What Exactly Is the 'Bush Doctrine'?

Any nation supporting or harboring terrorists were also guilty of aggression, and therefore we had a right to exercise our own self defense in going after them."

The doctrine was therefore about self defense and responding to aggression, not pre-emption.

Harboring Terrorists
To convict an individual for harboring terrorists, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant must be harboring or concealing an individual;
that individual must have committed, is about to commit, certain violent acts;
the defendant must know, or have grounds to believe, that the individual has committed, or is about to commit, those certain violent acts.

The punishment for harboring terrorists is a fine, imprisonment for up to 10 years, or both.

What is the Bush imperial strategy?

Chomsky: It has two components. One is that we declare that we have the right to carry out offensive military actions against countries we regard as a security threat because they have weapons of mass destruction. Many criticized it, not so much because they disagreed but because they thought the brazenness was ultimately a threat to the United States and therefore shouldn't be done that way. Even Madeleine Albright, in an article in Foreign Affairs, pointed out, quite accurately, that this is not the kind of thing you do. Of course, every President has that doctrine, but you don't advertise it. You keep it in your pocket, and you use it when you want to. So this is just kind of stupid and dangerous.

The most interesting comment, perhaps, was Kissinger's. He described it as a revolutionary new doctrine in international affairs which, of course, tears up the whole Westphalian system from the early seventeenth century. It's a good doctrine, he said, but added that we have to understand that it is not in the national interest for this doctrine to be universalized. That's a nice way of saying the doctrine is for us, not for anyone else. We will use force whenever we like against anyone we regard as a potential threat, and maybe we will delegate that right to clients, but it's not for others.

Q: And the other part?
Chomsky: It says states that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and will be treated as such.

How does that one work? What are the states that harbor terrorists? Let's put aside harboring leaders of states who are terrorists. If we count that, it reduces to absurdity in no time. So let's talk about the kind of terrorists whom they regard as terrorists, what I call subnational terrorists, like those in Al Qaeda and Hamas. What states harbor them?

Just to give a little background, the U.S. launched a terrorist war against Cuba in 1959. It picked up rapidly under Kennedy, with Operation Mongoose--a major escalation that actually came close to leading to nuclear war. And all through the 1970s, terrorist actions against Cuba were being carried out from U.S. territory, in violation of U.S. law and, of course, international law. The U.S. was harboring the terrorists, and quite serious ones.

There is Orlando Bosch, for example, whom the FBI accuses of thirty serious terrorist acts, including participation in the destruction of the Cubana airliner in which seventy-three people were killed back in 1976. The Justice Department wanted him deported. It said he's a threat to the security of the United States. George Bush I, at the request of his son Jeb, gave Bosch a Presidential pardon. He's sitting happily in Miami, and we're harboring a person whom the Justice Department regards as a dangerous terrorist, a threat to the security of the U.S.

Here's another example: The Venezuelan government is now asking for extradition of two military officers who were accused of participation in bombing attacks in Caracas and then just fled the country. These military officers participated in a coup, which, for a couple of days, overthrew the government. The U.S. openly supported the coup, and, according to British journalists, was involved in instigating it. The officers are now pleading for political asylum in the U.S.

Or take, say, Emmanuel Constant, whose death squads killed maybe 4,000 or 5,000 Haitians [during the early 1990s while he was on the payroll of the CIA]. Today, he is living happily in Queens because the U.S. refused to even respond to requests from Aristide for extradition.

So who is harboring terrorists? If the most important revolutionary part of the Bush Doctrine is that states that harbor terrorists are terrorist states, what do we conclude from that? We conclude exactly what Kissinger was kind enough to say: These doctrines are unilateral. They are not intended as doctrines of international law or doctrines of international affairs. They are doctrines that grant the U.S. the right to use force and violence and to harbor terrorists, but not anyone else.