With the Bush Administration coming to a close what are we to make of foreign policy during that period? It is commonly supposed that a cabal of neo-conservatives hijacked the normal state policy apparatus and enforced radical policies on America. Certainly PNAC and neo-conservatism were discovered after the rush to invade Iraq was pushed through the mass media. But both those groups based their policy around American global hegemony and the maintenance of the hegemon. That is not really that radical, it is how super-powers have acted since the beginning of time.

White House from photogeneric's photostream.

Probably the best idea we have of neo-conservative foreign policy is from an article by Irving Kristol. Where he almost bmusedly discusses the neo-conservative approach to foreign policy. Again, it is not really that radical. It is based upon national patriotism, distaste for world government (UN etc), the friend-enemy distinction in international relations and finally that American interests are global, not national;

Finally, for a great power, the "national interest" is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode.

A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns.

This can be construed as an idealogical justification for the defence of democratic Israel from the monarchies, oligarchies and dictatorships of the Middle East. In conjunction with the friend-enemy distinction it can possibly be seen to aim at Saddam Hussein as well.

But what of American interests being global? Neo-conservatism, like conservatives from the 19thC see the collapse of the nation that ensures the freedom of the seas - formerly Britain, now America - as an essential role in the global order .

Consequently the maintenance of American hegemony becomes an altruistic and necessary policy. Currently the US maintains it position at the top of the international pile through its industry and culture which are massive consumers of finite energy resources. In addition, a one party state in China is now challenging the US for these resources.

The Carter Doctrine has been around since the 1970s and states that the US will go to war to ensure the security of its energy supplies. This is not a new thing and it is possible many decades of US policy makers have become used to the idea of some kind of US military intervention in the Middle East would happen.

After the attacks on New York on September 11th a US national security document included the doctrine of pre-emption, which can be called the Bush Doctrine. This enabled the US to strike another country based on the assumption of terror threats:

We will disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations by: ... 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 against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country;

By 2002 there were the doctrines in place to strike into the heart of the Middle East with US military power. The political sell of it was a different matter. The Bush Administration went quickly from freedom and democracy, to nuclear weapons, to mushroom clouds, and so forth. In the end they settled on the Schmittian policy of vilifying their political opponents.

So how radical was the Bush foreign policy? The main incident the Bush Administration will be remembered for will be the invasion of Iraq. Here the cassus belli was tenuous at best and an outright fabrication at worst. The complete schmozzle of policies after the invasion immediately discredited what good will remained for America.

Where did the policy for the invasion of Iraq come from? The Bush Doctrine allows for the pre-emptive strike against nations based on terror threats, but Iraq did not satisfy this. Neo-conservative foriegn policy allows for the friend-enemy distinction which Hussein obviously fell on the wrong side of. But not enough to invade a country and place American military power at risk.

Bush often talks in speeches of freedom and democracy and how America is bringing it to Iraq. There was also the hope that it could shake up the region and democracy could flower across the Middle East. The opposite has happened with Iran becoming more powerful for having an American neighbour in Iraq. The freedom and democracy reason is weak as it was one of the constantly shifting political sells during the run up to the war. I don't doubt Bush and others hope for it, but it is not enough to justify an invasion policy and its consequent cost.

The only other alternative was that it was strategic in an attempt to secure American energy supply with the establishment of a geographical stake in the Middle East along with a political, economic and militaristic one. In this area the Bush Administration was not radical as it followed on from a doctrine that dated back to the 1970s. It can also be construed that this process was to ensure American pre-eminence economically and in global affairs. (reply)
It appears that General Petreaus has pacified Iraq enough that it is dropping of the US political radar. There are other political pressures in America largely related to poor governance, inflation and wages not rising since the 1970s. America has survived bad Presidents before, it will again this time, but some of the external pressures are going to be harder to treat politically.

Global markets have meant that China and India, specifically, but numerous other nations too, are rising out of poverty and have increasing per capita wealth. This has had to be balanced by the loss of sharing in the global wealth by western middle classes. This is not a new process. Since the 1970s wages have been flat and families have adjusted by becoming two income, and more recently cashing out on the equity of their houses to make up for that loss in wage/salary increases.

There is an anxiety as to what the future will bring domestically. Internationally the US is not leaving Iraq anytime soon. Despite Bush's protestations of freedom and democracy the Iraqi Government is a colonial one. The power in Iraq is with the US military. There is not much in the way of national sovereignty there which was not the intent anyway. The US now sits on top of one of the largest oil reserves and in amongst all the other oil pumping countries of the Middle East. It now has a geographic as well as economic and political stake in Middle Eastern oil. (reply)
Via lm: Lessons in Forced Democracy. Vedantam argues that the Philippines is a better analogy for Iraq and consequently offers more insight. The numbers inthe article for the probability of success for forced democracy are low with only 41 cases of democracy being implemented by force successfully over the last two hundred years. The recidivism rates are high too; a third of democracies imposed by force fail within ten years. Of the weak democracies which survive the first ten years, seventy-five percent fail within twenty to thirty years. While ninety percent fail within sixty years. (more)
What is a superpower and holder of the moral high ground to do when no matter what they do, they are criticised? (more)

Two articles in the same section of a newspaper and on the same topic; one from a reporter in Baghdad and the other from a think-tank associate in Washington DC . (more)

I have long been convinced that a military approach in Iraq was incorrect. A civil approach is more local and persistent. (more)

Any political philosophy has to deal with the issue of violence and be able to explain its current forms, as well as the institutions and natural patterns which cause and inflame it. Hobbes wrote Leviathan partly in a response to the constant civil warring in England. Many of his points of unitary sovereignty are related to those events (a kingdom divided cannot stand). Republicanism is a technology for dispersing sovereignty into the people and restricting state violence as the state has a habit of seeing any violence what-so-ever as a threat to its monopoly on force; which then produces such things as sedition laws which are not intended to end or deal with the violence, but prop up the current political order. (more)

Adam wrote a while ago on the The Military-Environmental Complex :

Militaries depend on supply lines and logistical trains, and far from being an exception the modern American military has quite a high tail:teeth ratio, around 10:1 as I recall. A lot of this is just moving oil around.
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Fareed Zakaria is one of the few pundits worth reading on the issue of Iraq, Afghanistan and Middle Eastern violence. In his article, "The Surge That Might Work" (it appears with different titles in the WaPo and Newsweek) he argues that the economy is what needs a surge as it can dampen the violence and politics by constructively occupying the time of the population. (more)
Cam Riley: South Sea Republic. Freedom, liberty, equity and an Australian Republic.