Source: The New Republic
In First Meditation René Descartes asks himself how he would know that "the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams." How can we really know, Descartes asks, whether what we see is real or a hallucination? Descartes finally evokes God to connect himself to the outside world, but subsequent philosophers, including George Berkeley and David Hume, doubted whether the connection could be made with any certainty. In so far as it was always conceivable that what we saw was illusion, we could not know.Berkeley's and Hume's skepticism followed, in fact, from their adopting the disengaged posture of the philosopher--in which language ceases to be an instrument of human interaction and instead, in Ludwig Wittgenstein's words, "goes on a holiday." Terms like knowing and certainty become subject to standards that don't prevail in everyday life, from which they originated. It is as if when one got into the car in the morning, one invariably questioned whether the car was a chimera. If that kind of questioning became the norm, life as we know it would come to a screeching halt.
There is an analogous situation in foreign policy. In devising a policy toward friend and foe, one can always ask whether a friend is really a foe in disguise and whether a foe doesn't merely wish us ill, but is preparing to annihilate us. These questions can usually be answered through journalism and through inquiries by ambassadors and intelligence agencies. But what if one insists on absolute, ironclad proof? Isn't it conceivable, for instance, that Vladimir Putin secretly desires the downfall of the United States and that under extremely strained circumstances--perhaps a previously undetected brain tumor--he might resort to weapons of mass destruction to effect it? It's not likely, but it is conceivable. And if it is conceivable, shouldn't we do something about it before it's too late?
Governments don't ordinarily reason in this manner--and it's a good thing they don't, because if they did, diplomacy would break down, and wars would spread. But sometimes they do--and wars do spread. Since September 11, the Bush administration, backed by Democrats as well as Republicans, has conducted foreign policy in this bizarre manner--and the results have been predictably disastrous. It has taken two forms: First, what might be called the "madman theory," and second, what author Ron Suskind calls Vice President Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine." Both are infringements of the conventions of international relations in the same way that Descartes's skepticism is an infringement of everyday epistemology.
Diplomacy assumes that national leaders act according to the usual norms of reasoning. They design actions in order to accomplish certain ends, and one of these is the preservation of their nation. But what if a nation's leader is or becomes genuinely mad and attempts to carry out policies that will, he believes, lead to the destruction of his nation and, perhaps, the world? Or what if he is so deranged that he has no conception of means and ends, so that he undertakes policies that will lead to the destruction of the world, but has no awareness that they might? Such a leader would be a "madman." And in that case, the ordinary rules of diplomacy would not hold.
The Bush administration made exactly this case about Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The administration's public case for war boiled down to the claim that Saddam Hussein was a "madman" who, if he were to acquire nuclear weapons, would not hesitate to use them against the United States and its allies. "If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy and is not an option," Bush declared in his January 2003 State of the Union address. Saddam, therefore, had to be overthrown before he even acquired nuclear weapons. "I acted because I was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman," Bush assured National Guardsmen and reservists in New Hampshire in October 2003.
Other invasion supporters invoked the specter of a crazy Saddam. Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman repeatedly described Saddam as a "homicidal maniac." Council on Foreign Relations fellow Kenneth Pollack, writing in The Threatening Storm, hinged his influential argument for eventual war on a hypothetical situation in which "bizarre notions would run through [Saddam's] mind as he confronted his own mortality without having achieved any of his grandiose visions." If Saddam had nuclear weapons, Pollack suggested, one of these might be "ordering a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv." "Saddam Hussein has repeatedly demonstrated that he thinks in strange and convoluted ways that often contradict what any Westerner--or even any other Iraqi--might think sensible," Pollack wrote.
Yet, even before the American invasion, it was evident that the Bush administration and the supporters of its foreign policy were not using the term "mad" in a clinical sense. Saddam Hussein was not really "mad." He had miscalculated terribly in the Iraq-Iran War and in the first Gulf War, but so had the European powers in 1914 and the United States in 1965 and 2003. And as documents unearthed after the invasion show, Saddam Hussein was not consumed with destroying Israel and the United States, but with defending himself against the Shiites and Kurds and even his own Republican Guard. (See "Saddam's Delusions: the View from the Inside," in the May-June Foreign Affairs.) Like Descartes's invocation of the dreamer, Bush's invocation of the madman was an instance of language going on a holiday--and in this case, a very dangerous one.
In his new book, The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind attributes to Cheney a complementary departure from prevailing norms. According to Suskind, Cheney reasoned that with the new threat of international terror, a mere suspicion that a country or group had hostile intentions toward the United States had to be treated as certainty. Suskind quotes Cheney as saying, "If there's one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response." According to Suskind, Cheney would apply this reasoning to the possibility that Saddam might develop a nuclear weapon that he would hand off to terrorists to explode in the United States. Even if there was only a one-percent chance of that happening, the United States would have to make sure that it never did.
Together, the madman theory and the one-percent doctrine justified what Bush called pre-emptive war, but what was in fact preventive war. The United States did not invade Iraq because it had attacked or was planning to attack the United States, but because, under the leadership of a madman, it might conceivably do so in the future. That is an extremely thin reed on which to base a foreign policy. And if this approach were adopted by other countries--say India and Pakistan--it could lead to a succession of wars, and perhaps to the Armageddon that Bush's evangelical followers foresee.
It would be nice to say that in the wake of the Iraq war the United States has abandoned this approach, but it might not have. One hears similar arguments being made about Iran and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In National Review, Victor Davis Hanson branded Ahmadinejad a "madman." So did New York Senator Chuck Schumer. Talk show host Chris Matthews and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman jousted over whether Ahmadinejad was "crazy" or "unstable." And when Matthews asked Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, whether the president should meet with Ahmadinejad, Biden replied, "No, I don't think he should meet with him, because I think the guy is a little crazy."
Fortunately, some Bush State Department officials have stepped back from these assumptions and have decided that the United States will have to conduct diplomacy with Iran. That appeared to be a recognition, even if fleeting, that we Americans have to assume that other leaders--no matter how bizarre their religious beliefs appear (as if we Americans don't have bizarre beliefs of our own)--are as sane as we are; and that foreign policy cannot be based on the theoretically conceivable, but on the likely or at least genuinely possible.
John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.