One of the most destructive aspects of the Iraq War was that it was the first application of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, falsely passed off as "preemption." Since it's hard to see how Bush can initiate another war at this point with so many troops tied down in Iraq, he's very unlikely to apply the doctrine in a second case before the election.
So we are unlikely to know until after the election whether the Bush team intends to apply this approach against other countries, or whether instead it was mainly an elaborate justification for the invasion of Iraq. (And then, of course, only if Bush wins.) Since it is the official foreign policy strategy of the United States right now, we have to assume that the Bush doctrine will mean more such wars of "liberation."
Based heavily on the Project for the New American Century's 2000 report Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, the Bush Doctrine was articulated in Bush's speech at West Point of 06/01/02 and made official in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America released 09/20/02.
Definitions
John Dean gives a good brief description of the difference between "preemptive" and "preventive" wars in Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (2004). Speaking of the National Security Strategy, with particular reference to the fifth part, Dean writes:
Lawyers who worked on this policy statement intentionally fudged it, talking in terms of traditional preemption (quick-draw self-defense) but also in terms of preventive war - acting as the aggressor. In fact, experienced policy analysts doubt that preventive war is viable. For example, James J. Wirtz, a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, and James A. Russell, a fellow at the Naval Postgraduate School, believe this formal declaration of policy is more rhetoric than reality, for there are too many obstacles to implement such a policy on any sort of sustained basis, everything from the logistical problems of trying to go it alone to "political costs of abrogating international law." But the history of this presidency and the evolution of this strategy suggest that Bush and Cheney fully intend to implement this appropriately described muscular Wilsonism. International law is only a problem if you respect it and are not a sole superpower so strong that you can act with impunity.
Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay give a somewhat longer version in America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (2003):
[C]ritics argued that the Bush strategy suffered from considerable conceptual confusion, which had real policy consequences. Most important, it conflated the notion of preemptive and preventive war. Preemptive wars are initiated when another country is clearly about to attack. Israel's decision to go to war in June 1967 against its Arab neighbors is the classic example. Preventive wars are launched by states against others before the state being attacked poses a real or imminent threat. "What made war inevitable," the ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War, "was the growth in Athenian power and the fear this caused in Sparta." The purpose of initiating war in these circumstances is therefore to stop a threat before it can arise. Israel's strike against Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 was one example of preventive war. Cheney's argument that Iraq needed to be struck before it acquired nuclear weapons was another. Much of the Bush rhetoric - including the justification for the Iraq War - was consistent with the notion of preventive war, not preemption. Yet, while preemptive wars have had a long-recognized standing in international law as a legitimate form of self-defense, preventive wars did not. Not surprisingly, a resort to preventive war in the case of Iraq would prove highly controversial.
The Wirtz/Russell paper Dean cites above is "U.S. Policy on Preventive War and Preemption," Nonproliferation Review Spring 2003. They describe the difference this way:
Although the terms often are used interchaneably, "preventive war" and "preemption" are distinct strategic concepts. Preventive war is based on the concept that war is inevitable, and that it is better to fight now while the costs are low rather than later when the costs are high. It is a deliberate decision to go to war. Preventive war thinking seems to dominate Bush administration planning about Iraq: It is better to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime now than to deal later with a regime armed with nuclear weapons or other WMD. Preventive war thinking, however, can turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, since treating war as inevitable can help make it inevitable. It also can lead to unnecessary conflict because few things are inevitable...
Preemption, by contrast, is nothing more than a quick draw. Upon detecting evidence that an opponent is about to attack, one beats the opponent to the punch and attacks first to blunt the impending strike. States that fear preentive war often adopt preemptive strategies: During the Cold War, preemption, often referred to as a "launch-on-warning attacks," was depicted as a desperate doctrine to thwart an opponent's effort to bring the Cold War to a final showdown. (my emphasis)
Preventive war and American tradition
Maybe I was a bit too harsh on David the Dean Broder in an earlier post, when I grumbled about his saying, "From World War I right through the Persian Gulf War, the United States had never initiated hostilities or invaded a major country without the provocation of an attack from that country on this nation or its allies."
