by Andrew J. Bacevich

In his widely praised appearance before a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, George W. Bush put to rest any lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his presidency.After months during which it had constituted a battle cry of sorts, “ Florida ” reverted to being merely a state.

Speaking with confidence, conviction, and surprising eloquence, Bush reassured Americans that their commander-in-chief was up to the task at hand:they could count on him to see the nation through the crisis that had arrived nine days earlier with such awful and terrifying suddenness.To the extent that leadership contains elements of performance art, this particular performance was nothing short of masterful, delighting the president’s supporters and silencing, at least for a time, his critics.The moment had seemingly found the man.

Yet however much the atmospherics surrounding such an occasion matter—and they matter a great deal—the historian’s attention is necessarily drawn elsewhere.Long after passions have cooled and anxieties have eased, the words remain, retaining the potential to affect subsequent events in ways large or small.

What did the president actually say?What principles did he enunciate?From which sources did he (or his speechwriters) draw the phrases that he spoke and the aspirations or sentiments that they signified?What unstated assumptions lurked behind?Looking beyond the crisis of the moment, what does this particular rendering of America ’s relationship to the world beyond its borders portend for the future?

In this case, more than on most others, those questions may well matter.Not since the Cold War ended over a decade ago has an American statesman offered an explanation of foreign policy principles and priorities that enjoyed a half-life longer than a couple of news cycles.Bush’s father during his single term in office and Bill Clinton over the course of eight years issued countless pronouncements touching on this or that aspect of U. S. diplomacy or security policy.None achieved anything even remotely approaching immortality. (George H. W. Bush’s “This will not stand”—uttered in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990— might have come close. But given the unsatisfactory conclusion of the Persian Gulf War and its frustrating aftermath— with Bush’s nemesis evincing a Castro-like knack for diddling successive administrations —the rhetorical flourish that a decade ago sounded brave reads in retrospect like warmed-over Churchill). 

George W. Bush’s speech outlining his war on terrorism may prove to be the exception. It qualifies as the first foreign policy statement of the post-Cold War era with a chance of taking its place alongside Washington’s farewell, Monroe’s doctrine, Roosevelt’s corollary, and Wilson’s fourteen points among the sacred texts of American statecraft. Or perhaps a more apt comparison might be to another momentous speech before a joint session of Congress, delivered by Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947. 

A looming crisis in a part of the world that had only infrequently commanded U.S. attention prompted President Truman to appear before Congress. A faltering British Empire had just announced that it could no longer afford to support Greece, wracked by civil war and deemed acutely vulnerable to communist takeover. Britain’s withdrawal would leave a power vacuum in southeastern Europe and the Near East, with potentially disastrous strategic consequences. Filling that vacu- um, in Truman’s judgment, required immediate and decisive American action. 

In short, Truman came to the Capitol not to promulgate some grand manifesto but simply to persuade Congress that the United States should shoulder the burden that Britain had laid down by providing aid to shore up the beleaguered governments of Greece and of neighboring Turkey. But Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a recent convert from isolationism (and thus presumed to possess special insights into the isolationist psyche) had cautioned Truman that enlisting the support of skeptical and tightfisted legislators would require that the president first “scare hell out of the American people.” Truman took Vandenberg’s counsel to heart. 

Thus, the president described the challenges of the moment as nothing short of pivotal. History, he told the Congress and the nation, had reached a turning point, one in which “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.” Alas, in too many cases, the choice was not one that they were at liberty to make on their own. Militant minorities, “exploiting human want and misery,” and abetted by “aggressive movements” from abroad were attempting to foist upon such nations the yoke of totalitarianism. Left unchecked, externally supported subversion would lead to the proliferation of regimes relying upon “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms”—the very antithesis of all that America itself stood for. According to Truman, the United States alone could stem this tide. In what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, he declared that henceforth “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” 

