Does Might Make It Right?

By MICHAEL DUFFY

Sometimes it's striking how strength begets greater strength. One by one, George W. Bush is clearing away the obstacles to war, at home and overseas. His public campaign to make Saddam Hussein disarm or disappear is barely a month old, but already Bush has thrown war-averse Democrats on the defensive. He flew to New York City and smacked down the U.N. with his call to wake up or risk irrelevancy. And last week he unveiled his new national-security strategy, a long-range plan for the U.S. overseas, which argues that the strongest nation in the world has the right to pre-emptively attack anyone who seeks to harm its people or interests.

How did a guy who talked in his campaign about the need for America to act "humbly" in the world produce a strategy that looks and sounds so imperial? Normally, government officials work in secret on these strategy papers for months, producing documents so turgid that no one needs to read them. That's what might have happened here had Bush not intervened and asked his aides to kick it up a notch. And because Bush wants everyone to see the final document--"The boys in Lubbock ought to be able to read it," he advised an aide, the New York Times reported--he put the final line-by-line touches on his strategy at Camp David two weeks ago.

At the heart of the Bush Doctrine is the idea that, as the new blueprint states, "We cannot let our enemies strike first." Bush makes it clear that the billions of dollars we have spent on armies, navies and aircraft can't protect us anymore. Terrorists and rogue states have learned to attack our weak spots with truck bombs, boat bombs and airliners. Next, he predicts, they will use weapons of mass destruction on us and perhaps on our friends and allies. For all those reasons, a new kind of deterrence is needed. We can no longer rely entirely on "our reactive posture," Bush says. "We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends."

The right to strike first has long been embedded in U.S. foreign policy. When Washington launched its pre-emptive wars in the past, it did so covertly, as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973. Large invading forces and long postwar occupations were not part of the deal, mostly because they clashed violently with a piece of national character that we're all taught in school: Americans deter and defend; we don't attack, and we don't conquer. It wasn't entirely true, but it was true enough so that when we broke our rule, we tried to keep it quiet. Bush believes that Americans now live in a kill-or-be-killed world and must behave accordingly: "America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed. We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best... In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action."

Stating this is one thing; acting on it is another. Asked whether the new strike-first doctrine was aimed at Iraq, a senior official dodged last week and said pre-emption is at the "narrow end of a long band of options." But it's no coincidence that the new strategy has appeared at the very moment that Bush needs a strategic anvil on which to forge his campaign against Saddam. The White House still will not share--or doesn't have--proof that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction that can reach the U.S. And because no one expects Saddam to do anything so stupid as to provide Bush with a new reason that would justify a U.S. invasion, a strategy that permits an invasion without a provocation comes in handy. "There will be cases when you have no other option but to use military force to prevent an attack against you," the official said.

Logic says it will take better intelligence--far better than we have now--to make a pre-emptive doctrine work. Congress last week held hearings on what went wrong last year--and why the President did not act on the wisps of information his Administration had gathered in the months leading up to Sept. 11. Bush's critics imply that if all the warnings and indications had been pulled together in advance, the President or his aides could have discerned the plot and launched a pre-emptive strike on Osama bin Laden last summer. That is a charge the White House dismisses. But Bush's pre-emptive doctrine assumes that we may never have all the intelligence, we may be able to make only educated guesses about our enemies' arsenals and intentions, and we'll need to rely on wisps and warnings and our guts. Bush may be comfortable making decisions that way. Whether the country is ready to go to war on instinct is another question.