Max Boot's latest piece for the Weekly Standard is an interesting insight into the shifting rhetoric of the pro-war camp. I don't fault the neocons so much for failing to admit defeat; I have to admit, if we had dug up some vial of Botox in Iraq with an al Qaeda member's fingerprints on it, I wouldn't have turned around 180 degrees. Boot's piece, though, oddly posits that the Bush doctrine has been strengthened by our Iraqi adventure.
Boot starts out with a lengthy outline of the ways in which preemption existed before the Bush administration. He conflates preemptive war under the pretense of direct threat with humanitarian interventions, enforcement of the Monroe and Truman doctrines, and of the Clinton doctrine ("When under political pressure, blast the crap out of something.") The Iraq war stands wholly apart from the doctrines of Monroe or Clinton, so those simply don't apply at all. If Boot wishes to cling to an analogy to the Truman doctrine, he must provide a link between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda. Not for lack of trying, no one has provided any satisfactory evidence of such, even after almost a year of occupation. If Boot wishes to present the case for Iraq on humanitarian grounds, he should have done that before the war. Claims by pro-war pundits and officials that the case for war rested heavily on the humanitarian angle are entirely disingenuous and objectively false.
Next, Boot claims that many fears about legitimizing the doctrine of preemption are overblown. "India isn't about to nuke Pakistan, claiming a right of prevention. Nations take life-or-death decisions based on their own circumstances, not on what the United States does." He goes on to explain that the Iraqi violations of international law provided legal cover for our action, and would not necessarily apply to another nation seeking to utilize the doctrine of preemption for its own purposes of national interest.
Boot fails to see that the stated doctrine of preemption would provide justification for such an action. In the future, one could envision North Korea crossing the DMZ, citing some amorphous "rising threat" or even a desire to prevent a threat before it can "fully form". There are many cases in which states could claim the above with more credibility than the US had when it came to Iraq. National interest and strategic calculations are the reasons that other states have not used the preemption doctrine, not some recognition that the US is the only player who gets to use it.
Boot then turns to the "tyrannical regimes themselves are WMD" mantra that has emerged from the failure to find any national interest justification for Iraq. Backing off promoting Iraq-style military incursions ("[I]f the only thing preemption can mean is an Iraq-size occupation, it is not an option that can be hauled out very often."), he cites Reagan's waging of "political, economic, and moral warfare on the 'evil empire'...[this] is a preemptive strategy we can and should apply around the world today". If he's referring to sanctions as the "economic" bit of Reagan's legacy, I'll quibble with that, but if he's otherwise been reduced to promoting "political" and "moral" warfare on bad-guy states, that's a considerable de-escalation of his rhetoric.
He even says that if all we want to do is call creepy regimes creepy, "[T]imely intelligence about WMD programs in other countries is not strictly essential." In just the next paragraph, however, he returns to form, stating "...military action can never be ruled out...[and it] doesn't have to mean hundreds of thousands of troops garrisoning a state for decades." This leads to his citation of the Osirak strike by Israel in the 1980s, and how grateful we should be for it. He then explains why strikes like this aren't really useful anymore, because rogue states have gotten smarter and have learned to hide their programs from scrutiny. (Some might say that they've learned to hide them so well that they disappear altogether, but that's a separate matter.) So now we're back to the argument for Iraq!
He then skips inexplicably to a bizarre argument that we might be in for more Iraqs -- first because Iraq might be transformed into a liberal democracy, and second because "the trend toward international occupations of failed states started long before Iraq." (Here's to hoping that it ends with Iraq.) First, it seems less and less likely that Iraq will stand as a city on a hill for the greater Middle East. Second, many of the cases he cites as examples actually undermine the case for nation-building's efficacy: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Ivory Coast...doesn't he know that each of this has been a failure? How could the fact that we tried and failed with those states promote further attempts to nation-build? Does he really expect us to march blindly forward on bureaucratic inertia?
The entire premise of the article is puzzling, and the article itself in no way adequately explains the thesis described in the title. If this is a sign of the intellectual integrity of the neocon arguments to come, so be it. That much better...