Truman did not spell out detailed guidelines on where this general statement of intent might or might not apply. In the matter at hand, Congress responded positively to the president’s appeal, appropriating $400 million of economic and military assistance for Greece and Turkey. But things did not end there. Truman’s openended commitment to protect governments threatened by subversion continued to reverberate. His successors treated it as a mandate to intervene whenever and wherever they deemed particular U.S. interests to be at risk. America’s putative obligation to defend free peoples everywhere (some of them not very free) provided political and moral cover for actions overt and covert, wise and foolish, successful and unsuccessful, in virtually every quarter of the globe. Over the next four decades, in ways that Truman himself could never have anticipated, his eponymous doctrine remained the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. 

George W. Bush’s speech of September 20 bears similar earmarks and may well give birth to a comparable legacy. This is not because Bush any more than Truman consciously set out to create such a legacy. But in making his case for a war on terror, Bush articulated something that has eluded policymakers since the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the United States of a readily identifiable enemy: a coherent rationale for the wide-ranging use of American power on a global scale. Truman had placed the problems besetting Greece and Turkey in a broad strategic context. The threat to those two distant nations implied a threat to U.S. security and to the security of the world at large. On September 20, Bush advanced a similar argument. The events of September 11 may have targeted the United States, but they posed a common danger. The fight was not just America’s. “This is the world’s fight,” Bush said. “This is civilization’s fight.” 

Truman had depicted a planet in the process of dividing into two opposing camps—the free world against totalitarianism. Bush portrayed an analogous division —with “the civilized world” now pitted against a terrorist network intent on “remaking the world—and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.” Echoing Truman, Bush insisted that history had reached a turning point. Once again, as at the beginning of the Cold War, circumstances obliged nations to choose sides. “Either you are with us,” he warned, “or you are with the terrorists.” Neutrality was not an option. 

As in 1947 so too in 2001, the stakes were of the highest order. In the course of enunciating the doctrine that would bear his name, President Truman had alluded to freedom—free peoples, free institutions, liberty, and the like—eighteen separate times. President Bush’s presentation of September 2001 contained fourteen such allusions. According to Bush, the events of September 11 showed that “freedom itself is under attack.” 

Casting the U.S. response to that attack not simply in terms of justifiable selfdefense or retaliation for an act of mass murder but as necessary to preserve freedom itself imbued Bush’s speech with added salience. Although its meaning is both continually shifting and fiercely contested, freedom by common consent is the ultimate American value. In political rhetoric, it is the ultimate code word. 

Defining the war against terror as a war on behalf of freedom served the administration’s purposes in two important ways, both of them likely to have longer-term implications. First, it enabled President Bush to affirm the nation’s continuing innocence—not only in the sense that it is blameless for the events of September 11 but more broadly that its role in the world cannot be understood except as benign.[1] “Why do they hate us?” the president asked rhetorically. “They hate our freedoms,” he replied, “our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” In offering this litany of estimable values as the only conceivable explanation for “why they hate us,” Bush relieved himself (and his fellow citizens) of any obligation to reassess the global impact of U.S. power, political, economic, or cultural. That others —to include even our friends—view America’s actual influence abroad as varied, occasionally problematic, and at times simply wrongheaded is incontrovertible. The president’s insistence on describing the United States simply as a beacon of liberty revalidated a well-established national preference for discounting the perceptions of others. 

Second, sounding the theme of freedom enabled Bush to situate this first war of the twenty-first century in relation to the great crusades of the century just concluded. Alluding to the perpetrators of the September 11 attack, the president declared that “We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century .… [T]hey follow the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.” 

The president did not need to remind his listeners that the dangers posed by those murderous ideologies had legitimized the rise of the United States to great power status in the first place. It was the mobilization of American might against the likes of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union that had hastened the demise of the ideologies they represented. A new war on behalf of freedom and against evil provides renewed legitimacy to the exercise of American power both today and until the final elimination of evil is complete. 

