Will Bush's policies outlast him?

As the Bush administration approaches its end; the people who made its policies are also preparing to leave. What we do not know, however, is whether these policies are going to outlast the president or will be abandoned by his successor.

In fact, there is a strong tendency amongst analysts and policymakers to compare 9/11 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941 in terms of events and consequences. Indeed, both are acknowledged as attacks from "out of the blue", unprovoked, and as "wake up calls" to the American people about the nature of the world in which they reside.

Two issues have been neglected in comparing the two cases, however: first, few have noted the degree of influence wielded by a dense network of think-tanks and lobbying organisations that predated both 9/11 and Pearl Harbour; and secondly, even fewer have asked whether the most profound long-term consequence of Pearl Harbour - the rise of a coherent, bi-partisan, and globalist, east coast foreign policy establishment that reigned at least until the end of the Vietnam War - was likely to follow 9/11.

In short, was there a new cross-party foreign policy consensus on the "neo-conservative" agenda being followed by the Bush administration, focussing on pre-emption, military preparedness, and unilateralism?

The fact that 9/11 has had a profound independent impact on US foreign policy should not be discounted. The public popularity of Bush in its wake, increased military budgets, development of a federal Homeland Security bureaucracy, perceived burying of the "Vietnam syndrome", and the strengthening of unilateralism, are all key changes.

Yet, it was also clear that there were well-prepared political and ideological forces - specifically a neo-conservative network of lobbyists and policy advisers - waiting in the wings with a new agenda for US foreign policy, waiting to press home their own radical plans for a shift in policy. Their agenda refers to exporting American democracy but not nation-building, to policing but not "international social work", and even speaks of the advantages of empire, the "E" word.

A neo-conservative movement has been getting stronger since the 1970s, when Irving Kristol resurrected the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), from which Bush borrowed at least twenty members for his administration, including John Bolton, Michael Rubin, and Richard Perle. In the early 1990s, Edwin J. Fuelner, Jr., head of the conservative Heritage Foundation, vowed to "build a new governing establishment by the end of the decade".

Currently, that establishment is headed by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which, since its founding in 1997, has lobbied for a war for regime change and eliminating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Radical plan

One year before 9/11, PNAC published a radical plan (Rebuilding American Defences) outlining most of what became US foreign policy after 9/11: the Bush doctrine. But they were not, in September 2000, optimistic about their plans' practicability. Indeed, they thought the only way their ideas would stand a chance of adoption was if something dramatic happened, "some cataclysmic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbour," they argued.

Back in 1941, before the real Pearl Harbour, there was an interesting parallel: a dense political-intellectual network, headed by the globalist New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), of anti-isolationist, liberal internationalists, who had been preparing since 1919 for US global leadership, a Pax Americana.

But as war raged in Europe and the Far East, American opinion was solidly isolationist and anti-war. CFR men, in May 1941, over six months before Pearl Harbour, felt that the only way Americans would be awakened from their well-fed, rationing-free long-vacation torpor was from "a shock (preferably a military one)".

On December 7, the shock came, and the US entered the war, promoted the "four freedoms", an Anglo-American alliance, built new international institutions (such as the UN and the World Bank), and offered a New Deal for the world. The US foreign policy establishment and the Vietnam generation were born at that time.

So, has 9/11 also created a new establishment, behind the Bush doctrine, that is set to outlast the man himself? We may have to wait until a new administration is in the White House before that question can be answered.

Dr Marwan Kabalan is a lecturer in media and international relations, Faculty of Political Science and Media, Damascus University, Damascus, Syria.