THE BUSH DOCTRINE,
COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM,
AND THE WAR ON TERROR

Donald Rumsfeld

The twenty-first century brought with it not only the promise of the Information Age and the power of instantaneous communication and 24/7 media, but also the peril that civilization’s enemies could harness these tools to subvert and attack the free societies that gave rise to information technology. Where some could create and use Wikipedia to share knowledge on just about every conceivable topic, others could create and use Wikileaks to post sensitive and classified documents endangering U.S. diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations. Where some could use Twitter and Facebook to gather by the thousands to protest authoritarianism as we saw across the Middle East during the so-called Arab Spring, others could use social media to spread propaganda of hate and radicalism. While the Information Age has opened avenues of expression to parts of the world that have not known free speech before, it has also made free societies more vulnerable to intimidation and terrorism than ever before.

That was the central challenge those of us in the Bush administration faced in the days after 9/11. The goal of the nineteen hijackers who boarded commercial aircraft the morning of September 11 was to inflict mass casualties but also to usher in an era of terrorism that would cause America to cease being the free, civil-liberty-minded society it has been since its founding. Maintaining the liberal, pluralistic, open society enshrined in our Constitution has long been the paradox in American conservatism. From my vantage point, that remained our task in an era when terrorists could use weapons of mass destruction to kill, terrorize, and force Americans to give up their freedoms. As Lenin wrote with characteristic terseness, “The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize.” It’s not to kill people. It’s to terrorize. It is to alter behavior. With 9/11, al-Qaida sought to alter the behavior of our entire society by instilling fear that no one was safe. The intelligence we were receiving was clear that the group wanted to inflict yet more deadly attacks on the American people.

My earliest experience with terrorism came when President Reagan asked me to serve as his Middle East envoy after 241 marines and navy corpsmen were killed in 1983. A truck loaded with explosives drove into the barracks in Beirut. I received a call from the secretary of state, George Shultz, asking me to take a leave of absence from the pharmaceutical company I was running. Dealing with terrorism was a new experience for me. I’d served in the Pentagon during the Cold War, but this was something that was notably different from the Cold War.

After the attack on the marine barracks, the next day our forces put revetments around all the buildings. What did that do? Nothing: terrorists started lobbing rocket grenades over the revetments. The next place they attacked was the U.S. embassy in Beirut, which had a wire mesh hung over it to bounce the rocket-propelled grenades off. Sounds logical. But for every offense, there’s a defense; for every defense, there’s an offense. So what did the terrorists do? The next thing they did was to start hitting soft targets, people going to and from work.

The point is that there isn’t any way to simply defend. That reality leads anyone with an ounce of sense to understand that you have to go on offense. The only way you can deal with that problem is not to treat it like a criminal act, where once it happens, you’re going to try to capture the person, put him in jail, and punish him—or more likely, indict him in absentia because you can’t find him. Those are the lessons I came away with way back in the early 1980s.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

Shortly before the 2000 election, Governor Bush spoke here at The Citadel and talked about the future. He argued for the need to bring the military, the armed forces of the United States, into the twenty-first century, out of the Industrial Age and into the Information Age. Then came 9/11: the attack on the seat of economic power in New York, the attack on the seat of military power in the Pentagon—and except for the courage of the passengers on the flight that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, undoubtedly, the terrorists intended an attack on the seat of political power, either the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

It was a day none of us will ever forget. The president of the United States properly recognized that the purpose of terrorism was to terrorize, to try to alter our behavior and cause us to change the way we live. He made a decision that was notably different from those made by earlier administrations of both political parties: he decided that we had to go on offense, declaring that terrorism could no longer be considered something to be solved through law enforcement. It was something that required a new approach. President Bush understood this immediately. Given the lethality of weapons in this new century and the risk that a terrorist attack could result in not 3,000 people killed but 300,000, 9/11 caused him to conclude that he had to declare a war on terrorism.

