President George W. Bush has been dismissed as a lame duck, but it appears that significant elements of the doctrine that bears his name will endure long after he leaves the White House. Although we haven't heard much about the Bush Doctrine in recent years, its impact on American foreign policy—both positive and negative—is as significant as it is misunderstood. The doctrine is generally associated with the preventive war against Iraq, but it has more than one component. The first was unveiled during Bush's address to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, long before the U.S. swept [...]
MANTA, Ecuador — A decade ago, this was just another obscure, humid, Pacific coast fishing town, with a third-rate airport and a problem with narcotrafficking. Today, the city is a regular stop for cruise ships, boasts a first-rate airport and is a key outpost in the United States’ war on drugs. But the eight-year-old U.S. anti-drug presence here has both put Manta on the map and made the city a center of controversy. The local U.S. anti-narcotrafficking facility “is a pretext for expansionism,” charges attorney Miguel Moran, who believes that Washington and U.S. corporations want to control the region’s natural [...]
The U.S. military’s decision last week to release Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press photographer who has been held by U.S. military forces since April 2006 on accusations of links to terrorism, was not just a blow to the U.S. military’s case against one prisoner. The announcement by the U.S. military, which followed the rulings of an Iraqi judicial panel granting Hussein amnesty, also raised a question war proponents may not want to answer. Namely, if the sovereign institutions and political processes that the U.S. troop surge was supposed to help foster actually take hold, will the United States respect them? [...]
