Taps for Preemptive War

The last few weeks have not been good ones for the doctrine of preemptive war. Former weapons inspector David A. Kay told the Senate “we were all wrong” to believe that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. President Bush acknowledged that the intelligence leading to the Iraq war was faulty. Those conclusions should sound the death knell for the policy of waging war purely to get rid of a future threat. More than 500 U.S. personnel and thousands of Iraqis have been killed in a war whose main announced cause has been shot full of holes.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led to a massive U.S. reaction, from passing the Patriot Act to creating the Department of Homeland Security. Nearly nine months after Sept. 11, Bush declared that retaliation against aggressor nations was insufficient. Nor would “containment” work against dictators who might hand chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to terrorists. Instead, Bush said, the United States must “be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.” But Iraq demonstrated that waging war against a nation that has not attacked another and ousting its leader -- even a dictator -- smacks of arrogance and sours allies whose help is needed in fighting other enemies and financing postwar reconstruction.

Bush’s National Security Strategy of 2002, published three months after the West Point speech, argued that countries can legally defend themselves “against forces that present an imminent danger of attack.” Bush has since argued, most recently Sunday on “Meet the Press,” that even imminence is too late. But the weapons on which his original argument rested were nowhere to be found. In retrospect, it is clear that the U.N. inspectors’ ability to find prohibited missiles and destroy them resulted in a receding threat, not Bush’s “grave and gathering” one.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said at a European security conference Saturday that his government believed “events have proven the position it took at the time was right.” That provoked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to again lecture other countries like schoolchildren and insist that Washington knew best.

Past U.S. administrations have reserved the right to wage preemptive war but knew that striking first, especially without immediate provocation, would yield the moral high ground. Before Bush, preemption was not a public strategy and was a weapon of last resort. The continuity over nearly two centuries has been impressive. Four years before he became president, John Quincy Adams argued for U.S. unilateral action when required but said the U.S. “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” To do so could make the country “dictatress of the world” and untrue to its principles. That operating principle deserves reinstatement.