Year 2003
Issue of March 7, 2003
---------
Politics by distraction, a new political proposal, a critque
of the Bush Doctrine from Parameters.Starting from a simple
news item,
United Nations warns of world water shortage
“The world faces an unprecedented water shortage and it's
only going to get worse in the years to come. That's the
conclusion of a new report by the United Nations. The most
comprehensive water report in UN history involved dozens
of UN agencies and commissions. It ranked 122 countries
according to their access to clean water, and many countries
are running out.”
The point is that the war on Iraq, even the war on terrorism,
is politics by distraction, because there is no substantive
viable politics related to the real issues.
Current politics is woven around exiting institutions,
elites, property, and media. No surprise. That is the way
history works. The problem is, elites always become isolated
from the reality of their own people.
The current elites tend to believe things like
1. The economy is cyclic, so it will bounce back
2. Spending money is a way to solve problems
3. People in other countries are disadvantaged and less
modern than we are.
These are all wrong.
My own view is that
1. The economy in the US faces Asian competition and to
meet that competition must cut prices and that means discounting
the entire American economy. This mean a long term lowering
of the value of most assets, especially those related to
wealth production, which means business, wages, corporate
valuations.
2. Spending money means increasing tax on society. The new
infrastructure costs around security, military, will break
the back of the American economy
3. The middle class in most of the world is well motivated
to learn and improvise. They also are motivated to understand
the world, and as a result are more curious and innovative
than the American heartland, and less egoistic than the
American coastal cultures. Three years ago a fund manger
friend, returning from India said to me “The average businessman
in Calcutta is smarter than anyone in Cincinnati.” This
is caricature, but an attempt to share a perspective to
suggest that the US economy is in long term difficulty.
Our current leadership is not prepared to lead on the real
issues. They are an interwoven network of minds, information
and character that are impervious to the real issues. The
feedback between reality and their conversations is broken.
We all are at risk. The key issue in history is how elites
deal with their own people. If they fail to protect and
develop, fail to maintain justice and sharing the socially
produced wealth, they threaten the whole society, including
themselves. ______________________________________
A proposal for a new politics.
Future of the democratic and possibly the republican party
Douglass Carmichael doug@bigmindmedia.com
The simple political platform which I believe is both conservative
and progressive has the following few simple and widely
coherent points that make a persuasive case for our real
alternative that touches on the issues people really care
about.
• The framework of sustainability taken seriously
• A vital economy with many more transactions with less
extraction and pollution, making full use of the potentials
of technology and human ingenuity.
• A focus on government programs that enter into partnerships
with local and regional authorities to implement the above
guidelines.
• A posture towards the rest of the world that is friendlier
and more supportive of democratic and human development
agendas, based more on the projection of American ideals
than the projection of American power.
These four points would be supported by the following:
• The quick reduction of all current subsidies which support
non sustainable business practices.
• A steady evolutionary shift of the tax code from income
to environmental extraction and resource use.
• Rethinking the speed and fairness of our criminal justice
system
• Rethinking the legal framework for corporate charters
• A cabinet level position on appropriate technology
• Federal support for regional, state, and local initiatives
that helped implement the model.
Our understanding is that this framework will go a long
way to providing guidance on many other crucial questions,
such as the nature of education, investment, and financial
rewards.
This approach is based on a perspective that by being focused
and clear the tracks the energy and commitment of a very
significant part of the population including people within
the political community and the business community and who,
regardless of class are attracted to hope and love of life.
It includes five primary perspectives.
• The need for an environmentally sane policy
• The recognition that business is a strategy for meeting
human needs and desires, not a just a privileged game for
individual wealth gathering
• A society fit for the human life cycle
• The need for complex governance in the world with 6 billion
people
• The idea that constitutions imply what they mean: a balance
of parts.
• That means that the five levels
o Global
o National
o Regional
o Local
o And individuals
have approximately equal access to power and money and
leverage so that each level can manifest its creativity
and responsiveness to the whole situation.
Background
There are two models of the future.
One is that of a free market leading to human abundance,
but where in fact governments and large businesses work
together for control of markets.
The ideology is individualist and entrepreneurial but the
practice is simply one of control and centralization is
a world of administration.
It lacks a theory of the relation of the economy and society
to the environment, and lacks a theory of society, and it
lacks any understanding or honoring of the deep human capacity
for compassion which should lead to a practical culture
of individuals, and especially leaders, with social responsibility
for the well-being for all.
The second model is based on the broader sense of human
nature.
It simply says that we can use our minds to put together
an economy and governments under the leading idea of sustainability
by the active use of technology, existing and emerging,
and create a vibrant economy both less extractive from the
land, water, and air, and with many more transactions among
consumers and producers. An economy actually more entrepreneurial
and innovative in contrast to the administrated future desired
those who run large corporations and governments.
It would be an economy that has a chance of coming closer
to meeting the full range of human needs.
The current market, with an over production of consumer
durables, and too many people with jobs in mere administration,
and too many people unemployed, could, if encouraged, shift
to a world satisfying more complex human needs and desires,
such as more attractive education and more attractive living
environments.
This framework has a chance of providing guidance on emerging
social questions such as genetic food manipulation, the
implications of the genome project for health, ways to allocate
health resources across the population, to foster quicker
and more judicious and fair legal systems, and above all
create the conditions for a society of civility and art
and humor and dignity.
This second model recognizes human creativity and initiative
and provides a framework which is socially responsive.
This model acknowledges that life does not have solutions,
but only approaches and agreements and that each generation
will bring its own energy, learning, and initiative to the
situation as it finds it.
We respect all that the past brings us and can teach us,
each generation knows that the responsibility is now it’s
own.
We believe that this platform would be not only good for
America, but attractive to the world, and provide a framework
for fulsomely lived individual lives, in a context of attractive
citizenship responsibilities, in a much safer world for
people of all ages and most traditions.
Appendix
Additional programs
1. Extension of land conservancy through land purchased
tax to the whole world.
2. A new homestead act based on real estate tax to make
homes available to the homeless as new homesteaders based
on the original homestead act
http://gwbweb.wustl.edu/csd/Publications/2000/wp00-9.pdf
3. A commitment to rapid justice, and getting rid of clogged
court, compensatory fees paid for jury duty, and a commitment
to reduce the prison population from 2.2 million to 1 million
in five years.
_________________________
*I am enclosing another article from the remarkable journal,
Parameters. A very good analysis of the bush Doctrine from
inside the military. See the five points in the second half
of the article, where the real critique is.
The Bush Doctrine and
War with Iraq
JEFFREY RECORD
© 2003 Jeffrey Record
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Parameters, Spring 2003, pp. 4-21.
