CIAO DATE: 11/03

Onward, Liberal Soldiers? The Crusading Logic of Bush's Grand Strategy and What Is Wrong with It

Edward Rhodes

2002

Center for Global Security and Democracy
Rutgers University

 

Abstract

As pressures mount to strike before summer weather forecloses military options for the year, the debate whether the United States should undertake a preventive war against Iraq moves inexorably toward the center of the American political stage, despite the understandable reluctance of many Americans to think about the difficult trade-offs and troubling questions such a war would raise. Proponents of the war focus on the dangers of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. Opponents focus on the morality, military risks, and international political costs of undertaking a preventive war, on the possibilities of containing Saddam Hussein's influence and deterring his use of weapons of mass destruction without resort to war, and on the difficulties of building stable political institutions in the region after a victory.

Strangely absent, however, has been any serious discussion of the overarching American foreign policy vision and the American grand strategy that provide the intellectual justification not only for this particular war but for America's politically and militarily assertive, and increasingly aggressive, engagement with nations around the globe. As a consequence, the debate over whether to launch a preventive war against Iraq has proceeded in a curious intellectual vacuum. The cases for and against war have been made in terms of the specifics of the Iraqi situation -- whether, or under what circumstances, Saddam Hussein might use weapons of mass destruction; whether a democratic alternative to Saddam Hussein exists; whether the Iraqi people would welcome an American invasion; and whether military action in the region would create an anti-American backlash or would destabilize the region's conservative and pro- American regimes. Missing from the discussion has been a consideration of the longterm goals of American foreign policy and of the nation's grand strategy for achieving these goals -- that is, of the world America seeks to create and how best to create it. It as if the proprietors of the Titanic were discussing techniques for dealing with icebergs without considering the question of where the Titanic was going and whether it was wise or necessary to enter iceberg-filled waters at all.

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