In public statements, President George W. Bush has often avowed his
personal religious faith, and from the very beginning of his
administration, he has sought to draw churches and other religious
organizations into the orbit of the government’s provision of goods
and services—thus, the so-called faith-based initiatives. Bush insists
that such religious providers have an excellent record in helping drug
addicts and others who have gone astray to get their lives back on
track. Although the president has yet to announce formally that his
foreign policy also relies heavily on faith, this reality has become
increasingly clear as his term in office has unfolded.
When the administration released its “National
Security Strategy of the United States of America” to Congress
last summer, the grandiosity of the intentions expressed in the document
stunned many observers—as commentator Joseph Stromberg noted, “it
must be read to be believed.” The strategy amounts to an enormously
presumptuous agenda for domination of the entire world, not only
overweening in the vast scope of the specific ambitions enumerated but
also brazen in the implicit assumption that the president of the United
States and his lieutenants are morally entitled to run the planet. It
takes a lot of faith in one’s own rectitude to declare, among other
things, that “our best defense is a good offense” (I am not making
this up, it’s in the document). Small wonder that George Bush closes
his introduction to the document by resorting to religious metaphor,
referring to his foreign policy as “this great mission.”
Well might we recall, however, that the crusaders of old went forth on
their faith-inspired missions heavily armed and itching for a fight, and
in those respects the Bush administration bears a startling resemblance
to them. “As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will
act against . . . emerging threats before they are fully formed,” the
president declares. In disturbingly Orwellian rhetoric, he affirms that
“the only path to peace and security is the path of action”—the
path, that is, of launching unprovoked military attacks on other
countries. This ongoing preemption, supported by the administration’s
faith that it can identify the threats correctly even before they
blossom, will be, the president warns, “a global enterprise of
uncertain duration.” We may presume that once Eurasia has been
preemptively polished off, the United States will set its military
sights on Eastasia.
The adminstration’s faith in preemptive warfare currently expresses
itself in the plan for military conquest of Iraq, a country that has not
threatened the United States and does not possess the means to do so
effectively in any event (in part because the United States has been
waging low-level warfare and enforcing an economic embargo against it
for some twelve years). The Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Perle coterie
evidently has faith that the United States can conquer Iraq quickly and
then turn it into a showcase of stable, flourishing democracy. The sheer
preposterousness of this expectation suggests that it is fueled more by
quasi-religious zealotry than by logic and evidence. Whatever else Iraq
may be, it certainly is not a democratic success story waiting to be
told by American crusaders. Indeed, given the violent ethnic, religious,
and political conflicts that ravage this unfortunate country, it may not
be viable under any form of government except dictatorship—nothing in
its history suggests otherwise.
Nonetheless, President Bush, after having insisted not so long ago that
he opposed getting our country bogged down in utopian “nation
building,” now has unleashed the neoconservative fanatics to transform
the Middle East into a fantastical form they find pleasing, molding Iraq
itself into something remarkably like the placid social democracies of
North America and Western Europe. If you suspect that the Iraqis lack
the necessary parts to compose this visionary contraption, well, you
just need to have faith. As St. Paul wrote to the Hebrews (11:1),
“faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things
not seen”—a characterization that fits perfectly the
administration's vertiginous conception of the post-conquest
reconstruction of Iraq.
Finally, the Bush administration has faith that it can continue to drag
the American people down the path of perpetual war for perpetual peace
and endless nation-building. Maybe it can: for the most part, the people
certainly have rolled over and played patsy so far, especially if we
judge by the actions of their pusillanimous representatives in Congress,
who hastened to pass a resolution unconstitutionally delegating to the
president their power to declare war against Iraq.
In the past, however, the American public has risen up from time to time
to insist with regard to some disastrous foreign adventure that enough
is enough. They eventually did so during the Korean War, and they did so
again during the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, in both instances the
public came to its senses only after enormous loss of life and other
human and material devastation had been sustained. More recently, with
respect to the U.S. military mission to Somalia, the public quickly
decided against spilling additional blood in a seemingly hopeless
nation-building effort.
I would like to believe that sooner or later the American people will
resist, and resist strongly, the Bush administration’s crusade for
global domination in general and its present plan to conquer and
reconstruct Iraq in particular. As matters now stand, though, I just
don’t have much faith in the majority of my fellow citizens.
*
Robert
Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at
The
Independent Institute and editor of its scholarly quarterly journal,
The Independent
Review. He is also the author of
Crisis
and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
and the editor of
Arms,
Politics and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.
For further articles and studies, see the
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on Terrorism.
