SCREEN TEXT: Trinity College / Dublin, Ireland
Professor Sir Michael Howard: …and we must all hope American policy will be successful. And that the American people will have the stamina and the skill to sustain a commitment to pacification and support that will last for many years, if not decades, to come. But there is a deeper, underlying problem that we have to consider tonight. How should the rest of the world, especially Europe, especially your country and mine, deal with an America that is sufficiently powerful and self-confident to ignore the opinions and interests of the rest of the world and make war and peace as it sees fit? In short, how does one deal with a hegemony? How do the weak deal with the strong? But the rest of us have to recognize that although the United States may do the wrong things or the right things in the wrong way, without their military power and their economic support, it may not be possible to do anything at all. I’ll conclude by once more quoting Churchill: “The United States is it, can usually be counted on to do the right thing, but only after they have tried all the alternatives.” Now ladies and gentlemen, let the debate begin.
SCREEN TEXT: In September of 2002 the White House released the United States National Security Strategy.
The document outlines a policy in which the US government reserves the right to attack countries that the administration perceives may aspire to be potential military rivals or threats. Distinct from pre-emptive war in which a known attack is about to occur and is being anticipated, the National Security Strategy prescribes preventive war that, in its own words, addresses potential threats before they have fully emerged.
Given both the end of a Cold War rival to US power, and the historically unprecedented military force standing at the ready to implement this policy of prevention, the strategy may very well have a lasting impact on the course of human history.
SECTION: The Document
Anthony Arnove: The National Security Strategy of the United States is a document that was released in September of 2002. And what it does is it lays out a position, a framework, for what the US seeks to do on the global stage, what its foreign policy objectives are. And what’s interesting about the National Security Strategy document is that it puts into language a number of doctrines that the United States has held for many years, but has been shy about publicly stating.
Chalmers Johnson: It’s a doctrine that calls for pre-emptive war against any nation or combination of countries that in our opinion and without international legitimacy, say provided by the UN Security Council, that in our opinion threaten our interests as a nation, that we then reserve the right to, in the words of the President, take them out, to eliminate them militarily.
Michael Klare: The main thrust of the document is to ensure American military dominance for the rest of time. That is the essential objective of the strategy. Never to allow another power to arise that could conceivably challenge the United States as a major power. That is, we always have to remain the number one top power, and there are a lot of elements to that including military superiority, technological superiority, economic dominance, and much else follow from that.
Arnove: So in terms of what it means, it’s a document that I think has been clearly a guide to the practice of the Bush Administration and it sets out to implement a policy of security American hegemony. Global hegemony, regional hegemony in areas of strategic importance like the Middle East, and it provides a framework for understanding the objectives of the United States today so I think it’s very important.
Klare: Now that’s related to something else that I think is distinctive that is influence of neoconservative thinking on the Bush Administration. As I say, the idea of supremacy, of dominance, was long there, and was shared by Democrats and Republicans, but this crusading spirit you find in the NSS, the notion that American is sort of chosen by history and destiny to bring its values: democracy, free markets, and all that to the rest of the world, that it must act proactively and assertively to do that, that I think reflects the influence of neoconservative thinkers and you don’t find that quite so strong in earlier documents like this.
Johnson: The National Security doctrine is quite explicit. It says what we’re going to do. Vice-President Cheney once spoke of fifty nations he wanted to carry out regime change in, the President upped him ten more and said there were sixty of them. That’s letting the rest of the world know, we’re coming. What it means is that all other countries on Earth today are quietly conspiring with each other to prepare to resist the United States. The pattern is exactly the same kind of pattern that developed in the first and second centuries AD against the Roman Empire, which ultimately lead to its destruction. So that it’s hard to imagine a more profound impact that the United States is having on the rest of the world through the National Security doctrine of September 2002.
Klare: You know it says we’re not going to tolerate rogue states, we’re not going to tolerate terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, we’re not going to tolerate the rise of competing powers in the world, we’re not going to let that happen, we’re going to do whatever it takes to prevent those things from happening. So it’s more negative of threats we’re not going to allow. It doesn’t do a very good job of saying if we follow this path, these are all the benefits that are going to accrue to us. I mean, I suppose you could say we’re gonna be safer, although I find it very hard, if you analyze it, to see how that’s actually going to work. I think it’s going to make us more exposed to risk rather than safer. But it really doesn’t spell out what benefits we’ll have except I guess you could say the preservation of privilege. It does say that we’re a very privileged country at a very privileged moment in time and our purpose here is to preserve our privileges indefinitely.
Noam Chomsky: It has a certain rationality, within a kind of lunatic framework, but that’s not so unusual in world affairs. If you look over history, history’s just replete with examples, including recent history, of actions that were undertaken by perfectly rational people, that carried as they knew a severe risk to themselves and their own interests but were undertaken because of pursuing shorter term goals of higher priority. History’s full of it. Just take a look at the history of wars. Wars are started by somebody. The people who start them very often lose the war and get destroyed, but it doesn’t mean it’s irrational. In fact, if somebody’s watching this whole story from Mars, they would think, “They’re all berserk.” But within a lunatic framework it looks not only rational but laudable, and you can give plenty of other examples unfortunately.
Johnson: The rule in the world at the present time under American guidance is might makes right. And that makes us extremely dangerous.
[Trinity College Interlude]
Gideon Rose: There are a number of sins that you could say with quite justice and with quite good reason that the United States has committed over the years, and that the Bush Administration, in particular, is committing. But the question before this house tonight is not whether you would prefer to see a kinder and gentler United States. The question is not whether you would prefer to see Al Gore as president or George Bush. The question is not whether the United States can and should be more prudent in its finances, more prudent in its foreign policy, and in general act more to reassure those with less power in the world than it is currently doing. The question is rather specific. The question is whether United States foreign policy is doing more harm than good. To answer therefore in the affirmative, you are saying something very specific and very concrete. You are not saying that you don’t like George Bush. You’re saying that you think that what George Bush has done, and presided over, is so bad, that it would be better if he had not done what he had done. You are saying therefore that you are siding, rather objectively in the old Marxist terminology, with those who are his enemies. However unpleasant and ridiculous that kind of zero sum thinking is, this house today forces us to consider that very question. You are saying you would prefer a world in which Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and the Taliban are riding high in the saddle, to one in which they are on the run and hopefully exterminated.
SECTION: Context
Rahul Mahajan: The National Security Strategy grows out of previous documents via the Project for the New American Century, in particular one issued in September 2000 called “Rebuilding Americas Defenses” which is very important to read because it’s like a massively expanded and much more honest version of the National Security Strategy and it’s interesting to see how they relate. That document itself grows out of a document Paul Wolfowitz wrote in 1992 called “The Defense Planning Guidance.” This document laid out the same kind of vision. Basically, the question has been, ever since the end of the Cold War, how do we, how do the elite planners of the United States, take advantage of what they call the unipolar moment, the fact that with the end of the Soviet Union there is no power on the Earth that can really measure up against the United States and almost none that can even deter the United States in any significant way. And so Wolfowitz’s answer was take advantage of it by an extremely militaristic policy, by an open declaration of military dominance, and by the things that are necessary to go along with it. So Paul Wolfowitz wrote a document that laid these things out, in some detail, in 1992.
Chalmers Johnson: He declared that the policy of the United States should be to prevent any nation, any country, anywhere, from developing power that could conceivable challenge out interests, not just militarily, but our interest in resources and things of this sort.
Maria Ryan: When George W. Bush came to office, it effective became a blueprint for the administration’s new foreign policy. And the ideas of Wolfowitz, and they were shared by many others, their ideas, very gradually started to become administration policy. And George Bush also took many members of the hawkish neoconservative think tanks to work in his government and to work as consultants to his government. For example he took twenty-one members of the Center for Security Policy. From the American Enterprise Institute there were at least ten people that went to work for the Bush Administration. There were sixteen people who had worked with the Project for the New American century throughout the 1990s.
Johnson: This represents a group of people that have conventionally been called neoconservatives, meaning a new kind of conservative. I don’t think they’re conservatives at all, new or old, they’re radicals, quite serious radicals, committed to the unilateral exercise of military power, of the militarization of the country. They fully accept the militarism that goes with their imperialism. And these people have bided their time. They obviously did not have the support of the country and the Congress when George Bush was appointed president in 2001. But with the attacks of September 11th, 2001, they have said, in so many words, it was their opportunity, it was like Pearl Harbor. It was a chance to take over and under the cover of a presidentially declared so-called war on terrorism they began to implement what was a private agenda of their own.
Mahajan: If you look at detail of all these documents, you find several different components of this worldview. One, as I said, military technology, total technological supremacy. That’s one of the tenets of this new worldview. A second tenet, a dramatic expansion of military bases around the world. And we’ve seen this carried out since 9 11 in at least a dozen new countries. And the third tenet is wars for regime change. Which is to say wars in which the goal is at the end that the United States goes into the country and creates a regime. Regime change does not mean bringing democracy. Regime change means we create a government that is a military puppet of the United States, that obeys our larger military imperial policy.
