Count Bush’s Doctrine of Preemption as a Casualty of the Iraq War

The second anniversary is approaching of the speech in which President Bush unveiled the doctrine of preemption that he hoped to enshrine as the centerpiece of America’s national security strategy. But the celebration is likely to be muted, inside the White House and beyond. Preemption, as applied in Iraq, has become the greatest threat to its author’s reelection.

It was in a commencement address at West Point on June 1, 2002, that Bush first fully explained his belief that the age of global terrorism had undermined the principles of deterrence and containment that guided U.S. defense strategy through the Cold War.

“Deterrence -- the promise of massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend,” Bush declared. “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can ... secretly provide them to terrorist allies.”

Against such threats, Bush insisted, America needed a strategy that would “take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” Bush labeled this approach “preemption,” and later his administration fleshed it out in a formal National Security Strategy document that pledged to “stop rogue states and their terrorist allies” before they could threaten the United States.

Deterrence and containment defined U.S. security strategy for more than four decades. But preemption, less than two years after its debut, already looks frayed.

“As a doctrine, it’s dead as a doornail,” insists Ivo Daalder, a former national security aide under President Clinton and coauthor of “America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy.” Even one GOP strategist familiar with White House national security thinking acknowledges that for any president looking to apply the doctrine again, “the bar is higher, the country would be more reluctant, and the case would be harder to make.”

The reason, of course, is Iraq, the doctrine’s first test. Initially, the war to depose Saddam Hussein seemed to strengthen the argument for preemption. Like the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the military’s lightning run to Baghdad dramatized America’s ability to eliminate regimes it considers hostile -- and to do so faster and with fewer U.S. casualties than once seemed imaginable.

The invasion freed Iraq from a brutal tyranny and might eventually produce a stable and humane country. But almost everything that has happened since the Hussein statues fell in Baghdad last spring has weakened the case for preemption as Bush defined it at West Point.

The first blow to Bush’s doctrine came when coalition forces failed to find the weapons of mass destruction the president had stressed as a principal justification for the war. That failure has been especially damaging because Bush’s vision placed such a premium on forecasting threats that weren’t as visible as the traditional justifications for preemptive attack, like armies massing on a border.

U.S. presidents, like leaders in almost all nations, have always reserved the right to strike preemptively against an enemy preparing an imminent attack. Bush’s innovation, the administration later explained, was to apply “the concept of imminent threat” to nations or groups developing “capabilities” that might one day threaten America. But after the intelligence debacle in Iraq, Bush or any successor is certain to face stiffer demands at home and abroad for proof before acting.

Building public support for another preemptive war would also be tougher because, by virtually every measure, Iraq has proved far costlier than the administration projected.

More than 770 American soldiers have now died in Iraq. The invasion and occupation have already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $127 billion, with another $67 billion to $79 billion probably due this year, according to a report last week by House Budget Committee Democrats. The war and the occupation have painfully stretched the military. And they have strained America’s relations with nations around the globe, even before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Does this mean preemption is dead? Probably yes, at least in the expansive sense Bush employed it in Iraq -- using the military to depose a government America considers hostile without evidence of an imminent threat.

Even if the United States can quell the turmoil in Iraq and establish a reasonably democratic government, no president could look forward to replicating this experience, especially if Bush loses this fall. “If the architects are thrown out of office,” acknowledges the GOP strategist, “that means the architecture will come down.”

But that doesn’t mean a future president would entirely reject Bush’s critique of containment and deterrence, or rule out preemption in narrower circumstances. It’s telling that though Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has condemned Bush’s approach to preemption, he insists that “every president, from the beginning of time” has had the right to strike against an imminent danger.

Kerry’s aides say he would consider preemptive action to depose a regime openly harboring terrorists that threaten America. And even skeptics such as Daalder say that though the U.S., short of such a provocation, isn’t likely to enlist for another “regime change” any time soon, it might still someday strike preemptively against a more targeted danger -- such as an Iranian nuclear-weapons facility.

Even in those cases, though, the world, and perhaps the American public as well, would probably demand much more proof than Bush mustered in Iraq. That looms as the ironic legacy of Bush’s attempt to elevate preemption from a tactic of last resort to a guiding doctrine. By defining preemption so much more aggressively than his predecessors, he may have reduced his successors’ ability to employ it.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ website at: latimes.com/brownstein.