Bush to reaffirm pre-emption as a U.S. security strategy

WASHINGTON – President Bush plans to issue a new national security strategy today reaffirming his doctrine of pre-emptive war against terrorists and hostile states with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, despite the troubled experience in Iraq.

The document, an articulation of U.S. strategic priorities required by law every four years, lays out a robust view of the country’s power and an assertive view of its responsibility to bring change around the world. On everything from genocide to human trafficking to AIDS, the strategy describes itself as “idealistic about goals and realistic about means.”

The strategy expands on the original security framework developed by the Bush administration in September 2002, before the invasion of Iraq. That strategy shifted U.S. foreign policy away from decades of deterrence and containment toward a more aggressive stance of attacking enemies before they attack the United States.

The pre-emption doctrine generated fierce debate at the time, and many critics believe the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has fatally undermined an essential assumption of the strategy – that intelligence about an enemy’s capabilities and intentions can be sufficiently reliable to justify preventive war.

In his revised version, Bush offers no second thoughts about the pre-emption policy, saying it “remains the same” and defending it as necessary for a country in the “early years of a long struggle” akin to the Cold War. In a nod to critics in Europe, the document places a greater emphasis on working in concert with allies and declares diplomacy to be “our strong preference” in tackling the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

“If necessary, however, under long-standing principles of self defense, we do not rule out use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack,” the document continues. “When the consequences of an attack with WMD are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize.”

Such language could be seen as provocative at a time when the United States and its European allies have brought Iran before the U.N. Security Council to answer allegations that it is secretly developing nuclear weapons. At a news conference in January, Bush described an Iran with nuclear arms as a “grave threat to the security of the world.”

Some security specialists criticized the continued commitment to pre-emption. “Pre-emption is and always will be a potentially useful tool, but it’s not something you want to trot out and throw in everybody’s face,” said Harlan Ullman, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “To have a strategy on pre-emption and make it central is a huge error.”

A military attack against Iran, for instance, could be “foolish,” Ullman said, and it would be better to seek other ways to influence its behavior. “I think most states are deterrable.”

Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has written on the 2002 strategy, said the 2003 invasion of Iraq in the strict sense is not an example of preemptive war, since it was preceded by 12 years of low-grade conflict and was essentially the completion of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Still, he said, the recent problems there contain lessons for those who would advocate pre-emptive war elsewhere. A military strike by itself is not enough, he said; building a sustainable, responsible state in place of a rogue nation is the real challenge.

“We have to understand preemption – it’s not going to be simply a pre-emptive strike,” he said. “That’s not the end of the exercise but the beginning of the exercise. … The larger of the two problems is not the weapons but the states themselves.”

The White House plans to release the 49-page National Security Strategy today, starting with a speech by national security adviser Stephen Hadley to the U.S. Institute of Peace. The White House gave advance copies of the strategy to the Washington Post and two other newspapers.

The strategy has no legal force of its own but serves as a guidepost for agencies and officials drawing up policies in a range of military, diplomatic and other arenas. Much of the new document echoes the 2002 document.