Klare: In all of these documents you find, sort of, and implicit belief, and implicit understanding that the United States as been chosen somehow as the world’s leader because of our history of because of our superior values, or for some of these people who are deeply religious we’ve been chosen by almighty God to be the world’s leader and to bring our values to the rest of the world, that we’re different from other people. The political science term is exceptionalism. We’ve been granted an exemption from the laws that we insist that everybody else follows because we’re chosen, we’re the preferred people, and therefore we have the right to act as the world superpower, the world police power, that we’ve been chosen for this task. I do believe that this mode of thinking is deeply embedded in the Bush Administration and in many of these earlier documents. Now, not everybody would go so far as that, but I do think that everyone in Washington, and the Clinton and the two Bush administrations and certainly Regan, does feel that the United States has earned its superpower status and has a right to exercise the concentration of power that we’ve accumulated over the years and that it’s our obligation to do so. So it’s this arrogance that prevails, that pervades, everything, all of these documents are driven by this arrogance.
Tariq Ali: Their idea of an American century is very frightening. It’s the domination of the world by a single power. It’s essentially the creation of a new empire for a hundred, two hundred years where anything that dissents, anything that moves against this empire is crushed. And that is not going to bring peace to the world. You know, parts of the world are now directly occupied and there is not going to be peace as long as these occupations continue. And if you begin to occupy more places there will be more resistance. And the irony is that some liberal dreamers, leaving aside the neocons who think this is the only way we can sort out the world, do not realize, that in the world of today, when there is neoliberalism at home, you can’t have enlightened social democracy abroad. That is the dilemma that faces the empire.
SECTION: Continuity & Change
Seth Leibhohn: The use of anticipatory self-defense, or preventive action, is not new. It’s not new to the US; it’s not new to the world; it’s not new to history, but it perhaps got more attention, and perhaps is being used more certainly, than it has been in the past.
Noam Chomsky: The doctrine itself, the National Security Strategy, the wording is not that unusual. The reason is aroused such an enormous protest, world-wide, and right within the foreign policy elite within the United States, is the style not the wording. It was brazen, defiant, in your face. These are the kind of declarations you do fine, in your pocket.
Mark Lance: What’s new however is explicitly turning this into a policy. We’ve always given, and the whole world, at least in the post-WWII era, has given lip-service to the idea that there are norms of conduct, that there are specific, very strict conditions under which countries can attack another country. And while people have ad hoc violated that, and have given justifications, they’ve always tried to at least formulate things within that framework. And the existence of the framework puts some kind of constraint on state behavior. We’ve now explicitly said that’s just gone.
This is obviously an imperial structure. No one can look at the basing of US troops around the entire world, the US economy controlling the world, and not think of this as an empire. What’s particularly dangerous is that we’re moving from a sort of sophisticated, what they call liberal system of empire that tries to use diplomatic channels and the use of proxies- it’s quite a dangerous system for the people of the world but at least it’s a sophisticated system that runs somewhat less risk of the eruption of complete destabilization- to a system that’s vastly more explicit and for that reason vastly more dangerous in terms of raising the stakes, raising the possibility of outright civil war in huge regions of the world.
Phyllis Bennis: The US is indeed creating a new empire, very much in parallel to the old Roman or Greek empires. We know how they operated. If you look at what the Greeks did, what the Athenians did. They created a little democracy for themselves, and they were very proud of themselves. And then when they felt that their democracy was a little bit threatened, maybe it was a little bit fragile, they went to the island of Melos and they said, “We need your island.” And the Melians said, “We don’t think so.” And the Athenians said, “Well, sorry, we’re bigger and stronger than you, we’re taking your island.” And the Melians said, “What about democracy.” And the answer was, “For us there is democracy, for you there is the law of empire.” That’s very much what we’re seeing with the United States today, the abandonment of international law, the overt claim that the US is not and should not be accountable to the international law that rules the rest of the world. This is the stuff of empire. And we are standing astride the globe with a level of power absolutely unimaginable by any earlier empire. Whether it be economic power, political power, military power, cultural influence- the whole range of human endeavor is under our boot. And that’s a very dangerous reality.
[Trinity College Interlude]
David Barsamian: Who are the defined enemies, other than the ones that have been mentioned, al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, and Iraq? I have to talk about Iraq because we’re after all here in a city that is associated with Jonathan Swift, a great satirist. And it would take someone of the magnificence and the imagination of a Swift to do justice to the tapestry of lies and falsehoods and fabrications that have been spun by the punditocracy in the United States, by the spinmeisters using the corporate media, not as an independent forum for information and news, but essentially as a stenographer to power. The litany of lies that have accompanied this aggression give me as an American, I mean, I feel a great sense of grief. I don’t celebrate that Bush is doing all of these things, or that the American Administration is doing all of these things. I mean, I’m not happy about it. I wish I could report otherwise to you, and I would be proud to do so if it were the case, but I cannot abide by this kind of reckless, imperialist aggression.
SECTION: Rogue States
Cliff May: The most dangerous thing we face in the twenty-first century is this unbelievably combustible mix, this matrix, of rogue dictators, terrorist groups, and weapons of mass destruction. Where we see them mixing together, we probably need to act, not right away though military mean, we should try everything else at our disposal, but where everything else fails, then you can’t rule out the possibility of a pre-emptive action. It’s not the weapons per sey that is the problem, it’s who has them. I’m not really very worried about a, I could be wrong about this, but about a democracy having dangerous weapons. A real democracy is answerable to its people, and if you look at history, it’s rare, to the point of practically non-existent, that two democracies go to war with each other. They don’t do it because their people won’t allow it. They say well what do we want and what do they want and surely there’s some way to compromise. Democracies don’t go to war with each other. We’re really worried about these terrible weapons being in the hands of rogue dictators who are accountable to no one. They’re not accountable to their people, they’re not accountable to…they’re simply not accountable. And that is the problem we have to face. And I cannot be neutral between a democracy and a dictatorship. I cannot have moral equivalence between a democracy and a dictatorship. I think the problem is these terrible weapons that can do so much damage so quickly being in the hands of unaccountable rogue dictators, and we’re not that. It would be nice if at a certain point if we could all beat our swords into plowshares. That’s probably not realistic for a long while. We’re going to have to have the weapons to defend ourselves and I want us to have better weapons than those who seek to destroy us. We’re not using those weapons against anyone that doesn’t threaten us.
Seth Leibsohn: That really ratcheted up what we’d do. We would not strike in the Cold War directly against a nuclear nation. We never did a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union or for that matter any nation already with nuclear capability. But today we will take a strike against a nation that is not yet nuclear, that is beginning to become nuclear, or for that matter is harboring and supporting terrorists what want to do to us what they did on September 11th, on a larger scale. The most important thing I think that has been said about preventive war, anticipatory self-defense, whatever you want to call it, was said by our National Security Advisor Condaleezza Rice, when she said, in this age, the problem with every time waiting for evidence before you strike, is that the evidence could very well be a mushroom cloud. And we don’t have that kind of cushion anymore.
Michael Klare: Now, this is an important argument and if some evidence were presented to show that it might have some effect. I mean I think this is what Tony Blair was trying to say so much of the time, but there isn’t any evidence for that, that these states like Iran, North Korea, and Iraq are any different from other countries with weapons of mass destruction like India and Pakistan and the United States and France and Britain and Russian and China, the other countries that historically have had nuclear weapons. Primarily, their purpose is deterrence. And even if you don’t like the morality of deterrence, the threat of retaliation, it is not an offensive, irrational strategy. We maintain it for ourselves…
Noam Chomsky: Well, there is an elementary moral principle which is called the principle of universality. The principle says that if something’s right for us, it’s right for others, if it’s wrong for others, it’s wrong for us. If you can’t accept that principle, you should have the decency to shut up. So either you accept that principle or you say, “OK, I’m a Nazi, I’ll do anything I like. No more discussion of right and wrong.” Those are the choices in effect.
They made it very clear right away, to the world, that they mean it. And the way you make it clear is by carrying out what’s called sometimes an exemplary action, an action undertaken to let the world know, put them on notice, that we’re not just talking, we mean what we say. And the action that was taken was the invasion of Iraq.
There was bitter opposition in elite groups all over the world- even the World Economic Forum practically broke up over it- but they don’t really care, that’s what they wanted. They wanted people to understand that we mean this doctrine. We are going to attack anyone we like without authorization. We’re not going to care about credible pre-text, and you understand it. That’s not the same as earlier doctrines.
Maria Ryan: And so for the people of Iraq, the application of the Bush National Security Strategy has meant the deaths of a minimum of eight thousand innocent civilians. And those deaths will carry on as well, because of the coalition’s use of cluster bombs which can lie unexploded for many years. It’s lead to the development of a terrorist network in a country where there was no terrorism previously. So the society is really in complete chaos now.