Furthermore, engagement in such a war removes the fetters that have hobbled the United States in its use of power since the last ideological competitor fell into its grave. The most important of those constraints relates to the use of force. Since the end of the Cold War military power has emerged as never before as the preferred instrument of American statecraft. Military preeminence forms an integral component of U.S. grand strategy—an effort to create an open and integrated international order, conducive to the values of democratic capitalism, with the United States enjoying a position of undisputed We willfully ignore the fact that bin Laden’s actions (however contemptible) represent an expression of strongly held convictions (however warped): a determination by whatever means necessary to overturn the existing American imperium in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Thus do we sustain the pretense that America is not an empire. primacy. But absent an adversary on a par with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, policymakers during the 1990s found themselves unable to explain to the American people generally exactly why the United States needed to exert itself to remain the world’s only superpower—why the need to spend more on defense than the next eight or ten strongest military powers combined? With U.S. security seemingly more assured than at any time in recent memory, they found themselves similarly hard-pressed to translate military preeminence into useful policy outcomes in places far from the American homeland—why the need to intervene in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and elsewhere? 

The Clinton administration justified its penchant for military intervention by insisting that it acted to succor the afflicted, restore democracy, and prevent genocide. Yet in virtually every case the facts belied such claims. Moreover, even if the purest altruism were motivating Bill Clinton periodically to launch a few cruise missiles or send in the Marines, Americans weren’t buying it. Ordinary citizens evinced precious little willingness to support foreign-policy-as-social-work if such efforts entailed even a remote risk to U.S. troops. The hope of salvaging a multi-ethnic Bosnia might stir the hearts of journalists and intellectuals, but the cause was not one that the average American viewed as worth dying for. As a result, during the 1990s, the greatest military power in history found itself hamstrung by its own selfimposed shackles, above all, an obsession with casualty avoidance. The United States could actually employ its military only with advanced assurance that no American lives would be lost. The Kosovo conflict of 1999 epitomized the result: a so-called humanitarian war where U.S. pilots bombed Belgrade from 15,000 feet while Serb forces, largely unmolested, pursued their campaign of ethnic cleansing on the ground. 

The fact that these various experiments in peacemaking and peacekeeping almost inevitably resulted in semi-permanent deployments of questionable efficacy, trampling on expectations that armed intervention should produce prompt and clear-cut results, only accentuated popular discontent. Bald-faced lies by senior U.S. officials—remember the fraudulent prom- ises that the troops would be out of Bosnia within a year?—didn’t help much. 

Now President Bush’s declaration of war on terrorism offers a way out of that predicament, making it possible for policymakers to reclaim the freedom of action that the Truman Doctrine had provided in earlier decades. Under the terms of the Bush Doctrine, the constraints that hampered the U.S. in the 1990s need not apply. The calculations governing tolerable risk change considerably. The gloves can come off—not just in the campaign against Osama bin Laden, but against any other group or regime that this administration or any of its successors can plausibly tag with supporting terrorist activity. The Republican Party that had once codified the lessons of the Vietnam War in the Weinberger Doctrine has now chucked that doctrine overboard, telling Americans that they must expect war to be a protracted and ambiguous affair, a long twilight struggle with even the definition of victory uncertain.[2]

Furthermore, defining our adversary as “terrorism” itself makes it all the easier to avert our eyes from the accumulating evidence suggesting that it is the quasi-imperial role that the United States has asserted that incites resistance—and that it will continue to do so. In fact, as Daniel Pipes has correctly noted, terror is a tactic, not an enemy.[3] But by insisting that our present quarrel is with terrorism—rather than, for example, with radical Islam—the United States obscures the irreconcilable political differences underlying this conflict. We willfully ignore the fact that bin Laden’s actions (however contemptible) represent an expression of strongly held convictions (however warped): a determination by whatever means necessary to overturn the existing American imperium in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Thus do we sustain the pretense that America is not an empire. 

