Iraq War critics: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and the doctrine of preventive war

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is a good person for me to quote here, not least because he first became famous with his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1945 book on Andrew Jackson, called The Age of Jackson. It not only provides a vivid picture of Old Hickory. It's also written in the language of militant democracy that was common in the World War II era, when that sort of talk from our leaders wasn't just a cynical justification for war.

Schlesinger in a recent essay analyzes the Bush Doctrine of preventive war:

What is the status of the Bush Doctrine today? Practically speaking, it has been sorely damaged by Mr. Bush's shrunken credibility. The entire case for preventive war rests on the assumption that we have accurate and reliable intelligence about the enemy's intentions and military capacity - accurate and reliable enough to send our young men and women to kill and die.

That is one of several reasons the dispute over Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" isn't going away. If the Bush Doctrine of preventive war is ever going to be a practical policy, it would have to have intelligence of a quality far beyond what was produced prior to the Iraq War.

The Bush administration ... had "not one doubt" about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Nor did it have any doubt about his partnership with Osama bin Laden, or about his capacity to quickly build a nuclear bomb, or about the joyous welcome as liberators that would be given our GIs. The collapse of such confident predictions suggests that the Bush Doctrine imposes a burden too heavy for our intelligence agencies to bear. For we can't ever know all the things we ought to know before going to war. The administration's credibility gap in Iraq may well undermine the preventive war policy. [my emphasis]

Schlesinger suggests that Bush's religious zeal is a political posture. He sees Bush as a Nixonian figure, creatively devious and "skillful at mobilizing opinion and brushing aside opposition." I worry that Schlesinger is being too optimistic. I'm inclined to think Bush holds to dogmatic religious beliefs that reinforce his rigidity, arrogance and self-righteousness. I hope Schlesinger's view is more correct than mine. A genuine religious zealot (who's not dysfunctionally weird like John Ashcroft) can be more dangerous than a cynical pragmatist.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, iraq war, laws of war, prventive war