Chomsky: Arthur Schlessinger, well known historian, Kennedy advisor, when the US started bombing Iraq, he wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times which is the strongest article I’ve seen criticizing the war anywhere- it’s striking that it’s coming from the mainstream- in which he recalls President Roosevelt’s statement after Pearl Harbor describing it as a date that “shall live in infamy.” And he said Roosevelt was correct, now it is we Americans who live in infamy now that we are following the policy of imperial Japan claiming self-defense just as the Japanese did. Nobody took that seriously, and nobody takes this seriously. And that’s accurate, I think, it just is the right of outright aggression.
Tariq Ali: And the notion that these countries pose a threat to the United States is of course a complete and utter joke. No one believes it. No one. Not even those who say it in the United States. It’s a pre-text to make war. And the fact that they’ve introduced in the National Strategy doctrine, the new Bush doctrine, is nothing to do with the threat coming from states which have been weakened over the years. The National Strategy doctrine basically poses a single question. In the post-Cold War phase, what is the United States going to do to preserve and maintain its economic hegemony and strength in the world? And a subsidiary question is automatically posed: will it use force to do so? And the National Strategy doctrine answers yes. So it’s a very blunt and frank document. It says we will fight to preserve our place in the world and we will use military force if we have to. This has got nothing to do with strikes by other states or anything remotely resembling that. This is an assertion of raw military power.
SECTION: Terrorism
I don’t think it’s necessarily a new idea. I think the idea goes back quite a ways. I mean, if you look in Grotious, who is the father of international law, you’ll find something about this concept of pre-empting an attack or a danger or a threat. It’s mentioned I believe only three times within this document that you name, but it’s an important part of it in the twenty-first century in a way it wasn’t in any past century for a very simple reason. We now have the very very real and chilling possibility that terrorists can and will get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. It may be very difficult to prevent that from happening.
Rahul Mahajan: The one thing that’s really glaring in the document is that early on it says basically that we are right now living at the mercy of stateless multi-national terrorist networks which are immune to the kind of deterrent that you would normally apply to a state and that basically work on almost any state confronted with the overwhelming might of US power- it says this. And then in the entire rest of the document it says nothing about how to address that fact. There’s a huge non sequitor going from that to the claim that we must engage in so-called pre-emptive- though a better word would be preventive war- against states, rogue states like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. A tremendous leap where there is absolutely nothing to fill in that huge gap.
Phil Donahue: I think we have to begin by saying that we cannot win the war on terrorism. We have an administration that truly believes that somewhere in the near future, we’re going to track down the last terrorist, in the last hiding place on Earth, and we’re gonna go, “bang,” put the gun the holster and say, “Boy I’m glad that’s over.” Won’t happen. There will be no parades down Fifth Avenue. No ticker tape. No generals waving to the crowd. No sailors, soldiers, and marines getting off airplanes and ships and kissing their loved ones till their hats fall off as it happened in World War II, when I was a child, a time I will never forget.
We have to somehow help people to understand that you can’t win the war on terrorism. If you say we’re going to win the war on terrorism you’re deluding yourself, and you’re deluding everybody who hears the message. What we have to do- and this is not what everybody wants to hear- is create an environment in which this type of behavior is less likely to occur.
Maria Ryan: And so I think people have to ask themselves whether there will be less terrorism as a result of the NSS or whether there’ll actually be more. And does this strategy of military dominance actually invite the kind of competition that it’s designed to prevent? Does the use of unilateral military power actually cause fear and resentment which makes it more likely that other countries might rearm in response to the United States? And perhaps most crucially, what does the exercise of unilateral military power do to ameliorate the intense dislike of the US government in the Middle East?
SECTION: Consequences
Noam Chomsky: Just commenting on that paragraph… it’s worth making clear that no one who writes the document believes a word of it. If they believed that the US would help any nation combating terror, they’ll act very differently from the way they act.
I tend to agree with the most conservative mainstream critics and the intelligence agencies that the likely consequence is an increase in threats- to the world, to the United States, an increase in proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and increase of terror, partially for revenge, partially just for deterrence. Again, the logic is straight forward. You announce to people that you’re going to attack them whenever you feel like it, and you have overwhelming force at your command, and you have an intellectual class which is capable doctrines of the sort you just quoted, and everybody knows that, what do you do?
You don’t react by saying, “Gee, thanks.” They do something. They can’t confront the United States in military force. It’s impossible. The US spends about as much as the world combined by now and is way more advanced technologically. So they turn to other means that are available to them. And there are other means. Weapons of mass destruction are available to the weak. Terror is available to the weak. Sooner or later they’re going to be combined, with horrendous consequences. It’s been known long before 9 11 that this was a very realistic possibility.
Other powers react. Russia has increased its military spending by, I forget the numbers, I think by about a third in the last year or something like that. And that means offensive weapondry, missiles, submarines for nuclear weapons and so on and so forth. They’re also moving their offensive forces onto automated launch on warning strategies, which is a tremendous danger to the world because of their deteriorating command and control systems. China’s going to react undoubtedly. If China builds up its military capacity, India will try to match it. Pakistan will do something to try to match it. And you’re kind of off and running at this point.
Chalmers Johnson: Without question, these doctrines have produced more nuclear proliferation than anything in the past. The world is recognizing what was wrong with Saddam Hussein is not that he had weapons of mass destruction, it was that he didn’t have them. Therefore, he was a sitting duck for the Americans. The North Koreans have certainly learned that lesson. If you’re going to resist the American imperial juggernaut, you definitely need nuclear weapons.
Phyllis Bennis: Because we don’t invade nuclear powers. We only invade those that don’t have nuclear weapons on the grounds that we think someday they might or someday they might want to or someday they might bring back a scientist who once knew how. And therefore it’s Ok to go to war.
Rahul Mahajan: To proclaim this right is basically to proclaim the right of the strong nations to invade the weak and nothing more. And it must be seen that way.
Maria Ryan: I think the US government has made its so-called grand imperial strategy quite clear by now, and really the only question left is whether the US population will be scared enough and manipulated enough to allow them to carry it out.
Phil Donahue: We’ve spent now, for the past several years over three hundred billion dollars, each year. About three hundred and fifty billion dollars a year, for the greatest, largest, most powerful array of things that go boom in the history of civilization. And we’re still scared. We give ourselves now permission to attack another country not for what they have done, but for what we think they’re going to do. If we’re going to allow ourselves to be this frightened… there goes the whole neighborhood. Then we truly are back to a Wild West frontier kind of civilization where you shoot first and ask questions later. Very unbecoming behavior on the part of the greatest experiment in democracy in the history of civilization I speak of the United States of America and this fabulous constitution.
[Trinity College Interlude]
Rt Hon Bill Rammell: The real issue that we confront is that we live in a world today where the United States of America is the only global economic or military superpower. And that’s the reality of the situation. Some might wish it were different, but that’s the issue that we’re facing. And faced with that, I believe we have a fundamental choice. We can oppose everything that America does, stand on the sideline in the full knowledge that they could act on their own, and in the process we’ll feel quite good about ourselves, or we can actually engage with America. We can work with them where they’re manifestly right and at the same time we can constructively criticize where they’re wrong and seek to take them down the path of multilateralism.
SECTION: Opposition
“People are asking the question today, ‘Why, if we are the leader of the civilized world, why aren’t we acting in cooperation with them? Why are we becoming the dictator, the tyrant of today rather than being the peacemaker, being the one to build consensus, because America hold all of the cards?’ So I’m saying pre-emption under certain circumstances. If the world community had gathered and said, ‘Man, they’re really cooking some bad stuff in Taiwan. And they’re shooting missiles off while the Secretary of State is there and we have to take some action because they’re provoking’, then I would say that’s justifiable. But when you’re in a situation where it’s status quo. Iraq has already been bombed into the Stone Age, that’s what one of the generals said, over the last ten years. So how can you go in there and pre-empt something that you’ve been spending the last ten years to pre-empt. So what I’m saying is that that means they’re pre-empting something else. The real pre-emptive war they’re having is against the American people. Pre-empting our ability to have jobs, to have housing, to develop our nation to become a model for the rest of the world of diversity, peace and cooperation. That’s the real pre-emption, and unfortunately, we’re losing that war.”
Maria Ryan: There’s really been quite an unprecedented reaction to the Bush doctrine, especially when you consider that the major day for the anti-war demonstrations actually occurred a month before the war started, so that was the fifteenth of February, 2003. There were protests on every continent. For example, in London we had about one and a half million people. Two million people in Madrid. Two million in Rome. Half a million in Berlin. Another half million in New York. And I think the really significant thing about those demonstrations was that most of the people who went to them were people who would never normally go to a demonstration. But there was a unifying sense that the Bush Administration and its allies are making the world a more dangerous place by engaging in this kind of aggression. And I certainly felt that there was a sense that we need to find other ways to solve our problems. And that might mean being a lot more creative and it might be a lot more difficult than just dropping bombs on a country, but it will certainly make us a lot safer in the long term.