In the weeks immediately following the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, a rift about how best to proceed appeared at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Should the United States embark upon what the president in an unscripted moment referred to as an allout “crusade” against global terror? Or should it limit itself to identifying and eliminating the network that had actually perpetrated the September 11 attack? In the near term, the advocates of the narrow approach seemingly prevailed. When Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 7, 2001, the United States singled out bin Laden’s apparatus and the Taliban for destruction. Yet U.S. officials also hinted that the just launched offensive constituted only the first phase of a multi-part campaign—carefully refraining from specifying what phase two or phase three might entail. It turned out that the president had not rejected the idea of a crusade; he had merely deferred it while keeping all options open.[4]

Assuming that the first phase of Operation Enduring Freedom succeeds, the doctrine that President Bush enunciated on September 20 will provide a powerful argument for those eager to move onto the next phase. Finding a suitable candidate to play the roles of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban will present few difficulties: the State Department roster of terrorist organizations is a lengthy one; regimes suspected of supporting terror include Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, the Palestinian Authority, Sudan, Yemen, North Korea, perhaps even our new-found ally Pakistan, just for starters. 

To put it another way: Operation Enduring Freedom may be the first instance of the U.S. waging “war on terror.” But it is unlikely to be the last. The quest for Enduring Freedom points where the pursuit of absolutes always has in international relations: toward permanent war waged on behalf of permanent peace. The Bush Doctrine, like the Truman Doctrine that it supersedes, offers policymakers a veritable blank check to fight those wars. 

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of international relations at Boston University. His book Indispensable Nation: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Global Age is forthcoming. 

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[1] In an effort to prevent any misunderstanding on this point, a statement of my own personal views may be in order. There exists no conceivable justification for the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11. The United States bears absolutely no responsibility for them. Even if the United States were guilty of all the crimes that its harshest critics accuse it of committing, the events of September 11 remain irredeemably evil and utterly and completely unacceptable. 

[2] The secretary of defense described America’s new war this way: “Forget about ‘exit strategies;’ we’re looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadline. We have no fixed rules about how to deploy our troops.” Donald H. Rumsfeld, “A New Kind of War,” New York Times, September 27, 2001. On another occasion Rumsfeld suggested that “victory is persuading the American people and the rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that is going to be over in a month or a year or even five years.” Quoted in Thomas E. Ricks and Steven Mufson, “In War on Terrorism, Unseen Fronts May Be Crucial,” Washington Post, September 23, 2001. 

[3] Daniel Pipes, “What Bush Got Right—and Wrong,” Jerusalem Post, September 26, 2001. 

[4] As early as October 8, 2001, the United States had notified the UN Security Council that “We may find that our self-defense requires further actions with respect to other organizations and other states”—seen as hinting at a wider war. Irwin Arieff, “US Warns It May Target Others,” Boston Globe, October 9, 2001. 

by Victor Davis Hanson

We have suffered a great—and still not determined —loss in the United States, perhaps as many killed on September 11 as at Iwo Jima, almost twice as many as the dead at Shiloh, and perhaps ten times the fatalities of the Coventry Blitz. A trillion dollars has vanished at once from our markets; forty billion dollars of Manhattan real estate was vaporized; and, more importantly, thousands of human lives were lost. But the incineration of innocent civilians in our cities is not due—pace the Taliban and Mr. Falwell—to our intrinsic weaknesses or decadence, but rather, like the Greeks in the weeks before Thermopylae, attributable to our naiveté, unpreparedness, and strange ignorance of the fact that there are some in the world who envy and hate us for who we are rather than what we have done. 

Yet bin Laden and the Taliban terrorists have made a fatal miscalculation. They should read Thucydides about the nature of democracies aroused, whether Athenian or Syracusan. Like all absolutists who scoff at the perceived laxity and rot of Western democracies and republics, these cowardly murderers have slapped an enormous power from its slumber, and the retribution of American democracy will shortly be both decisive and terrible, whether manifested in special operations, conventional firepower, or both. The bloody wages of this ignorance of the resilience of a free people are age-old and unmistakable— Xerxes’ 60,000 washed ashore at Salamis, 80,000 of the Sultan’s best floating in the waters off Lepanto, 100,000 lost in the streets of Tokyo. 

