Despite a history of terrorist attacks on our ships and embassies and despite evidence that al Qaeda was recruiting, training, and organizing for even more murderous attacks on Americans around the world, the United States, under Clinton and then under Bush, did nothing. While we could have dealt a devastating blow to al Qaeda’s terrorist base in Afghanistan, we chose instead to help sustain, with substantial “humanitarian” assistance, the Taliban regime that sheltered it. We left Osama bin Laden unmolested; and we waited. On September 11, we knew we had waited too long.
We had waited too long not only to deal with a visible threat but to revise our complacent notion, influenced by Clinton-era faith in international laws and institutions, of what it was appropriate to do, at home and abroad, to protect ourselves from Islamist fanatics who had long since declared war on the United States.
So the ancient wisdom of acting first in self-defense, discarded by leaders who had gravely underestimated our vulnerability to—and, even more, the consequences of—an attack on the scale of 9/11, was recognized anew by President Bush on the very day the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon were destroyed.
Bush was right to insist that we would no longer wait until we were attacked. And he was right to give notice to governments supporting and sheltering terrorists that we would no longer distinguish between them and the terrorists who operated from their territory. Finally, he was right to reject the failed policy he had inherited, according to which terrorists were to be dealt with only by the instruments of law enforcement, and the governments backing them by diplomacy alone.
Notwithstanding the caricature of the Bush Doctrine, portrayed by its critics as a menacing unilateralism serving a crusade to impose democracy by force, Bush has correctly understood that the dictatorships and autocracies of the Middle East are the soil in which lethal extremism and the passion for holy war have taken root and spread. He is under no illusion that democratic reform will come quickly or easily, or that it can be imposed from outside by military means. In pressing for reform, he has stood up against the counsel of inaction, self-designated as sophistication, from foreign offices around the world—including those of our European and “moderate” Arab allies—and rather too often even from our own diplomatic establishment. Such counsel would leave the dictators in place for as long as they can cling to power or, worse still, have us collaborate with them and their secret services, or negotiate for their voluntary restraint, in the vain and by now discredited hope that we can thereby purchase safety for our citizens.
It is early days for the Bush Doctrine, but for those who can see beyond the last suicide bombing in Baghdad, there is progress. Millions in Afghanistan and Iraq risked death to vote, bravely affirming the democratic opportunity given them by the destruction of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes. Millions in Lebanon have been emboldened to demand their country back from Syrian domination. Qaddafi has thrown in the towel. Four years after 9/11, al Qaeda has been unable to mount an attack in the United States that could satisfy its political requirement for ever more spectacular acts of destruction. And in coffeehouses and at back-gammon tables throughout the Middle East, there is open discussion of the once-dreaded “D” word.
That’s the good news. Of course, there’s bad news, too. Not everything has gone well. There have been serious mistakes, both tactical (in Iraq) and strategic (policy toward Iran and Syria). In Iraq, the vindictive State Department/CIA disparagement of Saddam Hussein’s opponents—especially the Iraqi National Congress and its talented and effective leader Ahmad Chalabi—made it impossible to launch Iraqi self-governance immediately after Baghdad fell. Instead, we allowed the liberation to subside into a politically inept occupation that was neither necessary nor wise.
The attempt to govern Iraq from Foggy Bottom and the Baghdad “green zone” by thousands of American civil servants who knew nothing of Iraq’s history, language, culture, or politics was a catastrophic mistake. This foolish occupation allowed the deposed Baathists from Saddam’s regime to regroup, import jihadists from abroad, and mount the insurgency from which we, and even more the Iraqis, continue to suffer. With rare exceptions, the intelligence and advice (and often the policy instructions) flowing between Washington and Baghdad continue to be an amalgam of the incompetence of the CIA and the clapped-out conventional wisdom of the State Department.
Administration strategy with respect to Iran and Syria is simple: there is none. While Tehran and Damascus work hard to undermine the fledgling Iraqi democracy and American influence in the region, the administration dithers. The President’s shrewd intuitive grasp of the way forward with these two main enemies of success in Iraq has been sidetracked again and again into the cul-de-sac of bad intelligence and even worse policy advice.
While the President can define issues, adopt bold strategies, and lay out broad visions, he cannot practically manage the thousands of policy matters that arise every day and whose consistency and integration profoundly affect the success of his strategy. Nor can he free himself from dependence on the bureaucratic institutions that are responsible for informing and executing his policies. Partly because the Bush Doctrine has encountered massive resistance from the government departments charged with implementing it, desperately needed change has often been slow and halting: two steps forward, one step back.
Soliciting cooperation from duplicitous Iraqi Baathists, making deals with Kim Jong Il, indecision on Iran, seemingly limitless patience with Syria’s support for the insurgency in Iraq, pretending the Saudis are our friends (they may not be out to destroy us but they are quite content to let others try)—these are products of your tax dollars at work. A cast of thousands of bureaucrats has been blunting or deflecting the President’s best instincts and encouraging him to return to the policies he once expressed the vision to change. The launch of the Bush Doctrine required a new understanding of the threat of Islamist terror, and, even more, the courage to confront it. Sustaining the Bush Doctrine will require more of the same.
RICHARD PERLE, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, is the co-author, with David Frum, of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (2003).
