Congress needs to challenge Bush
Congress should help President Bush end the dire threat posed by Iraq, but it also needs to give careful scrutiny to his new doctrine of pre-emptive war. It could be dangerous to world order.
Just as Bush’s anti-terror doctrine — “whoever harbors a terrorist is one” — has been used by Israel, Russia and India to justify their own operations, other countries also might pick up on the pre-emption idea to attack adversaries they suspect of hostile intent.
In fact, Russian President Vladimir Putin already has claimed the right to invade areas of neighboring Georgia to root out Chechen rebels seeking sanctuary there.
Nuclear-armed India or Pakistan could easily attack the other, claiming that it was convinced its adversary was planning to attack. And while it would be a stretch for China to claim it was threatened by Taiwan, it could happen.
First enunciated in Bush’s June 1 commencement address at West Point, the doctrine of pre-emption was reaffirmed in the administration’s National Security Strategy report sent to Congress last Friday.
“The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.”
As Congress considers Bush’s request for authority to conduct pre-emptive war against Iraq, Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and its House counterpart, also should question witnesses about the global doctrine Bush has enunciated.
This was done — vituperatively, to be sure, and not systematically — by former Vice President Al Gore in his speech Monday in San Francisco.
Gore accused Bush of practicing a “go-it-alone, cowboy-type approach to international affairs,” though he basically endorsed Bush’s current policy of challenging the United Nations to enforce its past resolutions against Iraq.
Even more cogently than Gore, the Bush doctrine has been challenged by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and one of the Democratic Party’s leading intellectuals, former Clinton White House aide Bill Galston, a professor at the University of Maryland.
At a breakfast meeting with reporters on Wednesday, Kerry observed that the United States “always has a right to defend itself in the face of imminent threat,” but that “it’s better left unasserted” because “if it applies for us, it applies for other nations, too.”
In an interview, Galston charged that Bush’s Sept. 12 challenge to the United Nations to prove its relevance by confronting Iraq was “a purely tactical and rhetorical tack toward multilateralism which was abandoned at the first whiff of grapeshot.”
On pre-emptive war, Galston said, “The administration seems to believe somehow we can contain this doctrine to our own case and that our unique virtue, wisdom and power will enable us to use it while restraining other nations from using it at all. I don’t believe it.”
By the logic of the pre-emptive doctrine, he said, “The only reason for not conducting a first strike against the Soviet Union is that we didn’t have the power to do it safely.
To give the administration its due, its National Security Strategy report declared that “the United States will not use force in all cases to pre-empt emerging threats, nor should nations use pre-emption as a pretext for aggression.”
Pre-emptive war may be justified in the case of Iraq — I think it is — but the United States shouldn’t inspire everyone to engage in it.
(Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.)