Containment on Steroids?

George W. Bush dismissed Bill Clinton’s formula of democratic enlargement and dual containment as a recipe for decline and insisted that post-Cold War America must become the most dominant power in the Middle East, the only nation capable of protecting us from them. Bush promised to increase the Pentagon’s budget, reaffirm Washington’s willingness to act unilaterally, and subject regional troublemakers like Iraq to “rogue state rollback.” When Al-Qaeda terrorists surprised Bush by literally flying in under the radar on September 11, 2001, Bush unleashed a “global war on terror” and embraced the doctrine of preventive war to guarantee that “they” would never inflict a second 9/11 on “us.” The initial testing ground for the Bush Doctrine was supposed to be Iraq, but the swift victory over Saddam Hussein in April 2003 soon devolved into a brutal low-intensity war that blackened America’s reputation in the Muslim world and strengthened the hand of Islamic extremists loyal to Osama Bin Laden. Although Bush had made exporting “freedom” a central feature of his foreign policy, by the end of his second term rogue state rollback had backfired in the Middle East.