Seth Leibsohn: As distinct from the protests of the 60s which I think is really interesting here, there protestors- I’m not afraid to say- hate America. Martin Luther King led a huge protest movement and it changed laws and it made this country better. All of that is irrelevant for this discussion. What’s interesting to me is that he did it on the principles of America he did it by quoting the declaration of independence. He did it in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He said this is how we were founded as a country; we need to live up to our ideals. The protestors of today are saying something quite a bit different, whether they be in America or elsewhere. They are saying we have no ideals. We have no principles. Or if we do they are bad ones. They’ve also been teaching, frankly, that our founding documents were a lie. That our founding documents were evil. And that we are so divorced from the notion of good that we can’t do any good.
Phil Donahue: We’ve got to be more aggressive in returning the insult to those who suggest that if we protest the war, we don’t support our troops. That is a lie, and it is the single most effective method of marginalizing those who would dissent. Imagine, because we protest the war, we don’t care about our troops. That is a lie on its face. Profoundly conservative Republicans don’t believe that about us. Why do they allow their colleagues to say that? What you don’t respect if you keep your mouth shut when you feel that what’s happening is wrong. What you don’t respect is the sacrifices of those who died to support this freedom to protest.
“D.C. on your feet. The drums of war we must defeat. US out of Iraq. US out of Iraq…”
Cliff May: You can’t expect to be universally liked and certainly not loved. And there’s going to be anger over some of your policies, and there’s going to be disagreement. And I’m afraid you kind of have to expect that. I don’t think after 9 11, the main goal in our foreign policy ought to be to win a popularity contest. I think the main goal ought to be to keep our men, women, and children safe from being incinerated as they go about their business, and buried alive in their offices. I don’t want to do that, I hope we won’t do that in a way that unnecessarily offends anybody, but if people take offence to that we can’t help it.
People say there was such sympathy after September 11th. Maybe there was sympathy but I don’t think there was support. I think there was also some shadenfreuder. In other words, people saying, “Well, better you than me.” And I think you see that particularly in Europe. I’m very nervous that the heart of for example French policy today is to say, you know what, this is a terrible war on terrorism that America’s fighting and I guess Israel’s fighting and India’s fighting and the Philippines are fighting. There’s no reason it has to come to Paris. And as long as we’re not on America’s side, we’re not seen as their ally, it’s not coming here. And so they’re going to be neutrals. Or maybe even less than neutrals in this war. They’re going to do what they can to appease and placate the terrorists so the terrorists stay out of Europe and just fight with us. So, I would love to go to Provance and know that I’m the most popular person there, but if I have to give that up in order to be safe and have my kids safe, I’m willing to.
Rahul Mahajan: There is no single force that can really put itself in opposition to the United States and get very far. It is very much a matter of what I believe Ian Williams said, of tying down Gulliver with hundreds or thousands of Lilliputian strings. After the February 15th demonstration, the New York Times, even, was so affected by them that it went so far as to say that there are now two superpowers in the world: the United States and world public opinion.
[Trinity College Interlude]
Colm Green: Be very weary of neoconservatives. Be very weary of people who think that the world is quite as simple as they think it is, ladies and gentlemen. The entire basis of the neoconservative agenda is that if we treat people like Americans they’ll try and treat us like Americans, ladies and gentlemen. It’s the philosophy of Henry Higgins. They’re paraphrasing Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady when they say why can’t a woman be more like a man, ladies and gentlemen. They’re trying to treat people so simply that they’re doomed to failure. They’re doomed to trouble. And the trouble is going to come down upon us as much as it’s going to come down upon them, ladies and gentlemen. Be afraid.
SECTION: National Security
Rahul Mahajan: Any national security strategy that was a national security strategy would start by saying that we have to massively shift our spending priorities. Even if we want to spend this gigantic amount of money on the military, let us start spending it on something that could at least have something to do with defending us from the kinds of attacks we’re likely to see. Any serious attempt to deal with the question of Islamic terrorism itself, international Islamic terrorism would have started by saying what are the things that feed this terrorism, what are the things that cause people either to join these groups or to support them in some generalized way. Any kind of national security strategy has to start with trying to understand what are the roots of that and what can be done about that. And it doesn’t take a genius. And it doesn’t take any involved analysis to figure out. The primarily, first and foremost grievance in the hearts and minds of those in the Arab world is without a question Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Probably one of the main grievances of the late 90s and early 2000s was the sanctions on Iraq. Now a grievance is the occupation of Iraq. So any current national security strategy would say that we need to get the hell out of Iraq because we’re creating massive resentment of us there. What we’re doing is making Iraq into Palestine except it has ten times the population and therefore ten times the potential problem for all of us. So a national security strategy would say let us stop being a superpower and making us a target by our oppression and domination of other countries and instead foster the idea that we are simply one country among many in an international world order built on at least some kind of harmony. Now, all of these are things that are obvious, which anyone serious about national security would have immediately started talking about after 9 11, and which sadly you heard almost no discussion of in any of the mainstream media, and you never heard a word about from any kind of government official in the context of national security, and that is a real tragedy.
Mark Lance: There’s sort of two ways which this is profoundly important for the average American- well, three really. The first is the obvious moral dimension. I mean, any human being that cares about other people is going to care about the fact that there are people out there saying they have the right to destroy whole societies, kill hundreds of thousands of people on their say so, a say so which in the case of the Iraq war has been shown now to have been utter nonsense. It was fairly clear before the way, but it’s quite clear that the justifications given were outright falsehoods and huge numbers of people died and a society was destroyed. The second is straightforwardly financial. These wars are costing hundreds of billions of dollars. We’re talking now about a new appropriation of $ 87 billion for the next year, while school districts around the country, colleges are being cut. Social services are being cut. In DC they just closed the only public hospital because they didn’t have funds for it. Third, it makes our lives more dangerous. We don’t make ourselves safer…. I mean, there was no conventional military threat anywhere from anyone in the world. There’s no conventional threat to the United States. This is perfectly obvious. What there is, is a threat that people who are so desperate they’re willing to die themselves to kill a few American- what is standardly labeled as terrorism- that’s a real threat, and that’s of course a threat that’s made vastly greater by the destruction of whole societies and by the creation of more and more people who have nothing to live for except revenge.
[QUESTION: Do you think this is something that the US as a whole should be shrugging off and not paying attention to?]
Noam Chomsky: Depends on how you want to be perceived in the world. If you want to be perceived as the citizens of a mafia don who’ll use force to crush anything in its path, you should shrug it off. If you think of yourself in a different way, as part of a civilized society that should be respected and admired by others then you won’t shrug it off, you’ll be very upset about it. I don’t think the Administration cares. I think they’re happy to be perceived as mafia dons. They don’t want to be loved, they want to be feared. But the American citizens might have a different picture of the kind of country they want to live in.
Michael Klare: As an assessment of the world that we live in today, it’s a complete disaster. I think anyone who looks openly, with open eyes, at the world we face would see a world with many many serious problems: environmental problems, economic problems, human rights problems, epidemiological problems. This is what affect the lives of most people in the world, and increasingly are going to affect the American people. What I find so offensive about the National Security Strategy is its complete failure to look at the world as it is, and instead to fixate. There’s fixation certain threats: the rogue states, al Qaeda, and some other terrorist organizations. Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t threats out there from terrorists and states pursuing weapons of mass destruction. They are threats. But they’re part of a spectrum of dangers that we face that’s much bigger than them, and I think that’s what’s so tragic about this.
Phil Donahue: We must never, ever let this happen again. This is Shakespearean. I obviously can’t prove this, but I think it’s a tragedy for those who died. I’m afraid we’re coming to a place where we’re going to look up and we’re going to say, “Why? This happened not that long ago, in another part of the world.” As the song says, “Where have all the flowers gone?” When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
SCREEN TEXT: January 2003, 41 Nobel Laureates signed a declaration opposing preventive war. The statement read in part: “even with a victory, we believe that the medial, economic, environmental, moral, spiritual, political and legal consequences of an American preventive attack on Iraq would undermine, not protect, US security and standing in the world.”
According to the Financial Times, when US forces who ousted Saddam Hussein failed to discover weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration suggested a refinement in the concept of preventive war outlined in the National Security Strategy. The revision suggests instead that “the administration will act against a hostile regime that has nothing more than the intent and ability to develop [WMD].”
2004 has been marked by world-wide questioning of the National Security Strategy in light of the war in Iraq. Press reports have noted that a preventive strategy, aside from the legal ambiguities, must rest on reliable intelligence about the capabilities of other nations, intelligence that was missing from the case against Iraq. Whether remaining questions will resonate into the debate over the next application of the National Security Strategy, or similar reincarnations, remains to be seen.