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/03spring/fromed.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bush Administration issued its first National Security
Strategy in September 2002, a year after the 9/11 terrorist
attacks on the United States by al Qaeda. The document’s
Chapter V summarizes the Administration’s approach to using
force, known as the Bush Doctrine. It essentially reiterates,
in four pages, presidential statements made over the months
following 9/11, including the President’s speeches before
a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001, before
the Warsaw Conference on Combating Terrorism on 6 November,
his State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002, his remarks
before the student body of the Virginia Military Institute
on 17 April, and his address to the graduating class at
the US Military Academy at West Point on 1 June. The Bush
Administration now has in place a clear, declaratory use-of-force
policy whose objective is stated in Chapter V’s title: “Prevent
Our Enemies from Threatening Us, Our Allies, and Our Friends
with Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
This article identifies and examines the Bush Doctrine’s
major tenets, and then assesses the doctrine’s strengths
and weaknesses within the context of the Administration’s
prospective attack on Iraq.
The Threat
The Bush Doctrine rests on a definition of the threat based
upon what it sees as the combination of “radicalism and
technology”—specifically, political and religious extremism
joined by the availability of weapons of mass destruction
(WMD). In his West Point speech, President Bush declared:
The gravest danger to freedom lies at the crossroads of
radicalism and technology. When the spread of chemical and
biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile
technology—when that occurs, even weak states and small
groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great
nations. Our enemies have declared this very intention,
and have been caught seeking these terrible weapons.1
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has subsequently and
repeatedly spoken of the emergence of a “nexus between terrorist
networks, terrorist states, and weapons of mass destruction
. . . that can make mighty adversaries of small or impoverished
states and even relatively small groups of individuals.”2
The Bush Doctrine identifies three threat agents: terrorist
organizations with global reach, weak states that harbor
and assist such terrorist organizations, and rogue states.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban’s Afghanistan embody the first
two agents. Rogue states are defined as states that:
. . . brutalize their own people and squander their national
resources for the personal gain of the rulers; display no
regard for international law, threaten their neighbors,
and callously violate international treaties to which they
are party; are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction,
along with other advanced military technology, to be used
as threats or offensively to achieve the aggressive designs
of these regimes; sponsor terrorism around the globe; and
reject human values and hate the United States and everything
it stands for.3
The key attributes are regime aggressiveness and the search
for WMD, especially nuclear weapons, which are far more
efficient engines of mass slaughter than chemical and biological
weapons.4
This definition of rogue states seems to be modeled on
Iraq, although Iran is a much greater purveyor of international
terrorism, and North Korea, the third “axis of evil” state,
is believed to have already acquired nuclear weapons capacity.
North Korea has, however, pursued a foreign policy of moderation
in recent years, at least until its October 2002 confession
that it had resumed its nuclear weapons program in contravention
of a 1994 agreement to suspend it. The Bush Administration
has nonetheless sought a diplomatic solution via the enlistment
of pressure from Tokyo and Beijing on Pyongyang. There has
been no talk of war against North Korea, even though Pyongyang
has a far more advanced nuclear program than Iraq’s, and
even though Kim Jong Il is, if anything, more unpredictable
than Saddam Hussein.5 The Bush Administration apparently
credits North Korea with relatively benign intentions; in
the case of Iraq, however, it has come very close to equating
capabilities and intentions—i.e., inferring intent to use
WMD offensively by virtue of their very existence in Iraq.
For example, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage
has declared that the “unrelenting drive to possess weapons
of mass destruction brings about the inevitability that
they will be used against us or our interests.”6
A key feature of the Bush Doctrine’s postulation of the
threat is its conclusion that Cold War concepts of deterrence
and containment do not necessarily work against WMD-seeking
rogues states and are irrelevant against terrorist organizations.
“In the Cold War,” states the National Security Strategy,
“we faced a generally status quo, risk-averse adversary.
. . . But deterrence based only on the threat of retaliation
is less likely to work against leaders of rogue states more
willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their
people, and the wealth of their nations. . . . Traditional
concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist
enemy.”7 This judgment echoes President Bush’s earlier remarks
in his West Point speech: “Deterrence, the promise of massive
retaliation against nations, means nothing against shadowy
terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend.”
And, “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators
with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons
on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.”8
(In contrast to containment of communism, which was aimed
at its territorial expansion, containment of Iraq since
1991 has targeted Saddam’s territorial and nuclear ambitions.
It is therefore “vertical” as well as “horizontal.”) Thus,
according to the Bush Doctrine, rogue states are a double
threat; they not only seek to acquire WMD for themselves
but also could transfer them to terrorist “allies.”
Making matters worse, argues the White House, the threat
is not just undeterrable—it is also imminent, requiring
urgent responses. Less than two months after the 9/11 attacks,
President Bush declared, “We will not wait for the authors
of mass murder to gain weapons of mass destruction.”9 In
his subsequent State of the Union Address, he further stated
that “time is not on our side. I will not wait on events,
while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws
closer and closer.”10 At West Point, he warned, “If we wait
for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long.”11
His National Security Strategy declares simply, “We cannot
let our enemies strike first.”12 National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice underscored the Administration’s sense
of imminent danger, telling CNN on 8 September 2002 that
the risk of waiting for conclusive proof of Saddam Hussein’s
determination to acquire nuclear weapons was too great because
“we don’t want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud,”13
a metaphor President Bush subsequently repeated.
In summary, the Bush Doctrine postulates an imminent, multifaceted,
undeterrable, and potentially calamitous threat to the United
States—a threat that, by virtue of the combination of its
destructiveness and invulnerability to deterrence, has no
precedent in American history. By implication, such a threat
demands an unprecedented response.
The Response
The judgment that we are dealing with enemies who are prepared
to “strike first,” “to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction
against the United States,”14 who “would [not] hesitate
to use weapons of mass destruction if they believed it would
serve their purposes,”15 inevitably dictates a policy of
what the Bush Administration has chosen to call “anticipatory
self-defense.”16 The policy is billed as a strategy of preemption.
In his West Point speech, President Bush announced that
the “war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We
must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and
confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world
we have entered the only path to safety is the path of action.
And this nation will act.”17 The National Security Strategy
declares that the “United States has long maintained the
option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat
to our national security,” and given the risk of inaction
against enemies prepared to strike first, “the United States
will, if necessary, act preemptively.”18 The National Security
Strategy goes on to say, “Legal scholars and international
jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on
the existence of an imminent threat—most often a visible
mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing
for attack.” However, “We must adapt the concept of imminent
threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.”
Because rogue states know they can’t win with conventional
weapons, “they [will] rely on acts of terror and, potentially,
the use of weapons of mass destruction—weapons that can
be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without
warning.”19
The Bush Administration does not regard preemption as a
substitute for traditional nonmilitary measures such as
sanctions and coercive diplomacy or for proactive counterproliferation
and strengthened nonproliferation efforts. Preemption is
an “add-on” tailored to deal with the new, non-deterrable
threat. But the question does arise as to whether “preemption”
best characterizes the new policy. The Pentagon’s official
definition of preemption is “an attack initiated on the
basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack
is imminent.”20 In contrast, preventive war is “a war initiated
in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent,
is inevitable, and that to delay would involve great risk.”21
Harvard’s Graham Allison has captured the logic of preventive
war: “I may some day have a war with you, and right now
I’m strong and you’re not. So I’m going to have the war
now.” Allison went on to point out that this logic was very
much behind the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “and in
candid moments some Japanese scholars say—off the record—that
[Japan’s] big mistake was waiting too long.”22
The difference between preemption and preventive war is
important. As defined above, preemptive attack is justifiable
if it meets Secretary of State Daniel Webster’s strict criteria,
enunciated in 1837 and still the legal standard, that the
threat be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means
and no moment for deliberation.”23 Preemptive war has legal
sanction.24 Preventive war, on the other hand, has none,
because the threat is neither certain nor imminent. This
makes preventive war indistinguishable from outright aggression,
which may explain why the Bush Administration insists that
its strategy is preemptive, although some Cabinet officials
have used the terms interchangeably.