I remember a week or two after 9/11 I went to the Middle East and Central Asia to secure overflight and basing rights for our coming campaign in Afghanistan. One of the nations I visited was Oman, where I met with Sultan Qaboos. He had decamped to the desert, where he apparently regularly met with his constituents. It must have been 140 degrees in the tent. He sat there without any visible reaction to the heat, while we perspired through three layers of our clothes. British-trained, he spoke English perfectly. He said something to the effect that the attacks of 9/11 may have been a “blessing in disguise, as terrible as they were.” Not sure what he meant, I asked, “In what sense?” He said, “It may be the wake-up call for your country and the world so we will take actions and work together in ways that will be able to prevent not three thousand, but three hundred thousand, or three million people from being killed, as a result of the use of more powerful and more lethal weapons.”

President Bush had to do everything conceivable not just to defend, but also to make everything that terrorists do harder: make it harder for them to move around between countries, harder to talk on the phone, harder to raise funds through their financial networks, harder to find a country willing to house them and be hospitable to their planning and training and launching of attacks on free people. Around that time, Johns Hopkins University organized an exercise called Dark Winter, which would give a scientific basis to Sultan Qaboos’s point. The participants theorized about a biological attack with a smallpox outbreak in three locations in the United States. Within a year, that independent study concluded that there would be up to one million Americans dead as a result. There was likely to be martial law, states guarding their boundaries. When I grew up, if you had smallpox, chicken pox, or measles, the authorities would put a “quarantine” sign on your house; you weren’t allowed to go out, and no one was allowed to go in. Well, you can imagine our entire country doing that because of a fear of smallpox.

This was very much on President Bush’s mind. So we went to work to put in place a set of structures so that we could preserve our free way of life, so that we could avoid the hard choices that might accompany a major chemical, biological, or nuclear terrorist attack. One was the Patriot Act and an update to surveillance programs, some of whose existence has been leaked on the front pages of our newspapers. Another was Guantánamo Bay and military commissions, which had been a practice of our country since George Washington. Our armed forces had experience managing detentions of prisoners of war—POWs—people who wore uniforms, carried their weapons openly, and had a command structure. The terrorists being captured were not POWs because they violated these basic laws of warfare, so therefore they were not entitled to the rights and privileges that went with POW status. They were enemy combatants who were entitled to humane treatment, but the Justice Department argued that we also had a right to ask them questions and interrogate them. It is worth noting that despite campaign rhetoric to the contrary, President Barack Obama has kept in place these structures.

Another concept that President Bush and his administration embraced as part of the War on Terror was anticipatory self-defense, or preemption. It is a fundamental tenet of international law to respect national borders; every country has the right to do what is needed within its own country—unless it is threatened by another country. The right of self-defense is an equally fundamental tenet of international law. The question becomes not if but when a nation has a right to take action to stop an attack originating from outside it. The idea of waiting until you’re attacked to defend yourself is one thing if someone’s going to come across your border with conventional forces. It is quite another thing if you’re going to be attacked with weapons of mass destruction. In that case, no responsible leader would wait until attacked. That caused President Bush to consider anticipatory self-defense and the realization that if you wait, it’s too late. That is a difficult calculation, particularly given the unevenness of intelligence and the difficulty of the intelligence gatherers’ tasks.

Another challenge that came up was the issue of language. Take, for instance, the phrase War on Terror. First, if you say “war,” it sounds as if you are going to win with bullets, that the task is conventional, and, as such, it’s a problem for the Department of Defense. In fact, it is something quite different. It’s not going to be won with bullets. It’s much more like the Cold War, a battle of ideology and a competition of ideas, and it will take all elements of national power to prevail. I argued that the phrase War on Terror might mislead people and cause them to expect things that aren’t realistic. I struggled with trying to come up with a better phrase, and I failed. I thought about A Struggle Against Violent Extremists, but the president stuck with War on Terror.

Even more problematic was the unwillingness of many in and out of government to identify the enemy, a problem that is even worse today. If you think about it, in the Cold War, communism was identified as the enemy. We pinned the tail on the donkey. We talked about it; we said what communism did, how it didn’t work, how command economies were inefficient, how unfree political systems were not the kind of systems that unleashed human energy and creativity. In this new war, I worried that we weren’t calling our enemies what they really are: radical Islamists.