Professor Sir Michael Howard: …and we must all hope American policy will be successful. And that the American people will have the stamina and the skill to sustain a commitment to pacification and support that will last for many years, if not decades, to come. But there is a deeper, underlying problem that we have to consider tonight. How should the rest of the world, especially Europe, especially your country and mine, deal with an America that is sufficiently powerful and self-confident to ignore the opinions and interests of the rest of the world and make war and peace as it sees fit? In short, how does one deal with a hegemony? How do the weak deal with the strong? But the rest of us have to recognize that although the United States may do the wrong things or the right things in the wrong way, without their military power and their economic support, it may not be possible to do anything at all. I’ll conclude by once more quoting Churchill: “The United States is it, can usually be counted on to do the right thing, but only after they have tried all the alternatives.” Now ladies and gentlemen, let the debate begin.
SCREEN TEXT: In September of 2002 the White House released the United States National Security Strategy.
The document outlines a policy in which the US government reserves the right to attack countries that the administration perceives may aspire to be potential military rivals or threats. Distinct from pre-emptive war in which a known attack is about to occur and is being anticipated, the National Security Strategy prescribes preventive war that, in its own words, addresses potential threats before they have fully emerged.
Given both the end of a Cold War rival to US power, and the historically unprecedented military force standing at the ready to implement this policy of prevention, the strategy may very well have a lasting impact on the course of human history.
SECTION: The Document
Anthony Arnove: The National Security Strategy of the United States is a document that was released in September of 2002. And what it does is it lays out a position, a framework, for what the US seeks to do on the global stage, what its foreign policy objectives are. And what’s interesting about the National Security Strategy document is that it puts into language a number of doctrines that the United States has held for many years, but has been shy about publicly stating.
Chalmers Johnson: It’s a doctrine that calls for pre-emptive war against any nation or combination of countries that in our opinion and without international legitimacy, say provided by the UN Security Council, that in our opinion threaten our interests as a nation, that we then reserve the right to, in the words of the President, take them out, to eliminate them militarily.
Michael Klare: The main thrust of the document is to ensure American military dominance for the rest of time. That is the essential objective of the strategy. Never to allow another power to arise that could conceivably challenge the United States as a major power. That is, we always have to remain the number one top power, and there are a lot of elements to that including military superiority, technological superiority, economic dominance, and much else follow from that.
Arnove: So in terms of what it means, it’s a document that I think has been clearly a guide to the practice of the Bush Administration and it sets out to implement a policy of security American hegemony. Global hegemony, regional hegemony in areas of strategic importance like the Middle East, and it provides a framework for understanding the objectives of the United States today so I think it’s very important.
Klare: Now that’s related to something else that I think is distinctive that is influence of neoconservative thinking on the Bush Administration. As I say, the idea of supremacy, of dominance, was long there, and was shared by Democrats and Republicans, but this crusading spirit you find in the NSS, the notion that American is sort of chosen by history and destiny to bring its values: democracy, free markets, and all that to the rest of the world, that it must act proactively and assertively to do that, that I think reflects the influence of neoconservative thinkers and you don’t find that quite so strong in earlier documents like this.
Johnson: The National Security doctrine is quite explicit. It says what we’re going to do. Vice-President Cheney once spoke of fifty nations he wanted to carry out regime change in, the President upped him ten more and said there were sixty of them. That’s letting the rest of the world know, we’re coming. What it means is that all other countries on Earth today are quietly conspiring with each other to prepare to resist the United States. The pattern is exactly the same kind of pattern that developed in the first and second centuries AD against the Roman Empire, which ultimately lead to its destruction. So that it’s hard to imagine a more profound impact that the United States is having on the rest of the world through the National Security doctrine of September 2002.
Klare: You know it says we’re not going to tolerate rogue states, we’re not going to tolerate terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, we’re not going to tolerate the rise of competing powers in the world, we’re not going to let that happen, we’re going to do whatever it takes to prevent those things from happening. So it’s more negative of threats we’re not going to allow. It doesn’t do a very good job of saying if we follow this path, these are all the benefits that are going to accrue to us. I mean, I suppose you could say we’re gonna be safer, although I find it very hard, if you analyze it, to see how that’s actually going to work. I think it’s going to make us more exposed to risk rather than safer. But it really doesn’t spell out what benefits we’ll have except I guess you could say the preservation of privilege. It does say that we’re a very privileged country at a very privileged moment in time and our purpose here is to preserve our privileges indefinitely.
Noam Chomsky: It has a certain rationality, within a kind of lunatic framework, but that’s not so unusual in world affairs. If you look over history, history’s just replete with examples, including recent history, of actions that were undertaken by perfectly rational people, that carried as they knew a severe risk to themselves and their own interests but were undertaken because of pursuing shorter term goals of higher priority. History’s full of it. Just take a look at the history of wars. Wars are started by somebody. The people who start them very often lose the war and get destroyed, but it doesn’t mean it’s irrational. In fact, if somebody’s watching this whole story from Mars, they would think, “They’re all berserk.” But within a lunatic framework it looks not only rational but laudable, and you can give plenty of other examples unfortunately.
Johnson: The rule in the world at the present time under American guidance is might makes right. And that makes us extremely dangerous.
[Trinity College Interlude]
Gideon Rose: There are a number of sins that you could say with quite justice and with quite good reason that the United States has committed over the years, and that the Bush Administration, in particular, is committing. But the question before this house tonight is not whether you would prefer to see a kinder and gentler United States. The question is not whether you would prefer to see Al Gore as president or George Bush. The question is not whether the United States can and should be more prudent in its finances, more prudent in its foreign policy, and in general act more to reassure those with less power in the world than it is currently doing. The question is rather specific. The question is whether United States foreign policy is doing more harm than good. To answer therefore in the affirmative, you are saying something very specific and very concrete. You are not saying that you don’t like George Bush. You’re saying that you think that what George Bush has done, and presided over, is so bad, that it would be better if he had not done what he had done. You are saying therefore that you are siding, rather objectively in the old Marxist terminology, with those who are his enemies. However unpleasant and ridiculous that kind of zero sum thinking is, this house today forces us to consider that very question. You are saying you would prefer a world in which Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and the Taliban are riding high in the saddle, to one in which they are on the run and hopefully exterminated.
SECTION: Context
Rahul Mahajan: The National Security Strategy grows out of previous documents via the Project for the New American Century, in particular one issued in September 2000 called “Rebuilding Americas Defenses” which is very important to read because it’s like a massively expanded and much more honest version of the National Security Strategy and it’s interesting to see how they relate. That document itself grows out of a document Paul Wolfowitz wrote in 1992 called “The Defense Planning Guidance.” This document laid out the same kind of vision. Basically, the question has been, ever since the end of the Cold War, how do we, how do the elite planners of the United States, take advantage of what they call the unipolar moment, the fact that with the end of the Soviet Union there is no power on the Earth that can really measure up against the United States and almost none that can even deter the United States in any significant way. And so Wolfowitz’s answer was take advantage of it by an extremely militaristic policy, by an open declaration of military dominance, and by the things that are necessary to go along with it. So Paul Wolfowitz wrote a document that laid these things out, in some detail, in 1992.
Chalmers Johnson: He declared that the policy of the United States should be to prevent any nation, any country, anywhere, from developing power that could conceivable challenge out interests, not just militarily, but our interest in resources and things of this sort.
Maria Ryan: When George W. Bush came to office, it effective became a blueprint for the administration’s new foreign policy. And the ideas of Wolfowitz, and they were shared by many others, their ideas, very gradually started to become administration policy. And George Bush also took many members of the hawkish neoconservative think tanks to work in his government and to work as consultants to his government. For example he took twenty-one members of the Center for Security Policy. From the American Enterprise Institute there were at least ten people that went to work for the Bush Administration. There were sixteen people who had worked with the Project for the New American century throughout the 1990s.
Johnson: This represents a group of people that have conventionally been called neoconservatives, meaning a new kind of conservative. I don’t think they’re conservatives at all, new or old, they’re radicals, quite serious radicals, committed to the unilateral exercise of military power, of the militarization of the country. They fully accept the militarism that goes with their imperialism. And these people have bided their time. They obviously did not have the support of the country and the Congress when George Bush was appointed president in 2001. But with the attacks of September 11th, 2001, they have said, in so many words, it was their opportunity, it was like Pearl Harbor. It was a chance to take over and under the cover of a presidentially declared so-called war on terrorism they began to implement what was a private agenda of their own.
Mahajan: If you look at detail of all these documents, you find several different components of this worldview. One, as I said, military technology, total technological supremacy. That’s one of the tenets of this new worldview. A second tenet, a dramatic expansion of military bases around the world. And we’ve seen this carried out since 9 11 in at least a dozen new countries. And the third tenet is wars for regime change. Which is to say wars in which the goal is at the end that the United States goes into the country and creates a regime. Regime change does not mean bringing democracy. Regime change means we create a government that is a military puppet of the United States, that obeys our larger military imperial policy.