Over some 2,500 years of brutal warring, the real challenge for a Western power has always been another Western power—more Greeks dying in a single battle of the Peloponnesian War than all those who fell against the Persians, Alexander butchering more Greeks in a day than did Darius III in three years, the Boers killing more Englishmen in a week than the Zulus did in a year, more Americans falling at Antietam than were killed in fifty years of frontier fighting. And in the present conflict, America is not fighting England, Germany, a westernized Japan, or even China or India, nations that so desperately seek to emulate our military organization, training, and armament. 

Western nations at war from the Greeks to the present are not weak, but enormously lethal—far out of proportion to their relatively small populations and territories. This frightful strength of the West is not an accident of geography, much less attributable to natural resources or genes. The climate of Egypt of the Pharaohs did not change under the Ptolemies, but the two were still quite different societies. Mycenaeans spoke Greek and raised olives, but they were a world away from the citizens of the city-state that later arose amid their ruins. 

Nor is our power merely an accident of superior technology; rather it is found in our very ideas and values. The foundations of Western culture—freedom, civic militarism, capitalism, individualism, constitutional government, secular rationalism, and natural inquiry relatively immune from political audit and religious backlash— when applied to the battlefield have always resulted in absolute carnage for their adversaries. Setbacks from Cannae to Little Big Horn led not to capitulation, but rather to study, debate, analysis—and murderous reprisals. Too few men too far away, a bad day, terrible weather, silly generals like Custer, or enemy geniuses such as Hannibal—all in the long haul can usually be trumped by a system, an approach to war that is emblematic of our very culture. For good or evil, these terrible protocols of the West at war will soon make themselves known to the ignorant in Afghanistan and beyond. 

Indeed, such ideals have already appeared even in the first few hours of the attack—doomed airline passengers first voting on their decision to storm the hijackers to prevent further carnage to their countrymen; the Congress freely voting —and finding—vast sums of capital for military operations; bizarre military hardware and frightening weapons of death glimpsed on our television screens as they head eastward; media critics and pundits openly lauding and criticizing U.S. actions past, present, and future, and thereby crystallizing the nature both of the threat and our response; individual rescue workers, aided by sophisticated and huge machines, on their own initiative devising ad hoc methods of saving victims and restoring calm to a devastated city. 

Neither the genius of Mithridates nor the wasting diseases of the tropics nor the fanaticism of the Mahdists have stopped the heroes, idealists, megalomaniacs, and imperialists of past Western armies, whose occasional lapses have prompted not capitulation, but responses far more deadly than their enemies’ temporary victories. This is not a question per se of morality, but of military capability and power. It would have been less hurtful for all involved had the thug Pizarro stayed put in Spain or the sanctimonious Lord Chelmsford kept out of Zululand. 

In our peace and affluence, ignorant about the military history of Vietnam and in awe of the suicidal fanaticism of our enemies, we Americans of this complacent age have forgotten the lethal superiority of the Western way of war—the Greeks losing only 192 at Marathon, Alexander the Great destroying an empire of 70 million with an army of 40,000, Cortés wrecking an impe- rial people of 2 million in less than two years, or a small band of British redcoats ending the power of Cetshwayo and his Zulus for good in less than a year. The arsenal at tiny 16th century Venice—based on principles of market capitalism and republican audit, despite a West torn by Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism—launched far better and more numerous galleys than those of the entire Ottoman navy. After Lepanto, the salvage crews collected the Ottoman cannons —themselves copied on Venetian and German designs—for scrap, so inferior were they to their European models. At Midway, American code breakers—products of free universities, nursed on egalitarianism and free to inquire without political and religious censure—helped to win the battle before it had even begun. There was nothing like them in the Japanese military. We are not supposed to say such things, but they are true and give us pause for reflection upon the prognosis of the present military crisis. 

