It has already been established that terrorism and WMD, while central to the Administration’s obsession with Iraq and Saddam, could not alone have provided a justification for war. There is something still missing in the equation. Perhaps terrorism and WMD, along with American strategic interests such as oil and support for Israel, were ancillary elements that formed an aggregate motive around a nucleus of “moral clarity”. The claim now is that an overwhelming and unequivocal humanitarian commitment to the Iraqi people was always and continues to be the principle driving force of our policy. Indeed this justification has been present from the beginning. During debates in October, 2002 over the Congressional resolution authorizing military action in Iraq, every speech in the Congress, whether made by a Republican or a Democrat, began with the litany of a Saddam’s moral outrages. Of course, it was not Saddam’s viciousness that needed establishing at the time, it was the necessity of an immediate war to remove him. Hence, not only was Saddam the modern equivalent of Adolf Hitler, he had weapons of mass destruction and was willing to use them. But there is no evidence that unilateral humanitarian military intervention ever underpinned the foreign policy thought of George W. Bush or his closest advisors.
In fact, the Bush Doctrine did not by any means grow out of the attacks of 9/11. It predated 9/11 by nearly a decade and so could not have been among its effects. In fact, all of its signature tenets—the repudiation of the policy of containment, the focus on weapons of mass destruction, and most importantly, the doctrine of unilateral preemptive wars to “end” nations that threatened the interests or security of the US with WMD or terrorist attacks—had been assembled into a coherent policy as early as 1992 by Paul Wolfowitz. At the time he was working under his soul mate and mentor, Dick Cheney, then Secretary of State. The belligerent new policy grew out of neo-conservative displeasure and humiliation arising from the “ragged ending” of the first Gulf War. When Iraqi Muslims and Kurds rose up against Saddam after the end of Desert Storm (at the urging of President George H. W. Bush), they were slaughtered by the thousands. American troops, fully armed and equipped for war, stood by and watch helplessly, mainly because the Commander-in-chief could not bring himself to authorize any unilateral action to save them. The blow to American prestige and credibility was massive and enduring, both among our allies and most bitterly among Iraqis. The document Wolfowitz drafted and called a “Defense Planning Guidance”, aimed at redressing such weakness, but it went much farther. When its content was leaked to the press during the home stretch of the presidential campaign against Bill Clinton it immediately ignited widespread criticism. The Administration was forced to disown it. Dick Cheney did a hasty rewrite, omitting references to preemption and “acting alone”. The plan for an all-American twenty-first century, however, was far from dead.
In its entirety the Wolfowitz’ “Defense Planning Guidance” is anything but a humanitarian manifesto. Central to its guidelines for American action are brute force and unilateralism in the establishment and maintenance of a single super power world hegemony. Not only is the plan to assert dominance in the pursuit of American interests and influence, it is to do so to the express exclusion and subordination of all other nations:
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.
"There are three additional aspects to this objective: First the U.S must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
The plan lists some vital American interests that might be threatened by regional conflicts:
". . . access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict, and threats to U.S. society from narcotics trafficking."
Traditional alliances, get short shrift in Wolfowitz’ regional defense strategy, and it completely ignores the United Nations, long a favorite whipping boy of the conservative right. Instead the US would lead “ad hoc assemblies” tailored to the needs of the particular conflict, and whenever necessary or desirable would act alone. Wolfowitz’ plan leaves no doubt as to its central motivations: US military and economic hegemony. The closest he gets to making any case for a humanitarian purposes in the exercise of American power is his statement that the US should "promote increasing respect for international law, limit international violence, and encourage the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems." Undoubtedly laudable aims with obvious possibilities for humane consequences, but everything else about the “Defense Planning Guidance”, especially its advocation of strong-arm tactics against the rest of the world in the name of American supremacy, hardly promotes a sense of humanitarian well-being. It would seem to offer scant comfort to peoples and populations who do not have American passports.
Just supposing this were an unintentional oversight, and just supposing the United States might adopt a “unilateral humanitarianism” to fit the Wolfowitz outline, and just supposing such a policy is now at work in Iraq, how do we apply it in the rest of the world? Would we be compelled by our “moral clarity” to intervene militarily in all other countries where masses suffer from oppressive regimes? What about the brainwashed and malnourished people of North Korea, whose government does possess nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them? What about the dismembered children of Sierra Leone, who are defenseless and unarmed? Or the shell-shocked inhabitants of Chechnya who might have remnants of WMD from the old Soviet arsenal? And what about the beleaguered citizens of Columbia and Peru where insurgent leftist guerrillas and narcotraffickers wreak havoc daily on innocent civilians and war on civil society in an endless quagmire of violence? What does this newly awakened “moral clarity” on the part of the world’s only super power entail for the starving, disease-ridden, and polluted millions the world over? Couldn’t they make equally just claims for US-orchestrated regime changes accompanied by billions of dollars in American aid? Are any of these populations in the prayers and plans of the New Conservative Humanitarians? Do Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice have a doctrine for their unilateral salvation? I don’t think so. The Bush Doctrine is a humanitarian policy only if you need the humanitarianism to justify a war retroactively.
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