Klare: In all of these documents you find, sort of, and implicit belief, and implicit understanding that the United States as been chosen somehow as the world’s leader because of our history of because of our superior values, or for some of these people who are deeply religious we’ve been chosen by almighty God to be the world’s leader and to bring our values to the rest of the world, that we’re different from other people. The political science term is exceptionalism. We’ve been granted an exemption from the laws that we insist that everybody else follows because we’re chosen, we’re the preferred people, and therefore we have the right to act as the world superpower, the world police power, that we’ve been chosen for this task. I do believe that this mode of thinking is deeply embedded in the Bush Administration and in many of these earlier documents. Now, not everybody would go so far as that, but I do think that everyone in Washington, and the Clinton and the two Bush administrations and certainly Regan, does feel that the United States has earned its superpower status and has a right to exercise the concentration of power that we’ve accumulated over the years and that it’s our obligation to do so. So it’s this arrogance that prevails, that pervades, everything, all of these documents are driven by this arrogance.
Tariq Ali: Their idea of an American century is very frightening. It’s the domination of the world by a single power. It’s essentially the creation of a new empire for a hundred, two hundred years where anything that dissents, anything that moves against this empire is crushed. And that is not going to bring peace to the world. You know, parts of the world are now directly occupied and there is not going to be peace as long as these occupations continue. And if you begin to occupy more places there will be more resistance. And the irony is that some liberal dreamers, leaving aside the neocons who think this is the only way we can sort out the world, do not realize, that in the world of today, when there is neoliberalism at home, you can’t have enlightened social democracy abroad. That is the dilemma that faces the empire.
SECTION: Continuity & Change
Seth Leibhohn: The use of anticipatory self-defense, or preventive action, is not new. It’s not new to the US; it’s not new to the world; it’s not new to history, but it perhaps got more attention, and perhaps is being used more certainly, than it has been in the past.
Noam Chomsky: The doctrine itself, the National Security Strategy, the wording is not that unusual. The reason is aroused such an enormous protest, world-wide, and right within the foreign policy elite within the United States, is the style not the wording. It was brazen, defiant, in your face. These are the kind of declarations you do fine, in your pocket.
Mark Lance: What’s new however is explicitly turning this into a policy. We’ve always given, and the whole world, at least in the post-WWII era, has given lip-service to the idea that there are norms of conduct, that there are specific, very strict conditions under which countries can attack another country. And while people have ad hoc violated that, and have given justifications, they’ve always tried to at least formulate things within that framework. And the existence of the framework puts some kind of constraint on state behavior. We’ve now explicitly said that’s just gone.
This is obviously an imperial structure. No one can look at the basing of US troops around the entire world, the US economy controlling the world, and not think of this as an empire. What’s particularly dangerous is that we’re moving from a sort of sophisticated, what they call liberal system of empire that tries to use diplomatic channels and the use of proxies- it’s quite a dangerous system for the people of the world but at least it’s a sophisticated system that runs somewhat less risk of the eruption of complete destabilization- to a system that’s vastly more explicit and for that reason vastly more dangerous in terms of raising the stakes, raising the possibility of outright civil war in huge regions of the world.
Phyllis Bennis: The US is indeed creating a new empire, very much in parallel to the old Roman or Greek empires. We know how they operated. If you look at what the Greeks did, what the Athenians did. They created a little democracy for themselves, and they were very proud of themselves. And then when they felt that their democracy was a little bit threatened, maybe it was a little bit fragile, they went to the island of Melos and they said, “We need your island.” And the Melians said, “We don’t think so.” And the Athenians said, “Well, sorry, we’re bigger and stronger than you, we’re taking your island.” And the Melians said, “What about democracy.” And the answer was, “For us there is democracy, for you there is the law of empire.” That’s very much what we’re seeing with the United States today, the abandonment of international law, the overt claim that the US is not and should not be accountable to the international law that rules the rest of the world. This is the stuff of empire. And we are standing astride the globe with a level of power absolutely unimaginable by any earlier empire. Whether it be economic power, political power, military power, cultural influence- the whole range of human endeavor is under our boot. And that’s a very dangerous reality.
[Trinity College Interlude]
David Barsamian: Who are the defined enemies, other than the ones that have been mentioned, al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, and Iraq? I have to talk about Iraq because we’re after all here in a city that is associated with Jonathan Swift, a great satirist. And it would take someone of the magnificence and the imagination of a Swift to do justice to the tapestry of lies and falsehoods and fabrications that have been spun by the punditocracy in the United States, by the spinmeisters using the corporate media, not as an independent forum for information and news, but essentially as a stenographer to power. The litany of lies that have accompanied this aggression give me as an American, I mean, I feel a great sense of grief. I don’t celebrate that Bush is doing all of these things, or that the American Administration is doing all of these things. I mean, I’m not happy about it. I wish I could report otherwise to you, and I would be proud to do so if it were the case, but I cannot abide by this kind of reckless, imperialist aggression.
SECTION: Rogue States
Cliff May: The most dangerous thing we face in the twenty-first century is this unbelievably combustible mix, this matrix, of rogue dictators, terrorist groups, and weapons of mass destruction. Where we see them mixing together, we probably need to act, not right away though military mean, we should try everything else at our disposal, but where everything else fails, then you can’t rule out the possibility of a pre-emptive action. It’s not the weapons per sey that is the problem, it’s who has them. I’m not really very worried about a, I could be wrong about this, but about a democracy having dangerous weapons. A real democracy is answerable to its people, and if you look at history, it’s rare, to the point of practically non-existent, that two democracies go to war with each other. They don’t do it because their people won’t allow it. They say well what do we want and what do they want and surely there’s some way to compromise. Democracies don’t go to war with each other. We’re really worried about these terrible weapons being in the hands of rogue dictators who are accountable to no one. They’re not accountable to their people, they’re not accountable to…they’re simply not accountable. And that is the problem we have to face. And I cannot be neutral between a democracy and a dictatorship. I cannot have moral equivalence between a democracy and a dictatorship. I think the problem is these terrible weapons that can do so much damage so quickly being in the hands of unaccountable rogue dictators, and we’re not that. It would be nice if at a certain point if we could all beat our swords into plowshares. That’s probably not realistic for a long while. We’re going to have to have the weapons to defend ourselves and I want us to have better weapons than those who seek to destroy us. We’re not using those weapons against anyone that doesn’t threaten us.
Seth Leibsohn: That really ratcheted up what we’d do. We would not strike in the Cold War directly against a nuclear nation. We never did a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union or for that matter any nation already with nuclear capability. But today we will take a strike against a nation that is not yet nuclear, that is beginning to become nuclear, or for that matter is harboring and supporting terrorists what want to do to us what they did on September 11th, on a larger scale. The most important thing I think that has been said about preventive war, anticipatory self-defense, whatever you want to call it, was said by our National Security Advisor Condaleezza Rice, when she said, in this age, the problem with every time waiting for evidence before you strike, is that the evidence could very well be a mushroom cloud. And we don’t have that kind of cushion anymore.
Michael Klare: Now, this is an important argument and if some evidence were presented to show that it might have some effect. I mean I think this is what Tony Blair was trying to say so much of the time, but there isn’t any evidence for that, that these states like Iran, North Korea, and Iraq are any different from other countries with weapons of mass destruction like India and Pakistan and the United States and France and Britain and Russian and China, the other countries that historically have had nuclear weapons. Primarily, their purpose is deterrence. And even if you don’t like the morality of deterrence, the threat of retaliation, it is not an offensive, irrational strategy. We maintain it for ourselves…
Noam Chomsky: Well, there is an elementary moral principle which is called the principle of universality. The principle says that if something’s right for us, it’s right for others, if it’s wrong for others, it’s wrong for us. If you can’t accept that principle, you should have the decency to shut up. So either you accept that principle or you say, “OK, I’m a Nazi, I’ll do anything I like. No more discussion of right and wrong.” Those are the choices in effect.
They made it very clear right away, to the world, that they mean it. And the way you make it clear is by carrying out what’s called sometimes an exemplary action, an action undertaken to let the world know, put them on notice, that we’re not just talking, we mean what we say. And the action that was taken was the invasion of Iraq.
There was bitter opposition in elite groups all over the world- even the World Economic Forum practically broke up over it- but they don’t really care, that’s what they wanted. They wanted people to understand that we mean this doctrine. We are going to attack anyone we like without authorization. We’re not going to care about credible pre-text, and you understand it. That’s not the same as earlier doctrines.
Maria Ryan: And so for the people of Iraq, the application of the Bush National Security Strategy has meant the deaths of a minimum of eight thousand innocent civilians. And those deaths will carry on as well, because of the coalition’s use of cluster bombs which can lie unexploded for many years. It’s lead to the development of a terrorist network in a country where there was no terrorism previously. So the society is really in complete chaos now.