The problem, at least with respect to Iraq, is the lack
of convincing evidence, at least publicly available evidence,
that an Iraqi WMD attack on the United States, its allies,
or its friends, is imminent. Such an attack seems inherently
implausible because it would invite, via devastating retaliation,
the destruction of Saddam Hussein, his regime, and even
Iraq itself. And, ironically, notwithstanding the White
House’s dismissal of deterrence as insufficient against
rogue states, the Administration has reportedly warned the
Iraqi dictator that he and his country face “annihilation”
if he uses his WMD against another country.25 The threat
was generically repeated in the Administration’s December
2002 National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction,
which declared that the United States “reserves the right
to respond with overwhelming force—including through resort
to all our options—to the use of WMD against the United
States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies.”26 Presumably,
these threats would not have been made absent some level
of confidence in deterrence. Perhaps the Administration’s
very campaign of threatening an attack on Iraq is designed
to reinforce deterrence. Yet deterrence requires the deterree
to believe that he will not be attacked if he does not commit
the act to be deterred. If he is convinced that we are coming
anyway, is not deterrence undermined?
If an Iraqi attack is not imminent, and indeed is deterrable
in any event, then does not a US attack on Iraq become a
preventive war based on an assumption of the inevitability
of hostilities and the desire to strike before the military
balance becomes less favorable (i.e., before Saddam gets
nuclear weapons)? The Bush Administration’s statements and
actions with respect to Iraq point strongly to a conviction
that war is inevitable, and its declared willingness to
start a war with Iraq is based on the Administration’s stated
judgment that time is not on the American side. In his address
to the nation from Cincinnati on 7 October 2002, Bush asked
the question, “If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons
today, and we do, does it make any sense for the world to
wait to confront him as he grows stronger and develops even
more dangerous weapons?” The President went on to assert
that Iraq could be “less than a year” away from building
a nuclear weapon, and that if allowed to do so, “a terrible
line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position
to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression . . . to
dominate the Middle East . . . [and] to threaten America”
by “pass[ing] nuclear technology to terrorists.”27
There may indeed be a case for starting a war, even a preventive
war, with Iraq, but we should be clear on the traditional
distinction between preemptive attack and preventive war.
On the other hand, perhaps the National Security Strategy
is right in insisting on the need to revisit that traditional
distinction in the face of undeterrable non-state enemies
armed with WMD. “Perhaps the gulf between preemption and
prevention,” observes Michael Walzer, “has now narrowed
so that there is little strategic (and therefore little
moral) difference between them.”28 Moreover, against Iraq
at least, the United States has an established record of
preventive military operations. As noted in 1994 by Richard
Haass, who is now head of the State Department’s Policy
Planning Staff, the “Desert Storm coalition’s attacks against
Iraqi unconventional warfare capabilities inside Iraq involved
preventive employment of force; the capabilities targeted
were not yet in a state of development to affect the course
of [the Gulf War].”29 Indeed, by the time Desert Storm was
launched, Kuwait’s liberation—a certainty—had become incidental
to the larger aim of preventing future Iraqi aggression
by destroying Iraqi WMD capacity and gutting Iraq’s conventional
military capabilities. Kuwait could have been liberated
without striking targets in Iraq, albeit at probably significantly
greater cost.30
But assume, for the moment, that the traditional distinction
between preemption and preventive war does apply, and that
Iraq does pose a threat that justifies preemptive attack.
Any preemptive attacker must have overwhelming evidence
of the enemy’s intention of imminent attack as well as a
capacity to launch swift and decisive strikes—strikes that
quickly and conclusively preempt the expected offensive
military actions. Intentions, of course, are notoriously
difficult to gauge, and precisely because of this reality
there is an innate tendency to ascribe intentions from capabilities.
Note has been made of the Bush Administration’s equation
of Iraqi capabilities and Iraqi intentions. But intentions
to do what? There is no question that Saddam Hussein has
chemical and biological weapons and would love to have nuclear
weapons. But for what purpose? The Bush Administration argues
that he is itching to use them against the United States
and its allies and friends. But could he not be seeking
his own deterrent? In Israel and the United States he faces
two nuclear-armed adversaries; would not having his own
nuclear weapons make his enemies think twice before attacking
him—as well as offset Iraq’s greatly weakened conventional
forces? And can we speculate that this is the real reason
why the Bush Administration wishes to attack him before
he gets nuclear weapons? Middle East expert Stephen Zunes
contends that “any Iraqi WMDs that may exist are under the
control of a highly centralized regime more interested in
deterring a US attack than in provoking one.”31
The Bush Doctrine: Five Observations
The Bush Doctrine has sparked great controversy at home
and abroad. Some critics see it as further testimony to
American unilateralism and arrogance; as the triumph within
the Bush Administration of a neo-conservative agenda aimed
at ensuring a permanent American primacy in the world. Others
regard it as a reckless setting of a dangerous precedent
that other states will exploit to mask aggression. Still
others see the doctrine as simply a construct to justify
an attack on Iraq. Proponents of the Bush Doctrine contend
that a threat revolution is under way which requires new
approaches to using force. The 9/11 tragedy, they argue,
was a warning of worse—much worse—things to come if the
United States remains in the reactive posture it assumed
during the Cold War. The stakes, they claim, are as high
as they were during the Cold War, but we are now dealing
with enemies who do not care whether they live or die. As
with many controversial topics, both supporters and critics
exhibit strengths and weaknesses in their arguments.
What follows is an examination of their argumentation via
five observations pertaining to the Bush Doctrine and the
threatened American attack on Iraq.
• The threat of WMD proliferated among suicidal or otherwise
undeterrable terrorist groups is new, real, and potentially
catastrophic, but the Bush Administration’s primary focus
on regime change in Iraq may be a focus on the periphery
rather than the heart of the threat.
The Bush Administration is absolutely right in identifying
the possibility of a 9/11 with nuclear weapons as the gravest
threat to American security today. Every possible effort,
including preemptive attack, should be made to forestall
this threat’s materialization. Al Qaeda seeks our destruction
and is inherently undeterrable. We have been at war with
al Qaeda since 9/11 (which renders preemption moot), and
we are committed to continued military operations against
that enemy and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan until we
are satisfied that we can leave that country strong enough
to prevent its relapse into a haven for al Qaeda.
