COMMENTARY has posted an advance copy of Norman Podhoretz’s article from its forthcoming September issue: Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?
I must confess to being puzzled by the amazing spread of the idea that the Bush Doctrine has indeed failed the test of Iraq. After all, Iraq has been liberated from one of the worst tyrants in the Middle East; three elections have been held; a decent constitution has been written; a government is in place; and previously unimaginable liberties are being enjoyed. By what bizarre calculus does all this add up to failure? And by what even stranger logic is failure to be read into the fact that the forces opposed to democratization are fighting back with all their might?
Surely what makes more sense is the opposite interpretation of the terrible violence being perpetrated by the terrorists of the so-called “insurgency”: that it is in itself a tribute to the enormous strides that have been made in democratizing the country. If this murderous collection of diehard Sunni Baathists and vengeful Shiite militias, together with their allies inside the government, agreed that democratization had already failed, would they be waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it? And if democratization in Iraq posed no threat to the other despotisms in the region, would those regimes be sending jihadists and material support to the “insurgency” there?
Only yesterday we saw [Iraqi] aspirations [for democracy] vividly expressed in the flocking of millions of Iraqis to the polls, and all the world marveled at the sight. Now, because the enemies of these aspirations within Iraq and their foreign supporters are mounting a last-ditch campaign to blow them to smithereens, we are being told that it is useless to go on giving our support to what is clearly a lost cause. Shades of how George W. Bush’s father treated the Shiites whom he had encouraged to rise up against Saddam Hussein at the tail end of the first Gulf War, only to sit by as many thousands of them were slaughtered by this merciless despot who had been left in power by the “realism” of American policy.
Iraq is a battleground in what Podhoretz has previously termed World War IV. His article makes it clear that Bush views the war against Israel as another one, and not just an Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Podhoretz credits Bush with refusing, against enormous pressure, to support an early ceasefire in Lebanon, and he believes “Bush was tacitly encouraging the Israelis to use the additional time he was buying them to be more, not less, aggressive in the fight against Hizballah” — and that the administration would continue to give Israel time as long as it trusted in Israel’s ability to win the battle.
The article was completed on August 7, 2006 — four days before UN Resolution 1701 was adopted. A footnote in the article comments that as of August 7 a draft resolution was being considered that "could create serious problems for Israel in the long run."
Obviously worth reading in its entirety.