Chomsky: Arthur Schlessinger, well known historian, Kennedy advisor, when the US started bombing Iraq, he wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times which is the strongest article I’ve seen criticizing the war anywhere- it’s striking that it’s coming from the mainstream- in which he recalls President Roosevelt’s statement after Pearl Harbor describing it as a date that “shall live in infamy.” And he said Roosevelt was correct, now it is we Americans who live in infamy now that we are following the policy of imperial Japan claiming self-defense just as the Japanese did. Nobody took that seriously, and nobody takes this seriously. And that’s accurate, I think, it just is the right of outright aggression.
Tariq Ali: And the notion that these countries pose a threat to the United States is of course a complete and utter joke. No one believes it. No one. Not even those who say it in the United States. It’s a pre-text to make war. And the fact that they’ve introduced in the National Strategy doctrine, the new Bush doctrine, is nothing to do with the threat coming from states which have been weakened over the years. The National Strategy doctrine basically poses a single question. In the post-Cold War phase, what is the United States going to do to preserve and maintain its economic hegemony and strength in the world? And a subsidiary question is automatically posed: will it use force to do so? And the National Strategy doctrine answers yes. So it’s a very blunt and frank document. It says we will fight to preserve our place in the world and we will use military force if we have to. This has got nothing to do with strikes by other states or anything remotely resembling that. This is an assertion of raw military power.
SECTION: Terrorism
I don’t think it’s necessarily a new idea. I think the idea goes back quite a ways. I mean, if you look in Grotious, who is the father of international law, you’ll find something about this concept of pre-empting an attack or a danger or a threat. It’s mentioned I believe only three times within this document that you name, but it’s an important part of it in the twenty-first century in a way it wasn’t in any past century for a very simple reason. We now have the very very real and chilling possibility that terrorists can and will get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. It may be very difficult to prevent that from happening.
Rahul Mahajan: The one thing that’s really glaring in the document is that early on it says basically that we are right now living at the mercy of stateless multi-national terrorist networks which are immune to the kind of deterrent that you would normally apply to a state and that basically work on almost any state confronted with the overwhelming might of US power- it says this. And then in the entire rest of the document it says nothing about how to address that fact. There’s a huge non sequitor going from that to the claim that we must engage in so-called pre-emptive- though a better word would be preventive war- against states, rogue states like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. A tremendous leap where there is absolutely nothing to fill in that huge gap.
Phil Donahue: I think we have to begin by saying that we cannot win the war on terrorism. We have an administration that truly believes that somewhere in the near future, we’re going to track down the last terrorist, in the last hiding place on Earth, and we’re gonna go, “bang,” put the gun the holster and say, “Boy I’m glad that’s over.” Won’t happen. There will be no parades down Fifth Avenue. No ticker tape. No generals waving to the crowd. No sailors, soldiers, and marines getting off airplanes and ships and kissing their loved ones till their hats fall off as it happened in World War II, when I was a child, a time I will never forget.
We have to somehow help people to understand that you can’t win the war on terrorism. If you say we’re going to win the war on terrorism you’re deluding yourself, and you’re deluding everybody who hears the message. What we have to do- and this is not what everybody wants to hear- is create an environment in which this type of behavior is less likely to occur.
Maria Ryan: And so I think people have to ask themselves whether there will be less terrorism as a result of the NSS or whether there’ll actually be more. And does this strategy of military dominance actually invite the kind of competition that it’s designed to prevent? Does the use of unilateral military power actually cause fear and resentment which makes it more likely that other countries might rearm in response to the United States? And perhaps most crucially, what does the exercise of unilateral military power do to ameliorate the intense dislike of the US government in the Middle East?
SECTION: Consequences
Noam Chomsky: Just commenting on that paragraph… it’s worth making clear that no one who writes the document believes a word of it. If they believed that the US would help any nation combating terror, they’ll act very differently from the way they act.
I tend to agree with the most conservative mainstream critics and the intelligence agencies that the likely consequence is an increase in threats- to the world, to the United States, an increase in proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and increase of terror, partially for revenge, partially just for deterrence. Again, the logic is straight forward. You announce to people that you’re going to attack them whenever you feel like it, and you have overwhelming force at your command, and you have an intellectual class which is capable doctrines of the sort you just quoted, and everybody knows that, what do you do?
You don’t react by saying, “Gee, thanks.” They do something. They can’t confront the United States in military force. It’s impossible. The US spends about as much as the world combined by now and is way more advanced technologically. So they turn to other means that are available to them. And there are other means. Weapons of mass destruction are available to the weak. Terror is available to the weak. Sooner or later they’re going to be combined, with horrendous consequences. It’s been known long before 9 11 that this was a very realistic possibility.
Other powers react. Russia has increased its military spending by, I forget the numbers, I think by about a third in the last year or something like that. And that means offensive weapondry, missiles, submarines for nuclear weapons and so on and so forth. They’re also moving their offensive forces onto automated launch on warning strategies, which is a tremendous danger to the world because of their deteriorating command and control systems. China’s going to react undoubtedly. If China builds up its military capacity, India will try to match it. Pakistan will do something to try to match it. And you’re kind of off and running at this point.
Chalmers Johnson: Without question, these doctrines have produced more nuclear proliferation than anything in the past. The world is recognizing what was wrong with Saddam Hussein is not that he had weapons of mass destruction, it was that he didn’t have them. Therefore, he was a sitting duck for the Americans. The North Koreans have certainly learned that lesson. If you’re going to resist the American imperial juggernaut, you definitely need nuclear weapons.
Phyllis Bennis: Because we don’t invade nuclear powers. We only invade those that don’t have nuclear weapons on the grounds that we think someday they might or someday they might want to or someday they might bring back a scientist who once knew how. And therefore it’s Ok to go to war.
Rahul Mahajan: To proclaim this right is basically to proclaim the right of the strong nations to invade the weak and nothing more. And it must be seen that way.
Maria Ryan: I think the US government has made its so-called grand imperial strategy quite clear by now, and really the only question left is whether the US population will be scared enough and manipulated enough to allow them to carry it out.
Phil Donahue: We’ve spent now, for the past several years over three hundred billion dollars, each year. About three hundred and fifty billion dollars a year, for the greatest, largest, most powerful array of things that go boom in the history of civilization. And we’re still scared. We give ourselves now permission to attack another country not for what they have done, but for what we think they’re going to do. If we’re going to allow ourselves to be this frightened… there goes the whole neighborhood. Then we truly are back to a Wild West frontier kind of civilization where you shoot first and ask questions later. Very unbecoming behavior on the part of the greatest experiment in democracy in the history of civilization I speak of the United States of America and this fabulous constitution.
[Trinity College Interlude]
Rt Hon Bill Rammell: The real issue that we confront is that we live in a world today where the United States of America is the only global economic or military superpower. And that’s the reality of the situation. Some might wish it were different, but that’s the issue that we’re facing. And faced with that, I believe we have a fundamental choice. We can oppose everything that America does, stand on the sideline in the full knowledge that they could act on their own, and in the process we’ll feel quite good about ourselves, or we can actually engage with America. We can work with them where they’re manifestly right and at the same time we can constructively criticize where they’re wrong and seek to take them down the path of multilateralism.
SECTION: Opposition
“People are asking the question today, ‘Why, if we are the leader of the civilized world, why aren’t we acting in cooperation with them? Why are we becoming the dictator, the tyrant of today rather than being the peacemaker, being the one to build consensus, because America hold all of the cards?’ So I’m saying pre-emption under certain circumstances. If the world community had gathered and said, ‘Man, they’re really cooking some bad stuff in Taiwan. And they’re shooting missiles off while the Secretary of State is there and we have to take some action because they’re provoking’, then I would say that’s justifiable. But when you’re in a situation where it’s status quo. Iraq has already been bombed into the Stone Age, that’s what one of the generals said, over the last ten years. So how can you go in there and pre-empt something that you’ve been spending the last ten years to pre-empt. So what I’m saying is that that means they’re pre-empting something else. The real pre-emptive war they’re having is against the American people. Pre-empting our ability to have jobs, to have housing, to develop our nation to become a model for the rest of the world of diversity, peace and cooperation. That’s the real pre-emption, and unfortunately, we’re losing that war.”
Maria Ryan: There’s really been quite an unprecedented reaction to the Bush doctrine, especially when you consider that the major day for the anti-war demonstrations actually occurred a month before the war started, so that was the fifteenth of February, 2003. There were protests on every continent. For example, in London we had about one and a half million people. Two million people in Madrid. Two million in Rome. Half a million in Berlin. Another half million in New York. And I think the really significant thing about those demonstrations was that most of the people who went to them were people who would never normally go to a demonstration. But there was a unifying sense that the Bush Administration and its allies are making the world a more dangerous place by engaging in this kind of aggression. And I certainly felt that there was a sense that we need to find other ways to solve our problems. And that might mean being a lot more creative and it might be a lot more difficult than just dropping bombs on a country, but it will certainly make us a lot safer in the long term.