Why, then, does the Bush Administration seek to start a
second war against Iraq? Why, reportedly, just one day after
9/11, did Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his deputy,
Paul Wolfowitz, suggest in a National Security Council meeting
that the al Qaeda attacks be used as a pretext for a US
attack on Iraq?32 Many commentators have observed that Saddam
Hussein represents unfinished business of the first Bush
Administration, and that Saddam Hussein did sponsor a plot
to assassinate President George W. Bush’s father. But what
is the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda? President Bush
declared in late September 2002 that “you can’t distinguish
between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war
on terrorism. They’re both equally as bad, and equally as
evil, and equally as destructive.” He added that the “danger
is that al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam’s madness
and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass
destruction around the world.”33
But the Administration has presented no evidence linking
Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and no convincing evidence of an
operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Both
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden may hate the United States,
but the former is a secular dictator on the Stalinist model
who has never hesitated to butcher Muslim clerics, whereas
the latter is a religious fanatic who regards secular Arab
regimes as blasphemous. Other than hatred of the United
States, they do not have a common agenda,34 though the history
of international politics is replete with very strange bedfellows
(e.g., Hitler and Stalin, and then Stalin, Churchill, and
Roosevelt).
As for the Administration’s asserted threat of a revenge-motivated
Saddam Hussein’s transfer of WMD to al Qaeda, there is no
evidence that such a transfer has been made, even though
Hussein has had chemical and biological weapons for years.
Moreover, the Administration has not addressed the question
of whether the Iraqi dictator could ever be certain that
he could make such a transfer without a trace of evidence.
And even if he could be certain on that score, would he
not also have to worry that the Bush Administration would
consider an al Qaeda WMD attack to be prima facie evidence
that such a transfer had been made? There is also the issue
of control. Saddam Hussein and his regime are about absolute
political control because control means survival. How likely
is it, therefore, that Saddam, a Stalin-like paranoid and
megalomaniac who has a long record of repressing radical
Islamists in his own country, would transfer his own hard-earned
WMD to an Islamist terrorist group beyond his control?35
If there is a plausible scenario of Iraqi first use of
WMD, including indirectly via transfer to a terrorist group,
is it not in response to an American attack on Iraq that
placed Saddam in the position of certain doom, thereby removing
any “deterrent” obstacles to taking down as many of his
enemies as possible on the way to his own extinction? During
the Gulf War, Saddam pre-delegated orders to Iraqi Scud
batteries to launch biological- and chemical-armed missiles
at Tel Aviv if the coalition forces advanced on Baghdad.36
President Bush himself has acknowledged that an “Iraqi regime
faced with its own demise may attempt cruel and desperate
measures.”37 A CIA assessment concluded that Saddam, if
convinced that a US attack could not be deterred, might
“decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists
in conducting a WMD attack against the United States would
be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking large numbers
of victims with him.”38 At a minimum, Saddam would target
Israel and thereby guarantee his posthumous fame among many
in the Arab world. Thus, would not a US attack on Iraq make
Saddam’s first use of WMD a self-fulfilling prophesy? (All
of this assumes, of course, both a US decision for war and
the survival, despite UN reinspection efforts that began
in December 2002, of deliverable Iraqi WMD.)
And if the aim of the Bush Doctrine is to prevent the marriage
of terrorism and WMD, should it not concentrate first and
foremost on destroying the vast and poorly secured stocks
of WMD in the countries of the former Soviet Union? Unlike
Iraq, al Qaeda is a truly transnational organization with
cells in at least 60 countries. As such, and given its impressive
financial resources, al Qaeda seems well positioned to exploit
opportunities posed by the presence of so much loosely protected
WMD, to say nothing of securing the services of impoverished
former Soviet WMD scientists. Yet, inexplicably, the Bush
Administration has sought to cut the very Nunn-Lugar funding
designed to enable Russia to destroy its great stocks of
WMD.
The heart of the threat is al Qaeda, not Iraq, and a US
war against Iraq inevitably will divert strategic attention
and military resources away not only from the deteriorating
situation in Afghanistan and the destruction of al Qaeda,
but also from America’s still unacceptably weak homeland
defenses. It was precisely for this reason that former National
Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft warned against an American
attack on Iraq. “Our pre-eminent security priority . . .
is the war on terrorism,” he declared in August 2002. An
attack on Iraq “would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy,
the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken,”
in part because the international unpopularity of a US attack
on Iraq would result in a “serious degradation in international
cooperation with us against terrorism.”39 In that same month,
The New York Times’ Frank Rich commented that in Iraq “we
have chosen a first-strike target, however thuggish, that
may be tangential to the stateless, itinerant Islamic terrorism
of the youthful Mohamed Atta generation.” The Wall Street
Journal’s Gerry Seib agreed: “Saddam Hussein is 65 years
old . . . and represents the threat of yesterday and today.
These young terrorists [of al Qaeda] are the threat of today
and tomorrow. And we shouldn’t fool ourselves: By itself,
taking out the Iraqi leader will do little to eliminate
them as a threat. In the short term, in fact, going after
Iraq may stir them up further.” For former Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, “It makes little sense now to
focus the world’s attention and our own military, intelligence,
diplomatic, and financial resources on a plan to invade
Iraq instead of on al Qaeda’s ongoing plans to murder innocent
people. We cannot fight a second monumental struggle without
detracting from the first one.”40
Indeed, because virtually the entire Muslim world strongly
opposes an American attack on Iraq, the Bush Administration
risks turning action against Iraq into a powerful recruiting
tool for al Qaeda which, by October 2002, had displayed
clear signs of recovery via the apparent survival of Osama
bin Laden, bombings in Indonesia and the Philippines, and
its reconstitution of small training camps along the Pakistani-Afghan
border.41 Unexpected Islamist electoral victories in Pakistan’s
Afghan border provinces in that same month were attributed
in part to popular backlash against threatened American
military action against Iraq.42
Sound strategy involves differentiation of threats and
prioritizing of enemies. Lumping terrorist organizations,
weak states that harbor and assist them, and rogue states
together into a monolithic threat impairs the ability to
discriminate and risks diversionary applications of attention
and resources. During the first two decades of the Cold
War, the United States treated communism as a centrally
directed international monolith. In so doing, it failed
not only to discern critical national antagonisms within
the communist world, but also failed to recognize that communist
insurgencies in the decolonizing Third World were first
and foremost the product of unique local circumstances,
requiring tailored rather than one-size-fits-all responses.
The result of this strategic myopia was intervention and
defeat in Vietnam. Failure to differentiate the threats
posed by Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda is, likewise, a recipe
for policy failure. Indeed, two former NSC staff members
responsible for counterterrorism issues recently concluded
that the Bush Administration’s “confusion about these matters
and the ease with which the war on al Qaeda has blurred
into a move against Iraq suggest that America’s leaders
may not yet have taken al Qaeda’s full measure.”43
• The Bush Doctrine correctly dismisses the effectiveness
of deterrence against suicidal terrorist organizations,
but it may be mistaken in dismissing its effectiveness against
rogue states.
Like other states, rogue states have “return addresses”
in the form of attackable assets, including leaders who,
unlike suicide bombers, value their lives. In the case of
Iraq, these assets include the person of Saddam Hussein,
his internal security services, the Special Republican Guard,
the Republican Guard, the Ba’th Party leadership, and Saddam’s
palaces. The United States could destroy all of these targets
with nuclear weapons in a matter of minutes.