Too many in the Bush and Obama administrations have been unwilling to say so. Somebody asked me one day, “What kind of grade do you give the Bush administration on the subject of competing in the competition of ideas?” I said, “Well, I’m an easy grader and I’d give us a D.” Too many were nervous about being seen as being against a religion. Maybe that’s understandable, because we are not against any religion. A large fraction of people on the face of the earth are Muslim. But the fact remains that it is a relatively small group of Islamists in that religion who are the extremists and who are training people to kill innocent men, women, and children, and we make a serious mistake by not saying it, by not calling it what it is. The idea of imposing a caliphate and imposing that particular set of views and behavior patterns on the world is something that has to be resisted and argued against. I don’t believe we can achieve success unless we are willing to say what it is, identify it, and find ways to help other Muslims to resist the extremists.

We have to be patient. This struggle is not going to end like World War II with a signing ceremony on the USS Missouri. It isn’t going to end in two or three years. It will take time. The Cold War took decades. We have to expect that this struggle is going to take decades.

THE “FREEDOM AGENDA”

There were discussions inside the administration about the importance of promoting democracy as an element of national security strategy. President Bush made democracy promotion a centerpiece of his foreign policy, especially in his second term. “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” he declared on the steps of the Capitol in his second Inaugural Address.

That’s a tall order. And some individuals frequently interchange the word freedom with the word democracy. When the word democracy is used outside our country, I’ve long been concerned that the risk is that people think we are trying to impose our particular model of democracy on the rest of the world, and most people don’t want to have our template or any foreign template imposed on them. They know they have different cultures, different histories, different neighbors, and different circumstances. I kept trying to push, within the administration, the use of the phrases freer political systems and freer economic systems instead of the word democracy.

There was and remains a divide among conservatives about whether to promote democracy as a matter of national security. The divide dates back to the Cold War when a group who self-identified as “neoconservatives” opposed the Nixon and Kissinger policies of détente with the Soviet Union. They argued for policies that made human rights and governance central to U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. I was sympathetic to this view, especially during the Cold War, although I wondered whether culture and history might be more determinative of the makeup of foreign governments than the Western tradition of liberty, which has evolved considerably in the past three hundred years.

For example, in Uzbekistan, the United States faced an important question: what to do after violence broke out in the country and the Uzbek government put it down. I had been in Uzbekistan and met with President Karimov. He had agreed to let us use his base to put Special Forces in Afghanistan. He was cooperative even against Russian pressures. It was an enormous advantage for us. We couldn’t get to Afghanistan from the sea. We needed Karimov’s cooperation; that said, I had no illusions about his democratic aspirations. What was important was that he was moving in a positive direction. He had been a politburo member in the old Soviet Union.

In 2005, a group of Islamists stormed a prison in the country. The government stepped in and put the revolt down. Non-governmental organizations and human rights groups began issuing condemnations of the Uzbek government. They became judgmental, I believe, before all of the facts were assembled. Then the State Department and members of Congress criticized Karimov. I knew I didn’t know the facts. We do know what the result of the U.S. government action was. The result was that the president of Uzbekistan threw U.S. forces out of the base we were using. He said, “We now know who our friends are,” and then moved back into the Russian sphere of influence. That action did not advance U.S. interests or, for that matter, human rights in the country. Rather, it was a setback to human rights as well as for our national security.

Now, what does this example suggest? My view is that if someone is on what we consider the wrong side, but is moving in the right direction, improving on human rights, moving toward freer political and freer economic systems, that’s a good thing and we ought to encourage it. That was the case with Uzbekistan. But, instead, the United States stuck a stick in President Karimov’s eye. We disadvantaged our country from a security standpoint, and we disadvantaged the people of Uzbekistan by causing them to move back toward Russia and not maintaining the progress with respect to human rights and toward freer political and economic systems.

Uzbekistan isn’t the only country to move through a transition. Consider what America went through. The United States had slaves into the 1800s. Women didn’t vote until the 1900s. We had a Civil War that killed six hundred thousand human beings. We didn’t arrive the way we are today. We are still evolving. Those countries are still evolving. They don’t go from a dictatorial system to a free system in five minutes; it’s a tough journey, a very tough journey. It has been a tough journey for our country, but we’ve made enormous progress.