Seth Leibsohn: As distinct from the protests of the 60s which I think is really interesting here, there protestors- I’m not afraid to say- hate America. Martin Luther King led a huge protest movement and it changed laws and it made this country better. All of that is irrelevant for this discussion. What’s interesting to me is that he did it on the principles of America he did it by quoting the declaration of independence. He did it in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He said this is how we were founded as a country; we need to live up to our ideals. The protestors of today are saying something quite a bit different, whether they be in America or elsewhere. They are saying we have no ideals. We have no principles. Or if we do they are bad ones. They’ve also been teaching, frankly, that our founding documents were a lie. That our founding documents were evil. And that we are so divorced from the notion of good that we can’t do any good.
Phil Donahue: We’ve got to be more aggressive in returning the insult to those who suggest that if we protest the war, we don’t support our troops. That is a lie, and it is the single most effective method of marginalizing those who would dissent. Imagine, because we protest the war, we don’t care about our troops. That is a lie on its face. Profoundly conservative Republicans don’t believe that about us. Why do they allow their colleagues to say that? What you don’t respect if you keep your mouth shut when you feel that what’s happening is wrong. What you don’t respect is the sacrifices of those who died to support this freedom to protest.
“D.C. on your feet. The drums of war we must defeat. US out of Iraq. US out of Iraq…”
Cliff May: You can’t expect to be universally liked and certainly not loved. And there’s going to be anger over some of your policies, and there’s going to be disagreement. And I’m afraid you kind of have to expect that. I don’t think after 9 11, the main goal in our foreign policy ought to be to win a popularity contest. I think the main goal ought to be to keep our men, women, and children safe from being incinerated as they go about their business, and buried alive in their offices. I don’t want to do that, I hope we won’t do that in a way that unnecessarily offends anybody, but if people take offence to that we can’t help it.
People say there was such sympathy after September 11th. Maybe there was sympathy but I don’t think there was support. I think there was also some shadenfreuder. In other words, people saying, “Well, better you than me.” And I think you see that particularly in Europe. I’m very nervous that the heart of for example French policy today is to say, you know what, this is a terrible war on terrorism that America’s fighting and I guess Israel’s fighting and India’s fighting and the Philippines are fighting. There’s no reason it has to come to Paris. And as long as we’re not on America’s side, we’re not seen as their ally, it’s not coming here. And so they’re going to be neutrals. Or maybe even less than neutrals in this war. They’re going to do what they can to appease and placate the terrorists so the terrorists stay out of Europe and just fight with us. So, I would love to go to Provance and know that I’m the most popular person there, but if I have to give that up in order to be safe and have my kids safe, I’m willing to.
Rahul Mahajan: There is no single force that can really put itself in opposition to the United States and get very far. It is very much a matter of what I believe Ian Williams said, of tying down Gulliver with hundreds or thousands of Lilliputian strings. After the February 15th demonstration, the New York Times, even, was so affected by them that it went so far as to say that there are now two superpowers in the world: the United States and world public opinion.
[Trinity College Interlude]
Colm Green: Be very weary of neoconservatives. Be very weary of people who think that the world is quite as simple as they think it is, ladies and gentlemen. The entire basis of the neoconservative agenda is that if we treat people like Americans they’ll try and treat us like Americans, ladies and gentlemen. It’s the philosophy of Henry Higgins. They’re paraphrasing Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady when they say why can’t a woman be more like a man, ladies and gentlemen. They’re trying to treat people so simply that they’re doomed to failure. They’re doomed to trouble. And the trouble is going to come down upon us as much as it’s going to come down upon them, ladies and gentlemen. Be afraid.
SECTION: National Security
Rahul Mahajan: Any national security strategy that was a national security strategy would start by saying that we have to massively shift our spending priorities. Even if we want to spend this gigantic amount of money on the military, let us start spending it on something that could at least have something to do with defending us from the kinds of attacks we’re likely to see. Any serious attempt to deal with the question of Islamic terrorism itself, international Islamic terrorism would have started by saying what are the things that feed this terrorism, what are the things that cause people either to join these groups or to support them in some generalized way. Any kind of national security strategy has to start with trying to understand what are the roots of that and what can be done about that. And it doesn’t take a genius. And it doesn’t take any involved analysis to figure out. The primarily, first and foremost grievance in the hearts and minds of those in the Arab world is without a question Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Probably one of the main grievances of the late 90s and early 2000s was the sanctions on Iraq. Now a grievance is the occupation of Iraq. So any current national security strategy would say that we need to get the hell out of Iraq because we’re creating massive resentment of us there. What we’re doing is making Iraq into Palestine except it has ten times the population and therefore ten times the potential problem for all of us. So a national security strategy would say let us stop being a superpower and making us a target by our oppression and domination of other countries and instead foster the idea that we are simply one country among many in an international world order built on at least some kind of harmony. Now, all of these are things that are obvious, which anyone serious about national security would have immediately started talking about after 9 11, and which sadly you heard almost no discussion of in any of the mainstream media, and you never heard a word about from any kind of government official in the context of national security, and that is a real tragedy.
Mark Lance: There’s sort of two ways which this is profoundly important for the average American- well, three really. The first is the obvious moral dimension. I mean, any human being that cares about other people is going to care about the fact that there are people out there saying they have the right to destroy whole societies, kill hundreds of thousands of people on their say so, a say so which in the case of the Iraq war has been shown now to have been utter nonsense. It was fairly clear before the way, but it’s quite clear that the justifications given were outright falsehoods and huge numbers of people died and a society was destroyed. The second is straightforwardly financial. These wars are costing hundreds of billions of dollars. We’re talking now about a new appropriation of $ 87 billion for the next year, while school districts around the country, colleges are being cut. Social services are being cut. In DC they just closed the only public hospital because they didn’t have funds for it. Third, it makes our lives more dangerous. We don’t make ourselves safer…. I mean, there was no conventional military threat anywhere from anyone in the world. There’s no conventional threat to the United States. This is perfectly obvious. What there is, is a threat that people who are so desperate they’re willing to die themselves to kill a few American- what is standardly labeled as terrorism- that’s a real threat, and that’s of course a threat that’s made vastly greater by the destruction of whole societies and by the creation of more and more people who have nothing to live for except revenge.
[QUESTION: Do you think this is something that the US as a whole should be shrugging off and not paying attention to?]
Noam Chomsky: Depends on how you want to be perceived in the world. If you want to be perceived as the citizens of a mafia don who’ll use force to crush anything in its path, you should shrug it off. If you think of yourself in a different way, as part of a civilized society that should be respected and admired by others then you won’t shrug it off, you’ll be very upset about it. I don’t think the Administration cares. I think they’re happy to be perceived as mafia dons. They don’t want to be loved, they want to be feared. But the American citizens might have a different picture of the kind of country they want to live in.
Michael Klare: As an assessment of the world that we live in today, it’s a complete disaster. I think anyone who looks openly, with open eyes, at the world we face would see a world with many many serious problems: environmental problems, economic problems, human rights problems, epidemiological problems. This is what affect the lives of most people in the world, and increasingly are going to affect the American people. What I find so offensive about the National Security Strategy is its complete failure to look at the world as it is, and instead to fixate. There’s fixation certain threats: the rogue states, al Qaeda, and some other terrorist organizations. Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t threats out there from terrorists and states pursuing weapons of mass destruction. They are threats. But they’re part of a spectrum of dangers that we face that’s much bigger than them, and I think that’s what’s so tragic about this.
Phil Donahue: We must never, ever let this happen again. This is Shakespearean. I obviously can’t prove this, but I think it’s a tragedy for those who died. I’m afraid we’re coming to a place where we’re going to look up and we’re going to say, “Why? This happened not that long ago, in another part of the world.” As the song says, “Where have all the flowers gone?” When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
SCREEN TEXT: January 2003, 41 Nobel Laureates signed a declaration opposing preventive war. The statement read in part: “even with a victory, we believe that the medial, economic, environmental, moral, spiritual, political and legal consequences of an American preventive attack on Iraq would undermine, not protect, US security and standing in the world.”
According to the Financial Times, when US forces who ousted Saddam Hussein failed to discover weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration suggested a refinement in the concept of preventive war outlined in the National Security Strategy. The revision suggests instead that “the administration will act against a hostile regime that has nothing more than the intent and ability to develop [WMD].”
2004 has been marked by world-wide questioning of the National Security Strategy in light of the war in Iraq. Press reports have noted that a preventive strategy, aside from the legal ambiguities, must rest on reliable intelligence about the capabilities of other nations, intelligence that was missing from the case against Iraq. Whether remaining questions will resonate into the debate over the next application of the National Security Strategy, or similar reincarnations, remains to be seen.