Greek hoplites, like all Western armies, defined discipline not as sword play, captive taking, or individual bravado, but as keeping in rank, marching in time, drilling, and attacking in unison. And so at the battle of Cunaxa in 401 they slaughtered their Persian opponents, while incurring not a single fatality. Roman legions, Spanish harquebusiers, and English squares followed in the identical tradition, and left corpses all over the globe. After the disaster at Cannae—Hannibal’s genius resulted in 600 dead legionaries a minute—Roman legions nevertheless grew, while Carthaginian mercenary armies shrank. Such civic militarism is a trademark of Western militaries, where soldiers are not serfs or tribesmen, but fight as citizens with rights and responsibilities. The last radio transmissions of the doomed New York City firemen reveal not just professionalism, but a real sense of egalitarianism and democratic affinity. 

In the months to come, American ground and air forces, with better weapons, better supplies, better discipline, and more imaginative commanders—audited constantly by an elected congress and president, critiqued by a free press—will in fact dismantle the very foundations of Islamic fundamentalism. Indeed, the only check on the frightful power of Western armies— other than other Western armies—has rarely been enemy spears or bullets, but the very voices of internal dissent—a Bernardino de Sahagún aghast at his people’s cruelty in Mexico, a Bishop Colenso remonstrating the British government about the needless destruction of Zululand, or an American Jane Fonda in Hanoi to undermine the war in Vietnam. The Taliban and the hosts of murderers at bases in Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria may find solace from Western clergy and academics, but they shall not discover reprieve from the American military. 

America is not only the inheritor of the European military tradition, but in many ways its most frightful incarnation. Our multiracial and radically egalitarian society has taken the concepts of freedom and market capitalism to their theoretical limits. While our critics often ridicule the crassness of our culture and the collective amnesia of our masses, they underestimate the lethal military dynamism that accrues from such an energetic and restless citizenry, where past background means little in comparison to present ambition, drive, and ingenuity. 

Look at a sampling of the names of the dead firemen in New York—Michael Weinberg, Manuel Mojica, Paddy Brown, Joseph Angelini, Gerard Schrang, James Amato, Sean Hanley, Tarel Coleman, Joseph Gulleckson, and Jose Guadalupe. These rescuers were united not by hue or accent, but, like those in the legions, a shared professionalism and desire for action. So our creed is not class, race, breeding, or propriety, but unchecked energy as so often expressed in our machines, brutal competitiveness, and unleashed audacity—frightful assets when we turn, as we shall shortly, from the arts of production to those of destruction. 

The world, much less the blinkered fundamentalists, has not seen a United States unleashed since World War II and has apparently forgotten all this; we should not shudder at the false lesson of Vietnam but at the real seminar of the ages that they are about to learn. Americans are kind, and we are a generous people. But when wronged, held in contempt, and attacked in peace, we define victory as the absolute annihilation of our adversaries and then turn to a very peculiar but very deadly way of making war. In our reckoning, real humanity is redefined not by smug sermonizing about the sanctity of life, but by ending the lives of killers who will kill innocents until stopped. 

So we are a schizophrenic people of sorts, a nation of amateurs that can almost magically transform itself into a culture of professional killers. In 1860, Grant was a clerk and Sherman a failed banker and then teamster; in 1865, they were cruel masters in the art of unmitigated carnage, their huge armies the most deadly of the age. The world before September 11 has now passed, and what is to follow is murky, chaotic, and unpredictable. But there is one constant—we eventually will fight back and when we do, we will most surely win. Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and most recently the author of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles From Salamis to Vietnam (Doubleday, 2001). 

Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian
and most recently the author of Carnage and
Culture: Landmark Battles From Salamis
to Vietnam (Doubleday, 2001).