University Times

One year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the White House issued a strategy document that — depending on which politicians and pundits you believe — constituted:

• A radical change in U.S. military policy, seeking to justify America’s subsequent invasion and occupation of Iraq, or

• Merely a public declaration (as Bush administration officials maintain) of an option that has always been available to U.S. presidents: striking America’s enemies before they attack us.

Enunciating what has come to be called the Bush Doctrine, the September 2002 “National Security Strategy of the United States” argues that America’s post-World War II strategy of deterrence (the promise of massive U.S. nuclear retaliation, so effective in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and other “risk-averse” states) won’t work in the 21st century against aggressive rogue states or terrorists “whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and targeting of innocents; whose so-called soldiers seek martyrdom in death, and whose most potent protection is statelessness.”

For centuries, the White House document points out, international law has recognized that nations need not suffer attacks before lawfully taking action to defend themselves against enemy armies, navies and air forces poised to strike. But rogue states and terrorists don’t seek to attack America using conventional forces (which would be doomed to defeat), the National Security Strategy notes. “Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.s) — weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning.”

The document declares: “We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries….The greater the threat, the greater is the threat of inaction — and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively.” What the White House really was asserting was the right to act “preventively,” not “pre-emptively,” critics of the Bush Doctrine say.

The difference between “pre-emptive” and “preventive” warfare is profound, according to international jurists and legal scholars. Pre-emptive attacks respond to imminent threats, preventive attacks to distant (sometimes illusionary) ones. It was pre-emptive when Great Britain broke the shaky Peace of Amiens in 1803 and re-declared war on Napoleonic France, which was threatening to strangle British commerce and reoccupy Egypt. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was preventive.

Whether last year’s Operation Iraqi Freedom was pre-emptive or preventive depends, again, on whom you believe and how imminent and significant a threat to the United States you perceived Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to be.

To analyze the military and political implications of the Bush Doctrine, and whether Operation Iraqi Freedom was a unique conflict or a harbinger of things to come, two Pitt professors are coordinating a Working Group on Preventive and Pre-emptive Military Intervention, under the auspices of the University’s Ridgway Center for Security Studies.

Gordon R. Mitchell, a Pitt associate professor of communication, and Ridgway Center director William W. Keller convened a workshop Feb. 7-8 in Washington, D.C., for working group authors. In addition to Mitchell and Keller, the 13-member group includes (among others): William D. Hartung of the Arms Trade Resource Center, World Policy Institute, New School for Social Research; Robert P. Newman, a Pitt professor emeritus of communication; Rodger A. Payne of the University of Louisville; Simon F. Reich, director of Pitt’s Ford Institute for Human Security; Emory University’s Dan Reiter, and A. Gregory Thielmann, former director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs.

Over the next eight months, the group plans to publish a series of working papers and an edited volume of papers for wider distribution among policymakers “and other influential decision-makers” as well as the general public. The group also plans to hold a second workshop meeting, tentatively scheduled for early October on the Oakland campus.

Working group coordinator Mitchell said: “Recently on ‘Meet the Press,’ President Bush said he is interested in getting a big-picture look at all of the issues surrounding the handling of pre-war intelligence in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. One of the reasons that Bill Keller and I formed this working group last fall is that we are interested in getting that same kind of big-picture look. Our group will set forth learned opinions on topics that oftentimes don’t get the thorough treatment they deserve in the public dialogue on post-Cold War security strategies and a post-9/11 response to the threat of terrorism.”

Perhaps best known on campus as the coach of Pitt’s William Pitt Debating Union, one of the country’s top collegiate debating teams, Mitchell also is an expert on the impact of rhetoric on politics and security.

—Bruce Steele

UNIVERSITY TIMES: What’s so new about the Bush Doctrine? As you and Bill Keller point out, Article 51 of the U.N. Charter recognizes that nations facing imminent attack have a right to “anticipatory self-defense.” For example, it was Israel, not its enemies, that launched the 1967 Six-Day War with a pre-emptive strike. Prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Israel and America between them launched five attacks against Iraq’s nuclear program.

MITCHELL: The difference between pre-emptive war and preventive war really boils down to the concept of imminence. If your enemy is charging at you with a loaded and cocked gun, you face a clear and present danger of imminent attack. In that situation, the U.N. charter says it is legitimate to strike first in pre-emptive self-defense.

