Bush "Preventive War" Doctrine a Glaring Failure In Middle East

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/8021

Bush "Preventive War" Doctrine a Glaring Failure In Middle East
by Sherwood Ross | Jun 10 2007

Comics have said everything George Bush knows about foreign policy he learned at the International House of Pancakes. That's not quite true. Somewhere, he internalized the motto of heavyweight boxer Tony Galento: "T'row foist!" Just as Galento took an awful drubbing from heavyweight champ Joe Louis, Mr. Bush clings dazedly to the ropes in Iraq. His "surge," is only intensifying the slaughter. And his latest stumbling response has been to anoint a new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to replace General Peter Pace, who reportedly opposed the idea of using nuclear weapons against Iran. Recall preventive war is the heart of the "Bush Doctrine." It was Mr. Bush, after all, who told the world he reserved for America "the prerogative of striking first"--- just like Tony Galento.

That Doctrine, writes international relations expert Andrew J. Bacevich in "The New American Militarism,"(Oxford)"represents the clearest articulation to date" of the preventive war philosophy. Bacevich, a graduate of West Point and Viet Nam veteran, notes preventive war is designed "not to warn or wound. It is to kill quickly and efficiently" and "The only acceptable standard of performance is a first-round knockout." By that reckoning, the Iraq war is an epic failure. The U.S. military machine, which defeated Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard in a major tank battle in the Gulf War, has ground to a halt in the streets of Baghdad much as Hitler's panzers, designed for lightning war on the prairies of Europe, were immobilized in the rubble of Stalingrad.

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Congress has "failed egregiously," Bacevich writes, to assume its responsibility of deciding whether or when the nation should intervene abroad, hiding behind the skirts of such phrases as "support our commander-in-chief" and "support the troops."

Bacevich calls on the U.S. to view the use of force only as a last resort, and to renounce the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, which arrogates to the U.S. "prerogatives allowed to no other nation∑and in the long run can only make Americans less secure." He calls on the U.S. to draw down its overseas garrisons and to begin treating "U.S. allies as partners rather than vassals."

The author recalls America's first president, George Washington, warned against "those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."

If the U.S. continues to exercise its military dominance upon the world, it will share the fate "of all those who in ages past have looked to war and military power to fulfill their destiny," Bacevich warns. "We will rob future generations of their rightful inheritance. We will wreak havoc abroad. We will endanger our security at home. We will risk the forfeiture of all that we prize." Anybody in Congress listening?

[Rydz777]

1. Another tragedy: last month Bacevich's son died fighting in Iraq.

Bacevich has been right from the beginning, but Bush has been blind to anything except his own delusions. It is a terrible fact that Bacevich's son (along with 3,500 others) has been sacrificed to this disaster.

[babylonsister]

2. I remembered when I saw his name; he must feel so bitter. I do, and

I've never experienced a loss as great.