However, we seem not to have the same patience with other countries. In Pakistan, President Musharraf stepped up, supporting us and the War on Terror. But our State Department decided that it was important for Musharraf to go to work in civilian clothes instead of in his army uniform. Our president goes to work in civilian clothes; why shouldn’t every country’s president be a civilian? So the department pointed a finger and told him he should get out of the army. He did, and he was thrown out of the country. The result was that the civilian government that replaced him is weaker and less helpful, and today in Pakistan we run the risk of a failed state with nuclear weapons.

It seems to me that we should use judgment and balance. We should not expect perfection and we should not expect other countries to be exactly as we are today, because we weren’t as we are today over much of our history. What is important is to look to see in which direction countries are moving, and hope that they’re moving in a positive direction and encourage that, rather than judging that they are not perfect, criticizing them, and causing them to reverse course and move backward, rather than continuing forward, even if in a pace we consider slow.

WAR IN THE INFORMATION AGE

Afghanistan and Iraq were the first wars waged in the Information Age. These wars have been fought in a circumstance notably different from World War II, Korea, or even Vietnam. BlackBerries, iPhones, YouTube, and Sony video cameras mean that information moves instantaneously around the world. These advances have changed everything. We still haven’t fully adjusted to the Information Age when it comes to warfare and national security.

At any given moment of the day or night, something’s going on in the world that makes a difference to the United States of America. I’ll offer one example. There was a report in Newsweek that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet at Guantánamo Bay, and there were riots in three countries where people were killed as a result of that report. As was said more than a hundred years ago by Mark Twain, “A lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

We can’t lie. Terrorists can lie. So what happened after the Koran incident? Newsweek investigated and concluded that in truth it had never happened. The editors ran a retraction. They said they were sorry. Sorry? People were dead.

On a related media story, when people in the United States are asked, “How many people were waterboarded at Guantánamo?” answers vary widely. Some say, “A hundred or two hundred.” Some answer, “Ten or fifteen.” Others say, “I think I read three might have been.” But the answer is: none. Zero. Not a single human being was waterboarded by the U.S. Armed Forces in Guantánamo, for the purposes of interrogation. The CIA, not the Department of Defense, did waterboard three people. But think of how it all has been inaccurately conflated because of irresponsible and sloppy reporting.

Today’s news correspondents are under constant pressure to produce exclusives and breaking stories. Daily or weekly deadlines have turned into updates by the hour, even by the minute, to feed the insatiable demand of 24/7 cable news and Internet audiences. Terrorists have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age. Our country has not. Our enemies routinely twist the truth and launch attacks designed to attract headlines. Terrorist groups have media committees. The Taliban in Afghanistan have a Twitter account. Ayman al-Zawahiri once said, “More than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. We are in the media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of Muslims.”

The challenge of this glut of information is sifting through it and making the right judgment calls about what is true and what is not. Fortunately, the proliferation of technology and media means new alternatives and ways of getting information. Americans are no longer dependent on the three major networks and the New York Times to get the news. We have talk radio and blogs and cable news. The American people have sound inner gyroscopes. Over time, they come to the right decisions.

Another element of warfare in the Information Age is the prevalence of lawyers and the growth of a new phenomenon called “lawfare.” Increasingly, our enemies are aided by headline-seeking lawyers and rogue prosecutors who are using the concept of “universal jurisdiction” to file lawsuits against U.S. government officials and military personnel. They file lawsuits in foreign courts hoping that a lone judge or prosecutor might take up the case and create an international incident. It’s another way of creating an asymmetric advantage so that even if terrorists can’t win on the battlefield they have a chance to win or at least to harass in courts. They’re putting American officials and intelligence officials at risk of legal action in an attempt to intimidate them and their families and to sway policy decisions in their own favor. It is, in effect, an attempt to criminalize policy differences. It’s a trend that tends to subordinate the American people and their elected leaders’ actions, as well as the U.S. military, to foreign courts and rogue prosecutors. This is a growing threat to American sovereignty.

