THE BUSH DOCTRINE - First strike - Candidates ought to be clear about their position on pre-emptive war

THE BUSH DOCTRINE - First strike - Candidates ought to be clear about their position on pre-emptive war
By Robert Schmuhl. Robert Schmuhl is Annenberg-Joyce Professor of American Studies and Journalism at the University of Notre Dame and author of "In So Many Words: Arguments and Adventures."
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
Published March 4, 2007

As rhetorical firefights over Iraq keep breaking out among the 2008 presidential candidates, the controversial policy that produced the war seems strangely distant from the campaign battlefield.

The Bush Doctrine, formulated after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, endorsed pre-emptive war as an option for dealing with potential enemies. But the past four years in Iraq have been a case study of the unintended consequences of the doctrine's aggressive approach.

Rather than sniping at each other about past statements or votes on Iraq, presidential candidates--Democratic and Republican alike--should be taking a stand on the policy of pre-emption. Will the nation's next president adopt a strike-first strategy?

The Bush Doctrine shifted American foreign policy from its Cold War emphasis on containment and deterrence to a more activist, assertive approach. Domestically, the new stance seemed a tough-minded response to terrorist threats. Internationally, U.S. strategy was perceived as superpower saber rattling with dangerous and unforeseen implications.

Previous presidents have acted pre-emptively. Lyndon Johnson did so in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Ronald Reagan in Grenada in 1983. But the Bush Doctrine is different in its unprecedented threat of military action and its procedural merging of pre-emptive and preventive war into indistinguishable activities.

Although documents articulating the administration's approach--notably "National Security Strategy" reports from 2002 and 2006--emphasize self-defense and a need to be pro-active when potential peril looms, the policy's execution is less precise and more problematic.

But the inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or direct involvement between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein--the stated reasons for going to war--weakens its rationale and undercuts the policy triggering it.

Iraq, from what we know now, is less an example of pre-emptive war--one based on incontrovertible evidence of an imminent attack--than of a preventive war, or one initiated on grounds that conflict is inevitable but not imminent.

This is an important distinction. The Bush Doctrine focuses on pre-emption without dealing with the more bellicose concept of preventive war.

Given all that has happened since 2003, candidates seeking the White House next year need to look beyond the Iraq imbroglio and debate the larger policy that led to America's entanglement there.

Here, the thinking of former presidents can be instructive, though a time when terror is such a threat is vastly different from earlier eras of conflict.


`Make war at pleasure'

As a member of the House of Representatives in 1848, Abraham Lincoln opposed pre-emptive strikes in the Mexican War because it allowed a president to act like a king and "to make war at pleasure." Later, in his first inaugural address in 1861, Lincoln spoke directly to Southern secessionists about "the momentous issue of civil war," saying, "The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors."

Nearly a century later, Dwight Eisenhower said in 1954 that modern weaponry made him, as a former military commander, dubious about any strike-first approach.

"A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today," Eisenhower said. "How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled? . . . That isn't preventive war; that is war. I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously [who] came in and talked about such a thing."

Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy, was more emphatic. Speaking in 1963 at American University, Kennedy said the United States, "as the world knows, will never start a war."

With Iraq, the world now knows otherwise in no uncertain terms, and the consequences are troubling. In late January, the BBC World Service released results of a 25-country, 26,000-person survey. In 17 countries, a majority of those polled held a mainly negative view of U.S. influence, with Germany, France, Australia and Great Britain among the most critical.

As long as a strike-first policy is central to security strategy and execution, world leaders will respond in ways Americans find disturbing or dangerous. It's not surprising that Iran and North Korea allegedly have been seeking nuclear weapons when the only other member of the president's "axis of evil"--Iraq--was on the receiving end of a U.S. attack. American policy is a spark in this new arms race.

Is it any wonder Russian President Vladimir Putin threw rhetorical punches at the U.S. in his speech last month at the Munich Conference on Security Policy? Saying America "has overstepped its national borders in every way," Putin was, according to Russian media analysis, warning the 2008 presidential candidates that continuation of the Bush Doctrine could lead to more profound global crises.

While Putin grasped the broader issue, candidates are doing the opposite. By focusing so directly on Iraq and whether voting for congressional authorization of military action was right or wrong, White House hopefuls seem fixated on one tree rather than the more significant forest.


Jousting among Democrats

Especially on the Democratic side, with a fervent anti-war base crucial for nominating support, candidates keep jousting over prewar judgments and what they currently support.

Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd and John Edwards have called their Senate votes authorizing the administration's use of force a mistake, while Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson opposed the war, to varying degrees, from the beginning.

This leaves Hillary Rodham Clinton conspicuous among Democratic candidates in having voted for the Senate war resolution while being adamant about not apologizing for her vote or acknowledging it as a mistake. In fact, she told a New Hampshire audience recently, "If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from."

Hers is a deliberate posture to avoid the label of an irresolute mind-changer. But the speech she delivered on the Senate floor Oct. 10, 2002, the day before the vote, is a nuanced argument of hopes and hedges.

After 26 paragraphs of history and context leading up to what she called "probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make," Clinton said: "Because bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely, and therefore, war less likely, and because a good faith effort by the United States, even if it fails, will bring more allies and legitimacy to our cause, I have concluded, after careful and serious consideration, that a vote for the resolution best serves the security of our nation."

Her vote, to a certain extent, was a bet with the Bush administration. It is now evident she lost that bet. However, near the end of her remarks she broadens her scope, taking direct aim at the Bush Doctrine. "My vote," she said, "is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for unilateralism, or for the arrogance of American power or purpose--all of which carry grave dangers for our nation, for the rule of international law and for the peace and security of people throughout the world."

As the 2008 campaign intensifies, with televised debates and town-hall meetings multiplying, candidates have an obligation to tell the electorate more than their views, past and present, on Iraq. If pre-emptive or preventive war continues as the doctrine of the next president, voters--and the wider world community--should know whether another Iraq might loom on America's horizon.