The Bush Administration nonetheless has asserted that Iraq,
and by implication the other “axis of evil” states, Iran
and North Korea, are not—or at least may not be—deterrable.
The argument is twofold: Saddam has used WMD twice before,
against his own people and Iranian troops; and he is “unbalanced,”
even “mad.”44 Yet the fact that Saddam has already used
WMD does not prove an immunity to deterrence because his
helpless victims were in no position to retaliate. (Saddam
has always done well against enemies that can’t fight back.)
Is it not significant that he refrained from using WMD during
the Gulf War against the United States and Israel—enemies
that were in a position to launch devastating retaliation?
And how does one explain the absence of war on the Korean
Peninsula for the last 50 years? North Korea is the longest-running
rogue state in the world today, and it is far better armed
with WMD and means of delivering them than is Iraq. Has
not North Korea been effectively deterred for half a century?
Philip Bobbitt, in his magisterial The Shield of Achilles:
War, Peace, and the Course of History, has questioned the
argument that rogue states are not deterrable. Discussing
the advisability of ballistic missile defenses, which have
been sold, like preemption, on the grounds of rogue state
undeterrability, Bobbitt asks:
Is it really sensible to think that providing the great
states of the West with ballistic missile defenses would
actually discourage a “rogue state” to a greater degree
than the assurance of nuclear annihilation that would surely
follow such an attack [which] already deters them today?
To believe this assumes a psychological hypersensitivity
to the mere possibility of failure on the part of the leaderships
of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that seems incompatible with
their characters . . . and an indifference to survival that
these leaders, though they may seek it in their recruits,
do not prominently display themselves.45
On the matter of sanity, can Saddam really be compared
to the suicide bombers of al Qaeda, who value a cause more
than their own lives? Is Saddam eager to throw away his
own life and regime for the sake of injuring the United
States? Whatever the Iraqi dictator is or is not, is he
not above all a survivor who values his own life and position
to the point of willingness to massacre suspected internal
enemies and to personally murder his own colleagues? Saddam
“is a rational and political calculator who can reverse
himself on a dime if his regime is threatened,” says Jerrold
Post, former CIA profiler of Saddam Hussein. “But he can
become extremely dangerous when he is backed into a corner.”46
If there is an argument to be made on behalf of Saddam’s
undeterrability, it is his demonstrated capacity for catastrophic
miscalculation.47 He has plunged his country into three
disastrous wars,48 completely misjudging the strength and
will of his adversaries; and he may well have dangerously
convinced himself, as a result of the Gulf War, that the
acquisition of nuclear weapons will provide him immunity
from American military responses to future Iraqi aggression.
Personality cult dictatorships are prone to strategic misjudgment.
“Mr. Hussein is often unintentionally suicidal,” contends
Kenneth Pollack, former CIA analyst of the Iraqi military
and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading
Iraq. He “is a risk-taker who plays dangerous games without
realizing how dangerous they truly are,” because he “is
deeply ignorant of the outside world and surrounded by sycophants
who tell him what he wants to hear.”49 As such, he is very
unlike Stalin, to whom he has been compared by believers
in the efficacy of traditional deterrence against Saddam.
Though cruel and ruthless, Stalin was also cautious and
patient. “That Saddam [is] an admirer [of Stalin] and perhaps
an intentional imitator I do not doubt,” observed 98-year-old
George Kennan in late 2002. “But the streak of adventurism
that has marked Saddam’s behavior was quite foreign to Stalin.”50
Richard K. Betts believes that “reckless as [Saddam] has
been, he has never yet done something Washington told him
would be suicidal.”51 To be sure, his invasion of Kuwait
turned out to be a disastrous miscalculation, but in August
1990 Saddam had little reason to believe the United States
would react the way it did; indeed, far from attempting
to deter the Iraqi dictator, the first Bush Administration
unwittingly gave him a green light. And there is no question
that Saddam’s invasion of Iran a decade earlier was also
a profound misjudgment. But it also was understandable:
the Ayatollah Khomeini was openly attempting to subvert
Saddam’s regime.
• The Bush Doctrine rightly focuses on the principle of
regime change as the most effective means of defeating threats
posed by rogue and terrorist-hosting weak states, but actual
regime change can entail considerable, even unacceptable,
military and political risk, depending upon local, regional,
and international circumstances.
Doctrinal prescription, if insensitive to the uniqueness
and dominance of circumstance, is a recipe for disaster.
Again, George Kennan: “I deplore doctrines. They purport
to define one’s behavior in future situations where it may
or may not be suitable.”52 As noted, US intervention in
the Vietnam War was the product of dogmatic, indiscriminate
anti-communism.
The issue is not the desirability of regime change, but
rather, in each specific case, its feasibility, costs, risks,
and potentially unintended consequences as weighed against
the magnitude and imminence of the threat. Preceding administrations
were content to treat symptoms of aggression; offenders
were driven back to their own borders or subjected to coercive
diplomacy, but they were left intact, free to fight another
day. The first Bush Administration restricted its main Gulf
War objective to the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait;
it failed to inflict a military defeat on Iraq of sufficient
magnitude to bring down Saddam Hussein, though at the moment
of victory Administration officials believed otherwise.
The Clinton Administration recoiled from initiating a decisive
use of force in the Balkans against the Bosnian Serbs and
later Serbia, and countered al Qaeda attacks on American
interests in Africa, the Middle East, and Persian Gulf with
ineffectual punitive missile strikes.
In contrast, the current Bush Administration is prepared
to go to the source of aggression, although with respect
to Iraq it has waffled on the scope of regime change.53
It toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and seeks Saddam
Hussein’s destruction. In so doing, it extends to the 21st
century an established American practice of the 20th, in
which the United States repeatedly overthrew regimes it
did not like in its own hemisphere and occasionally elsewhere.
But the rogue states we face today are not banana republic
weaklings, and terrorist-hosting weak states beckon as strategic
quagmires. Moreover, forcible regime change in the Islamic
world, especially given the American position in the Israeli-Palestinian
war, risks converting the war on terror into a “clash of
civilizations.” The risk of sparking such a clash would
be particularly acute in the event that Saddam Hussein responded
to an American attack by launching WMD against Israel, which
almost certainly would provoke Israeli retaliation in kind.
In the case of both Afghanistan and Iraq, furthermore, the
Bush Administration has focused almost all of its attention
and resources on the first—and arguably the easier—half
of the regime change challenge: getting rid of the old.
