Drunkards know no limits. They drink until they drop. Those drunk on power, like the current Bush administration, delude themselves into believing they do not have to observe any limits.
Drunkards beware: the transition from swaggering to staggering can be unexpectedly swift.
As destruction segues into reconstruction in Iraq, the Bush administration is claiming victory — not simply for the battle plan — but for the entire Bush doctrine. Having toppled the first domino, top U.S. officials have now announced that Syria, the alleged owner of chemical weapons, may well be next. “Draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq,” Undersecretary of State John Bolton counsels countries that challenge Washington’s definition of good and evil.
Toppling tyrants in the Middle East is only part of the new doctrine. The Bush administration interred the Cold War era’s Containment Policy in the mountains of Afghanistan and the sands of Iraq. In its place is a doctrine of unilateral U.S. power, which the Bush team formulated before squeaking into office. It only became politically feasible after September 11.
By implementing this new doctrine, the Bush administration cut America loose from its moorings in the international system. Intoxicated by our military, economic and political preeminence, President Bush and his top advisers are remaking the world in what they see as the image of America. They are targeting adversaries, ignoring allies, ripping up international treaties, and leave the world looking at a country so arrogant that it believes itself above criticism.
In sum, we are now seen as a country on a power trip.
The costs of this power trip are enormous. They are measured in loss of life, destruction of property, and desecration of the environment. They are also measured in dollars. The United States will spend at least $75 billion on the war in Iraq—on top of $20 billion for the war in Afghanistan—and untold billions on the war against terrorism. The defense budget has ballooned to more than $400 billion.
The Clinton’s legacy of a budget surplus is gone. The legacies of Johnson and Roosevelt are next on the chopping block: the social welfare system that extends benefits to the poor and middle class alike. The war on terrorism, coupled with the current mania in Washington for tax cuts for the wealthy, is a war on education, health care and other public goods.
Other costs are harder to quantify. George W. Bush has savaged the transatlantic alliance. The United Nations suffered a blow to its credibility much as the League of Nations did after Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia. Even the World Trade Organization expressed its disgust at U.S. trade violations and Washington’s recent veto of an agreement to expand developing countries’ access to life-saving medicines.
A world deeply in sympathy with America after September 11 has turned away with revulsion from the Bush administration’s hubris. Anti-Americanism is enjoying a revival everywhere, perhaps most especially in the developing world. But they do not like us much on the streets of Paris or Tokyo, either. And in “liberated” Iraq, demonstrators have begun to shout “No to America.”
Also, there are future costs. Fearful of a preemptive strike, countries like North Korea will pursue nuclear deterrent capability by building arsenals of their own and will neither trust the U.S. commitment to inspection regimes, or their efforts to claim that nuclear weapons are of no real value in the world. Far worse, India now has justification if it chooses to launch a preventive war—nuclear or non-nuclear—against Pakistan, claiming U.S. actions in Iraq as precedent.
By ignoring international law, and by initiating new nuclear weapon tests, the Bush administration promotes general lawlessness and encourages lateral nuclear proliferation when all our arms control treaties and agreements are designed to prevent vertical or lateral nuclear proliferation.
The current administration in Washington is not conservative. The Bush team does not conserve treaties, institutions, alliances, or resources. A conservative policy recognizes limits—the limits of law, tradition, economy, the environment, and indeed, the limits of power itself. Rather, in its mendacity, impulsiveness, and refusal to acknowledge any constraints on its actions, this administration is making the United States a libertine, a global sociopath in the eyes of the world, and most especially some of our oldest and staunchest allies.
Informal safety nets often save drunkards: the bartender who stops pouring and the friends who take away our car keys. The power-drunk Bush administration is systematically removing such mechanisms. It repudiates the global safety net of international law and unravels the domestic safety nets that protect citizens from economic downturns.
When we cease swaggering with triumphalism—swelled with pride over military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, and boasting of new types of nuclear weapons—and instead begin staggering from all the costs of our power trip, we will find too late that nothing can cushion our fall.
Global Beat Syndicate, June 23, 2003