing the subject, of using elevated language to avoid the hard truths on the ground in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times, for example, complained in an editorial on February 3 that “if the Iraqi people’s freedom was once seen as merely a bonus from an unavoidable war, that freedom has moved to center stage as the war’s primary justification.”
This analysis has of course a grain of truth. There can be little doubt that the Bush administration’s postwar rhetoric would have shown greater continuity with that of the prewar period had we found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, as expected. We didn’t, and after some talk of “WMD-related programs,” the emphasis has now changed to democracy and freedom. (Regrettably, the Bush administration and the intelligence community have thus far failed to declassify a treasure trove of new information on another aspect of the threat from the regime of Saddam Hussein–its longstanding support of terrorism.)
But it was never true that the administration saw the freedom of the Iraqi people as “merely a bonus from an unavoidable war.” Especially for Bush himself, that freedom was a central objective of the Iraq war and something the president included in virtually all of his prewar speeches about Iraq.
Shortly before the war began, senior advisers to Bush became concerned that the focus of the media on the Iraqi threat had crowded out any discussion of the softer objectives of the coming war. So Mike Gerson and his speechwriting team drafted a speech that Bush delivered on February 26, 2003, at the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute. The speech was deliberately light on tough rhetoric, and after a brief description of the threat from Saddam Hussein, Bush shifted focus.
Indeed, ever since September 11, the advance of human freedom and the spread of democracy have been at the heart of Bush’s foreign policy. There were hints already in his first inaugural address: “America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom. . . . To all nations, we will speak for the values that gave our nation birth.”
Then, just nine days after the September 11 attacks, on September 20, 2001, in a speech to Congress, Bush spoke of “our mission.”
When the Bush administration released its National Security Strategy in September 2002, many in the media latched onto the doctrine of preemption. Widely overlooked was this interesting fact: The Bush administration’s most comprehensive statement on national security policy began with a sweeping affirmation of the universality of the “values of freedom.” It said, in part:
Six months ago, foreign policy experts were dancing on the grave of the Bush Doctrine. Since then we’ve seen successful elections in Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Palestinian Authority, and Iraq, a renewal of the Mideast peace process–and, of course, the reelection of George W. Bush over his neorealist rival.
The Bush Doctrine would seem to be alive and well.
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