Maybe, being the cautious guy he is, the Dean could have been relying on a December 2002 paper by Richard Grimmett prepared for the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, "U.S. Use of Preemptive Military Force: The Historical Record." In that brief paper done prior to the Iraq War, Grimmett employed a more expansive definition of preemption that could cover both "preemptive" and "preventive" wars.
His conclusion:
The historical record indicates that the United States has never, to date, engaged in a 'preemptive' militaryattack against another nation. Nor has the United States ever attacked another nation militarily prior to its first having been attacked or prior to U.S. citizens or interests first having been attacked, with the singular exception of the Spanish-American War.
Elaborating on his point about the Spanish-American War, he writes:
The Spanish-American War is unique in that the principal goal of United States military action was to compel Spain to grant Cuba its political independence. An act of Congress passed just prior to the U.S. declaration of war against Spain explicitly declared Cuba to be independent of Spain, demanded that Spain withdraw its military forces from the island, and authorized the president to use U.S. military force to achieve these ends. Spain rejected these demands, and an exchange of declarations of war by both countries soon followed.
He notes that the Cuban missile crisis, which Condi Rice has held out as a prior instance of "preemptive" war, "was resolved without a 'preemptive' military attack by the United States." He doesn't add what we now know, which is that the Soviet missiles in Cuba already had nuclear warheads attached, and that Soviet commanders in Cuba had been given the authority to use them without prior clearance from Moscow. An actual preemptive military attack on Cuba could have produced a nuclear exchange. Preemption, even when justified under international law, has its risks.
Grimmett is not trying to make an argument about whether US military actions were just, necessary or desirable in a pragmatic sense, only whether they were "preemptive." For instance, he states of various US interventions in Latin America, which were questionable on many grounds:
This is not to say that the United States has not used its military to intervene in other nations in support of its foreign policy interests. However, U.S. military interventions, particularly a number of unilateral uses of force in the Central America and Caribbean areas throughout the 20th century, were not "preemptive" in nature. What led the United States to intervene militarily in nations in these areas was not the view that theindividual nations were likely to attack the United States militarily. Rather, these U.S. military interventions were grounded in the view that they would support the Monroe Doctrine, which opposed interference in the Western hemisphere by outside nations. U.S. policy was driven by the belief that if stable governments existed in Caribbean states and Central America, then it was less likely that foreign countries would attempt to protect their nationals or their economic interests through their use of military force against one or more of these nations.
Of more recent interventions in the area, he says:
U.S. military interventions in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, and in Panama in 1989 were based upon concerns that U.S. citizens or other U.S. interests were being harmed by the political instability in these countries at the time U.S. intervention occurred. While U.S. military interventions in Central America and Caribbean nations were controversial, after reviewing the context in which they occurred, it is fair to say that none of them involved the use of "preemptive" military force by the United States.
Grimmett deals only briefly with interventions by covert action in various countries, noting that "the use of 'covert action' was widely reported to have been successfully employed to effect changes in the governments of Iran in 1953, and in Guatemala in 1954. Its use failed in the case of Cuba in 1961." But he says:
Such previous clandestine operations by U.S. personnel could arguably have constituted efforts at "preemptive" action to forestall unwanted political or military developments in other nations. But given their presumptive limited scale compared to those of major conventional military operations, it seems more appropriate to view U.S. "covert actions" as adjuncts to more extensive U.S. military actions. As such, prior U.S. "covert actions" do not appear to be true case examples of the use of "preemptive" military force by the United States.
He may be on somewhat shaky ground in that argument. But if we take those instances as examples of "preemption" or "preventive" action, it hardly makes a good case for the approach. The Cuban attempt(the Bay of Pigs invasion) was one of the worst disasters in the history of American foreign policy. The Guatemala coup of 1954 did nothing tomake the US more secure, though in overthrowing a democratically elected government it did make life a bit more convenient for United Fruit Company. And the restoration of the Shah of Iran in 1953 - we're still dealing with the "blowback" from that one.
Grimmett would have to write his history differently now. The Iraq War was a preventive war, waged under the guise of a preemptive war.
[See also my earlier post, "Preventive" war vs. "Preemptive" 04/22/04
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