The more daunting task is creating a new, enduring, and
nonthreatening political order. What is the Bush Administration’s
vision of a post-Saddam Iraq, and how much political energy
and military and financial clout is it prepared to expend
on a new Iraq, and for how long? Or is it sufficient simply
to overthrow Saddam Hussein and then let Iraq’s political
chips fall where they may? There has been a flood of Administration
analyses and statements on the necessity and means of toppling
Saddam Hussein, but barely a trickle of testimony on its
post-Saddam preferences. Indeed, President Bush’s first
public reference to America’s possible role in a post-Saddam
Iraq came in a speech he delivered on 5 October 2002, a
full year after his Administration began talking of war
with Iraq.54 In that same month, Newt Gingrich, referring
to the “mistake we made in Afghanistan,” warned, with respect
to Iraq, “You shouldn’t go into a country militarily without
having thought through what it should look like afterward.”55
Terminating wars in a manner that produces a better and
enduring peace is an inherently difficult task, and the
United States has a track record of botching war termination
(e.g., World War I, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War). There
is certainly no encouragement in the Bush Administration’s
visceral aversion to direct participation in “nation-building,”
an aversion whose price is evident in the deteriorating
security situation in Afghanistan. Yet regime change imposes
post-regime military, political, and economic responsibilities.
Failure to step up to those responsibilities not only betrays
those liberated by regime change but also invites a “worse
peace” that will incubate future threats.
Perhaps, however, the Administration will make a serious
effort to rebuild Iraq as a democratic market state. Notwithstanding
Iraq’s terrible ethnic and religious cleavages, the country
is, after all, far more strategically important to the United
States than is Afghanistan, and the combination of a relatively
well-educated population, huge proven oil reserves, and
a secular history offers a possible foundation upon which
to build such a state, which in turn could serve in the
region as an alternative model to the authoritarian and
often economically discredited regimes that dominate the
Middle East.56
• In transforming an implicit policy option—striking first—into
a declaratory doctrine, the Bush Administration has reinforced
an image of America, widely held among friends and adversaries
alike, of a unilateralist, overbearing “hyperpower” insensitive
to the concerns of others.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, candidate Bush declared,
“Our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms
of power. And that’s why we’ve got to be humble and project
strength in a way that promotes freedom. . . . If we are
an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that way, but if we’re
a humble nation, they’ll respect us.”57 Yet preemption,
and certainly preventive war, have never been associated
with humility. For a great power, the option of striking
first is always available in a crisis, and against a genuine
threat justifying preemption, such as that posed to the
United States by the Soviet Union’s clandestine deployment
of nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, the United States could
expect to carry world opinion, as it did then. But by elevating
preemption into an explicit doctrine, and by threatening
Iraq with what smacks of preventive war, the United States
seems to be deliberately walking away from over a half-century’s
effort to embed its security in a web of multilateral institutions
that reassure others that American power will be used with
restraint.
Pursuit of the neo-conservative agenda of permanent American
primacy via perpetual military supremacy, and, as a matter
of doctrine, an aggressive willingness to use force preemptively,
even preventively, to dispatch threatening regimes and promote
the spread of American political and economic institutions,
invites perpetual isolation and enmity. As John Ikenberry
comments:
America’s nascent neoimperial grand strategy threatens
to rend the fabric of the international community and political
partnerships precisely at a time when that community and
those partnerships are urgently needed [to wage war against
terrorist threats]. It is an approach fraught with peril
and likely to fail. It is not only politically unsustainable
but diplomatically harmful. And if history is any guide,
it will trigger antagonism and resistance that will leave
America in a more hostile and divided world.58
The influence of neo-conservative ideologues on the Bush
White House has been much remarked upon.59 That influence
has been evident in the Administration’s disdain for treaties
and coalitions that in any way limit American freedom of
action, its pronounced one-sidedness on the Israeli-Palestinian
struggle, its preoccupation with regime change in Iraq,
its proclamation of the use-of-force doctrine that is the
subject of this essay, and its confidence in the self-evident
virtue of the United States and its political and economic
values as the agents of global transformation.60 Long before
9/11, the neo-conservatives were committed to a hyper-activist
foreign policy based on large increases in defense spending
and a commitment “to challenge regimes hostile to our interests
and values” and “to accept responsibility for America’s
unique role in preserving and extending an international
order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our
principles.”61 In Iraq, they see an opportunity not only
to destroy a tyrant but also to demonstrate America’s will
to use its unprecedented power and to create a model state
in Iraq for others in the region to follow. Beyond that,
they seek to prevent the emergence of any military rival.
The National Security Strategy not only declares the American
objective of “dissuad[ing] potential adversaries from pursuing
a military build-up in the hopes of surpassing, or equaling,
the power of the United States,” but also lectures China,
thought to be the coming challenger, against “pursuing advanced
military capabilities . . . an outdated path that, in the
end, will hamper its pursuit of national greatness.”62 Thus
military supremacy is legitimate for the United States,
but military modernization by relatively weak China is not.
Pursuit of a unilateralist, primacist agenda risks long-run
insecurity for the United States. “An explicit American
hegemony may appear [to the Administration] preferable to
the messy compromises of the existing order, but if it is
nakedly based on commercial interests and military power
it will lack all legitimacy. Terror will continue, and worse,
widespread sympathy with terror.” So warns Sir Michael Howard.
He continues:
But American power placed at the service of an international
community legitimized by representative institutions and
the rule of law, accepting its constraints and inadequacies
but continually working to improve them: that is a very
different matter. . . . [The United States] must cease to
think of itself as a heroic lone protagonist in a cosmic
war against “evil,” and reconcile itself to a less spectacular
and more humdrum role: that of the leading participant in
a flawed but still indispensable system of cooperative global
governance.63
In fairness to proponents of preemption, however, it should
be pointed out that neither preemption nor, certainly, regime
change are new to American statecraft. Before the War of
1812, James Madison authorized military operations in Spanish
Florida in an attempt to preempt the British from using
it as a base from which to attack the United States. Indeed,
the subsequently proclaimed Monroe Doctrine was aimed at
preempting renewed European military intervention in the
Western Hemisphere. The post-Civil War US winter campaigns
against the Western Indians were preemptive in nature. In
1898, the United States launched a preemptive attack on
a Spanish fleet in the Philippines even though that target
and locus had nothing to do with the origins of the Spanish-American
War. NSC-68 (1950) explicitly accepted the idea of a preemptive
nuclear attack if a Soviet attack was known to be on its
way or about to be launched.64 During the Cold War, the
United States engineered the covert (e.g., Guatemala, Iran)
and overt (e.g., Grenada) overthrow of regimes it believed
were precursors to the establishment of expanded Soviet
power and influence. US intervention in Vietnam was justified
as a means of preventing the other Asian “dominoes” from
falling to communism. And US action during the Cuban Missile
Crisis of 1962 was preemptive to the extent that the US
naval “quarantine” of Cuba and threat of nuclear retaliation
against the Soviet Union were aimed at forestalling the
establishment on the island of a permanent force of Soviet
medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles. To be sure, President
Kennedy found a way out of the crisis short of war, but
he did warn that “we no longer live in a world where only
the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge
to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril.”65 Great
powers have a habit of intervening to forestall smaller
problems from becoming larger problems.
• The Bush Doctrine invites abuse and establishes a dangerous
precedent for others to follow.
For the United States, the risk is doctrinal degeneration
into an excuse for attacking regimes we simply don’t like
versus regimes that pose genuine “preemptive” threats. The
doctrine invites abuse because it offers no criteria by
which to judge a threat justifying a preemptive strike.
