The fallacy of the Bush Doctrine
The political pronouncements of U.S. President George W. Bush following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center have collectively come to be known as “The Bush Doctrine”. These foreign policy principles were anchored on the declaration that the United States of America had the right to treat “hostile” nations, particularly those suspected of “harboring or giving aid” to terrorist groups as terrorists. The “doctrine” also encompasses the notion of preventive war which stipulates that the United States has the right to depose or remove foreign governments that were perceived as threats to the national security of the country. A further explanation from the text of the National Security Strategy of the United States (2002) and the president posits that the U.S. would adopt a policy of “supporting democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny” globally as part of the Global War On Terror, and overt unilateralism which the President described as “pre-emptive, unilateral military force when and where it (the U.S) chooses”.
This faulty principle seems to assume from the onset that the stability of the world and the security of every nation depends on the United States engaging in pre-emptive global policing aimed at deterring or managing crisis and conflict wherever they may occur. There is also a shallow reasoning that “our” brand of democracy is a panacea for all the weak government and collapsed or collapsing regimes around the world, especially in the Middle East. As events have shown, the emptiness and reactionary nature of this “doctrine” has been thoroughly exposed. As a matter of fact, the Bush Doctrine may have emboldened some of the world’s worst tyrants to tighten their stranglehold on their already oppressed, marginalized and poverty-stricken citizenry through the introduction of draconian laws and policies aimed at “fighting the global war on terror”. By this one stroke of genius, the Bush administration doomed the fates of freedom seekers and dissidents in the most repressive of regimes around the globe. Empty rhetoric like “When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you” saw the likes of Ayman Nour of Egypt, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, Fathi el-Jahmi of Libya and a host of others moved to the lowest basement of jail houses in their respective countries. In the same vein, the United States government has propped up these despotic regimes with billions of dollars in “aid and grants”.
It is this same lack of originality that sees millions of people in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America absorbing the blows from brutal regimes, while the “world’s only superpower” churns out tomes upon tomes of resolutions threatening sanctions which they know will have absolutely no effect on these leaders who have business interests across the globe, billions of dollars in foreign unnamed bank accounts, and do not buy their meat or milk from the village square.
The lack of originality stems from the fact that the formulators of the Bush Doctrine failed to acknowledge that there are so-called non-traditional threats in the global arena in the form of hunger, lack of access to adequate health care, environmental challenges, social pressures in local entities, which causes some in the regions affected to resort to extra-legal means of expressing their frustrations.