I was at a NATO meeting in Brussels and read in the paper that the Belgian Parliament had passed a law that allowed anyone in a foreign military to be prosecuted in Belgian courts. I thought, “We can’t have military people go to Belgium, where NATO is located, if any rogue prosecutor can decide he wants to enhance his image by filing a lawsuit.” In fact, one did file a suit against General Tom Franks, the U.S. CENTCOM commander. So I called the Belgian defense minister, and, not being a diplomat, I was not very diplomatic. I explained that the NATO headquarters did not have to be in Belgium and that if the Belgian government persisted, American personnel—military and civilian—would not come to Belgium. Within a matter of weeks, the legislation was repealed, nullified, and withdrawn.

But Belgium was just the beginning. Lawfare is a danger, not just for the United States but for the world. Consider the contribution our military made in the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. Consider what we did during the earthquakes in Pakistan. Anytime the UN, the Organization of American States, or other international organizations are faced with a humanitarian crisis, they come to the U.S. Department of Defense and ask for help, and we provide it—generously and repeatedly. We wouldn’t be able help others if this “universal jurisdiction” practice continues to grow. We wouldn’t send U.S. military personnel on humanitarian missions if they could be prosecuted in foreign courts around the world. Even President Barack Obama, who had been personally authorizing drone strikes that kill people, would be vulnerable to such suits. I am convinced that if lawfare continues, it will inevitably lead to isolationism on the part of our country.

REFRESHING AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS

It may seem unusual to hear this from a conservative, but the fact is that the institutions created at the inflection point of the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, during the Truman administration, are in need of repair and adjustment. They are in need of reform to be better able to contribute to stability in an era in which there is no longer the Soviet Union or a bipolar world. We are also in need of an update of our own national security institutions, which were created for a different age. Here at home, the Defense Department, the CIA, and the National Security Council were established after World War II. Internationally, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization all were established during that period.

In the 1990s, we reached another inflection point—the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Information Age. But we have not moved forward to adjust those institutions—either here at home or within international agencies—to fit the twenty-first century. The changes and updates that have been made are, for the most part, only on the margins. NATO has seen some changes; it’s been enlarged. The Defense Department has made some changes with the Goldwater-Nichols legislation. In the old days, Bolling Air Force Base was built right next to Anacostia Naval Air Station. Two air stations within fifteen seconds of each other. Separate runways, separate air controllers, separate security. This was a model of inefficiency rather than jointness. Thanks to Goldwater-Nichols, today we are fashioning a joint force and achieving leverage that is critically important. I believe we would benefit from a new Hoover Commission, as we had in the 1940s and ’50s, to look at our national security and international institutions and make recommendations to bring them into the twenty-first century.

The problems we face in the world are not problems that are going to be solved by one nation—challenges such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, piracy, terrorism, and drug trafficking. They will require us to work closely with other countries.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Fear does focus the mind. The events of 9/11, the number of terrorist activities at various places around the world, and the recognition of the growing lethality of weapons today have changed leaders’ margins for error. The prospect that our country is facing growing and new challenges is registering on our people.

What’s unique about American conservatism, at least in contrast to its European cousin, is that what it seeks to preserve isn’t really conservative at all. American conservatives don’t want to conserve monarchy or a church. They want to conserve our founding ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution—ideals that by most standards are liberal, even radical some might say. The belief in the rights of the individual over the rights of the government is what unites American conservatism and what will propel it forward in this still new century, uniting libertarians, social conservatives, and the growing number of independents and Democrats who are witnessing the unparalleled growth and expansion of the federal government and increasingly questioning whether we are getting satisfactory results given the exorbitant costs.

There is a danger, however, that our country could reach a tipping point where behavior patterns alter the direction of our great country permanently away from the constitutional principles and toward big government. I had an Asian leader say to me, “I never thought I’d see the day when adults in the White House would be modeling America on Europe.” That’s a model, suffice it to say, that is not working.

I was in college in 1954 and Governor Adlai Stevenson gave a speech to my senior class. He said,

The power, for good or evil, of this American political organization is virtually beyond measurement. The decision it makes, the uses to which it devotes its immense resources, the leadership it provides on moral as well as material questions, all appear likely to determine the fate of the modern world. You dare not, if I may say so, withhold your attention. For if you do, if those young Americans who have the advantage of education, perspective, and self-discipline do not participate to the fullest extent of their ability, America will stumble, and if America stumbles the world falls.

Those words are as true today as they were then. That is our challenge. That is our responsibility.