A rogue state is not automatically a target for preemption;
if it were, the Bush Administration would be talking about
a war with Iran and not talking at all to North Korea. Indeed,
what justifies an attack on Iraq but not on Iran or North
Korea, which, like Iraq, the Administration has identified
as “axis of evil” states? Had the Bush Doctrine been in
place after World War II, could it have been invoked against
the Soviet Union and Communist China, both of which met
the new National Security Strategy definition of a rogue
state and were pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons
until 1949 and 1964, respectively? “Because the doctrine
sets no bounds,” argues an analysis of the National Security
Strategy, “might the US again choose preemption even though
deterrence would this time be appropriate? And knowing this,
might others be more likely to strike even earlier—requiring
the US to improve its first strike capabilities in return?
The logic of offense and defense could make a world of unbounded
preemption very ugly indeed.”66
A Brookings Institution critique concludes that the Bush
Doctrine’s “silence on the circumstances that justify preemption”
raises the danger that other countries “will embrace the
preemption argument as a cover for settling their own national
security scores. . . . [U]ntil the Administration can define
the line separating justifiable preemption from unlawful
aggression in ways that will gain widespread adherence abroad,
it risks seeing its words used to justify ends it opposes.”67
Russia has already invoked American endorsement of preemption
as justifying possible military action against Georgia,
from which Chechen separatists (or terrorists, if you prefer)
conduct operations in Chechnya. India could attack Pakistan,
happily invoking the Bush Doctrine on the charge of Pakistan’s
sponsorship of terrorism in Kashmir. And China could justify
a preventive war against Taiwan as a means of forestalling
its threatened independence or unfavorable (to China) alteration
of the military balance across the Taiwan Strait. “It cannot
be in either the American national interest or the world’s
interest,” argues Henry Kissinger, “to develop principles
that grant every nation an unfettered right of preemption
against its own definition of threats to its security.”68
However convincing the case for an attack on Iraq, preemption
as a declaratory doctrine lacking criteria but applicable
to a generic category of states invites real trouble after
Iraq, and for that reason could turn out to be a poor, even
impossible basis for America’s relations with the rest of
the world.
Coda
In the earliest years of the Cold War, before the Soviet
Union exploded its first atomic bomb, there were calls in
the United States for preventive war against another evil
dictator. The calls continued even after the Soviets detonated
their first bomb in 1949. Indeed, in the following year,
the Commandant of the Air Force’s new Air War College publicly
asked to be given the order to conduct a nuclear strike
against fledgling Soviet atomic capabilities. “And when
I went to Christ,” said the Commandant, “I think I could
explain to Him why I wanted to do it now before it’s too
late. I think I could explain to Him that I had saved civilization.
With it [the A-bomb] used in time, we can immobilize a foe
[and] reduce his crime before it happened.”69
President Truman fired the Commandant, preferring instead
a long, hard, and, in the end, stunningly successful policy
of containment and deterrence.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
1. Restated in The National Security Strategy of the United
States of America (Washington: White House, September 2002),
p. 13. Hereinafter referred to as National Security Strategy.
2. Donald Rumsfeld, “The Price of Inaction Can Be Truly
Catastrophic,” Asahi Shimbun (Japan), 10 September 2002,
http://ebird.dtic.mil/Sep2002/e20020910price.htm.
3. National Security Strategy, p. 14.
4. For a comparison of various WMD, see Gregg Easterbrook,
“Term Limits, The Meaninglessness of WMD,” New Republic,
7 October 2002, pp. 22-25.
5. See Michael R. Gordon, “In Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil,’ Why
Iraq Stands Out,” The New York Times, 9 September 2002.
6. Quoted in Kevin Whitelaw and Mark Mazzetti, “Why War?”
U.S. News and World Report, 14 October 2002, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Oct2002/e20021007whywar.htm,
emphasis added.
7. National Security Strategy, p. 15.
8. Text of President Bush’s Speech at West Point, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/international/02PTEX-WEB.html.
Hereinafter “Speech at West Point.”
9. Quoted in William Kristol, “Taking the War Beyond Terrorism,”
The Washington Post, 31 January 2002.
10. The President’s State of the Union Address, Washington,
29 January 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html.
11. Speech at West Point.
12. National Security Strategy, p. 15.
13. Quoted in Scott Peterson, “Can Hussein Be Deterred?”
Christian Science Monitor, 10 September 2002.
14. National Security Strategy, p. 14.
15. Donald Rumsfeld, “We Must Act to Prevent a Greater
Evil, Even if that Act Means War,” London Independent, 8
September 2002.
16. Rumsfeld, “The Price of Inaction.”
17. Speech at West Point.
18. National Security Strategy, p. 15.
19. Ibid.
20. US Department of Defense, DOD Dictionary of Military
and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02 (Washington:
Department of Defense, 12 April 2001), p. 333.
21. Ibid., p. 336.
22. Quoted in David E. Sanger, “Beating Them to the Prewar,”
The New York Times, 28 September 2002.
23. Quoted in Michael Elliot, “Strike First, Explain Yourself
Later,” Time, 24 June 2002, http://www.time.com/columnist/elliot/article/0,9565,265536,00.html.
Webster was referring to an incident in 1837 in which Canadian
forces attacked a US ship, the Caroline, above Niagara Falls,
believed to be conveying supporters of a rebellion against
British rule in Canada. The British claimed to have acted
in self-defense, a claim that Webster rejected with his
dictum on preemption.
24. See William W. Bishop, Jr., International Law, Cases
and Materials (2d ed.; Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), pp.
776-79.
25. On 8 September 2002, Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, stated that
Administration officials “have recently let Saddam Hussein
know what the consequences of his use of a weapon of mass
destruction . . . against any of his neighbors [would be],
and that would be annihilation.” Senator Richard C. Shelby,
Vice Chairman of the Committee, also stated that Saddam
Hussein had been formally warned of “extinction” if he used
such a weapon. Joyce Howard Price, “U.S. Reprisal to Be
‘Annihilation,’” Washington Times, 9 September 2002.
26. National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction
(Washington: White House, December 2002), p. 3.
27. “President Bush’s Speech on the Use of Force,” The
New York Times, 8 October 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/08/national/08BTEX.html.
Hereinafter, “Speech on the Use of Force.”
28. Michael Walzer, “No Strikes,” New Republic, 30 September
2002, p. 20.
29. Richard N. Haass, Intervention, The Use of American
Military Force in the Post-Cold War Era (Washington: Carnegie
Endowment for World Peace, 1994), p. 51.
30. For an assessment of explicit and implicit US political
objectives in the Gulf War, see Jeffrey Record, Hollow Victory,
A Contrary View of the Gulf War (McLean, Va.: Brassey’s
[US], 1993), pp. 50-56.
31. Stephen Zunes, “The Case Against War,” The Nation,
30 September 2002, pp. 11-16.
32. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2002), pp. 48-49.
33. Quoted in Mike Allen, “Bush: Hussein, Al Qaeda Linked,”
The Washington Post, 26 September 2002.
34. See David Benjamin, “Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda Are
Not Allies,” The New York Times, 30 September 2002, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Sep2002/e20020930saddam.htm.
35. See Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred
Terror (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 254.
36. Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm, The Case
for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 151,
266.
37. “Speech on the Use of Force.”
38. Cited in Alison Mitchell and Carl Hulse, “C.I.A. Warns
that a U.S. Attack May Ignite Terror,” The New York Times,
9 October 2002. Also see Dana Priest, “Analysts Discount
Attack by Iraq,” The Washington Post,” 9 October 2002.
39. Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t Attack Iraq,” The Wall Street
Journal, 15 August 2002, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Aug2002/e20020815dont.htm.
40. Madeleine K. Albright, “Where Iraq Fits In on the War
on Terror,” The New York Times, 13 September 2002.
41. Michael Elliot, “How Al-Qaeda Got Back on the Attack,”
Time, 28 October 2002, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Oct2002/e20021021howal.htm.
42. Georgie Anne Geyer, “Backlash Against Going After Iraq,”
Chicago Tribune, 18 October 2002.
43. Benjamin and Simon, p. 385. Also see Tony Judt, “The
Wrong War at the Wrong Time,” The New York Times, 20 October
2002.
44. In his West Point speech, President Bush referred to
the threat of “unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass
destruction” (Speech at West Point). Subsequently, he spoke
of “Saddam’s madness” (Allen).
45. Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace,
and the Course of History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002),
p. 685.
46. Whitelaw and Mazzetti, p. 5.
47. For an excellent presentation of this argument, see
Kenneth M. Pollack, “Why Iraq Can’t Be Deterred,” The New
York Times, 26 September 2002.
48. The Second Kurdish War of 1974-75, the Iraq-Iran War
of 1980-88, and the Gulf War of 1990-91.
49. Pollack, “Why Iraq Can’t Be Deterred.” For a rejoinder,
see Steve Chapman, “Is Hussein Too Crazy for Us to Control?”
Chicago Tribune, 3 October 2002. Also see Jack F. Matlock,
Jr., “Deterring the Undeterrable,” New York Times Book Review,
20 October 2002, p. 47.
50. Interviewed by and quoted in Jane Mayer, “A Doctrine
Passes,” The New Yorker, 14 and 21 October 2002, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Oct2002/s20021008doctrine.htm.
For a comparison of Saddam, Stalin, and Hitler as risk-takers,
see Pollack, The Threatening Storm, pp. 252-56.
51 Richard K. Betts, “Suicide from Fear of Death?” Foreign
Affairs, 82 (January/February 2003), 39.
52. Mayer.
53. In mid-October 2002, President Bush and other Administration
officials declared that regime change could be accomplished
in Iraq without Saddam Hussein’s removal as long as Iraq
was completely, verifiably, and permanently disarmed of
its WMD. See Joyce Howard Price, “Disarmed Saddam Can Stay
in Power, U.S. Says,” Washington Times, 21 October 2002;
and David E. Sanger, “Bush Declares U.S. is Using Diplomacy
to Disarm Hussein,” The New York Times, 22 October 2002.
54. David E. Sanger, “Bush Tells Critics Hussein Could
Strike at Any Time,” The New York Times, 6 October 2002,
http://ebird.dtic.mil/Oct2002/s20021007/tells.htm.
55. Quoted in James Dao and Eric Schmitt, “Rift Over Plan
to Impose Rule on Iraq,” The New York Times, 10 October
2002.
56. For two assessments of potential US roles in a post-Saddam
Iraq, see James Fallows, “The Fifty-First State?,” and Robert
D. Kaplan, “A Post-Saddam Scenario,” Atlantic Monthly, November
2002, pp. 53-64 and 88-90, respectively.
57. “2nd Presidential Debate Between Gov. Bush and Vice
President Gore,” The New York Times, 12 October 2000.
58. G. John Ikenberry, “America’s Imperial Ambition,” Foreign
Affairs, 81 (September/October 2002), 45. Also see Joseph
S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox Of Power, Why the World’s Only
Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
2002).
59. See, for example, Anatol Lieven, “The Push for War,”
London Review of Books, 3 October 2002, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n19/liev01_.html;
Michael Hirsh, “Bush and the World,” Foreign Affairs, 81
(September-October 2002), 18-43; Bill Keller, “The Sunshine
Warrior,” The New York Times Magazine, 22 September 2002,
pp. 48-55, 84, 88, 96-97; Frances Fitzgerald, “George Bush
and the World,” The New York Review of Books, 26 September
2002, pp. 80-86; Tony Judt, “It’s Own Worst Enemy,” The
New York Review of Books, 15 August 2002, pp. 12-18; and
Jay Bookman, “The President’s Real Goal in Iraq,” Atlanta
Journal Constitution, 29 September 2002.
60. For early expositions of the neoconservative “primacist”
foreign policy agenda, see Joshua Muravchik, The Imperative
of American Leadership, A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism
(Washington: AEI Press, 1996), and Zalmay Khalilzad, From
Containment to Global Leadership? America and the World
After the Cold War (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1995). Later
works include Robert Kagan, “The Benevolent Empire,” Foreign
Policy, No. 111 (Summer 1998), pp. 24-35; “American Power—For
What? A Symposium,” Commentary, 109 (January 2000), 21-47;
Robert A. Kagan and William Kristol, eds., Present Dangers:
Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy
(San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000); and Donald Kagan
and Frederick W. Kagan, While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion,
Military Weakness and the Threat to Peace Today (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 2000). For an exposition of an extreme
neoconservative’s anticipated consequences of Saddam Hussein’s
removal, see Michael Ledeen, “The War on Terror Won’t End
in Baghdad,” The Wall Street Journal, 4 September 2002.
61. “Statement of Principles,” Project for the New American
Century, 3 June 1997.
62. National Security Strategy, pp. 27, 30.
63. Sir Michael Howard, “Smoke on the Horizon,” Financial
Times, 8 September 2002.
64. Scott D. Sagan, Moving Targets, Nuclear Strategy and
National Security (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1989).
65. Quoted in Todd S. Purdum, “The Missiles of 1962 Haunt
the Iraq Debate,” The New York Times, 13 October 2002.
66. Dave McIntyre, Understanding the New National Security
Strategy of the United States, Institute Analysis 009 (Washington:
ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, September 2002),
p. 4.
67. Ivo H. Daalder, James M. Lindsey, and James B. Steinberg,
“The Bush National Security Strategy: An Evaluation,” Brookings
Institution Policy Brief (Washington: Brookings Institution,
4 October 2002), p. 8.
68. Quoted, ibid., p. 8.
69. Major General Orville A. Anderson, quoted in Allen
Rankin, “U.S. Could Wipe Out Red A-Nests in a Week, Gen.
Anderson Asserts,” Montgomery Advertiser, 1 September 1950.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffrey Record is a former professional staff member of
the Senate Armed Services Committee and senior fellow at
the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. His latest book,
Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential
Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo, was published in March
2002 by the Naval Institute Press.
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http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/03spring/fromed.htm
Douglass Carmichael
email doug@bigmindmedia.com
home page www.dougcarmichael.com
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