But imagine learning that your enemy has bought a gun, and you suspect that gun might be used to shoot you at some time down the road. Maybe your information came from a tip given by a source with an ax to grind. The attack may or may not come, but you decide it would be prudent to strike first just to make sure that the gun will never be used. That’s military prevention, not pre-emption.

In 1967, Egypt’s massive deployment of troops in the Sinai and closure of the Straits of Tiran presented clear evidence of an impending Arab attack on Israel. Egyptian troops were literally moving toward the Israeli border. The threat was imminent, so Israel launched a pre-emptive strike. The Bush Administration’s new doctrine is qualitatively different because it asserts an American prerogative to strike first militarily even if, quote, “uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.” That’s why Operation Iraqi Freedom was unique. No one ever presented any evidence that an Iraqi attack on the United States or its allies was imminent. The U.S. invasion was justified purely as a preventive measure to forestall the hypothetical possibility of Iraqi aggression sometime down the road. Another member of the Ridgway Center working group, Dan Reiter, argues that prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom the United States had never launched a war for purely pre-emptive or preventive motives. Do you agree?

My read of Reiter’s working hypothesis is that prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the United States never declared war for purely preventive reasons. It has engaged in a number of military strikes on alleged unconventional weapons facilities, such as the 1998 Operation Desert Fox in Iraq, and the August 1998 Tomahawk missile attack on the al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, but these were limited military operations, not wars.

The picture gets a bit murkier when you take into account Robert Newman’s argument that the NSC-68 blueprint for American Cold War strategy culminated in a series of covert operations designed to overthrow pro-Soviet regimes in Iran, Guatemala, Chile and Indonesia. Newman suggests that these were essentially preventive military interventions, because these regimes posed no imminent threat to U.S. security. But again, the classification is tricky because these were covert operations and NSC-68 was a secret strategy that remained classified and hidden from public view from 1950 to 1975.

The big difference today is that the 2002 National Security Strategy comes right out and declares openly that the United States is committed to a doctrine of preventive warfare. That declaratory element is new and audacious, since it carves out a first-strike prerogative that goes well beyond the traditional right of anticipatory self defense spelled out in the U.N. Charter.

Do you believe the Bush administration has sought to blur the distinction between pre-emptive and preventive war?

Well, the more the distinction gets blurred, the less radical preventive war seems. Defense Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld muddies the water by using the terms pre-emption and prevention almost interchangeably. But the reality is that striking first against an enemy who does not pose an imminent threat is a radical departure from international norms of pre-emptive warfare conducted in anticipatory self-defense.

On this point, Bush administration officials try to have their cake and eat it too. They try to answer charges of intelligence data distortion by claiming they never used the magical phrase “imminent threat” to justify Operation Iraqi Freedom, yet their substitute language was just as incendiary. Bush called the Iraqi threat “urgent,” [Vice President] Dick Cheney said it was “mortal” and Rumsfeld said it was “immediate.” So, when it is convenient they use the rhetoric of pre-emption and talk about imminent threats. But other times, they find it more strategic to couch the same positions and topics in the language of preventive war.

William D. Hartung of your working group suggested that Operation Iraqi Freedom made sense — to the war’s supporters, at least — from a “better safe than sorry” point of view: Saddam Hussein was a tyrant who had attacked neighboring countries, gassed his own people and supported terror groups. Whether or not he had links to Al Qaeda or imminent plans to attack us, and even if he didn’t currently possess chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, Saddam was the sworn enemy of the United States and its key regional ally, Israel. So, why not take advantage of the enhanced climate for action provided by the Sept. 11 attacks and take out

Saddam now, when he was relatively weak, instead of waiting until he inevitably became a bigger threat?

The problem with that logic is, there really was strong evidence that Saddam had dismantled and destroyed a vast amount of his unconventional weapon stocks in 1991 after the first Persian Gulf war, and then even more fully in 1995 before the defection of Hussein Kamel, his brother-in-law.

That evidence, coupled with the fact that the U.N. inspectors were not finding much evidence of unconventional weaponry in Iraq, points to the fact that sanctions and deterrents were quite effective in limiting the threat posed by Iraq. The fundamental logic that there was a need to remove him from power, given the inevitability of this growing threat, is belied by the evidence that is now turning up, which seems to suggest that inspections were working much more effectively than Bush administration officials were willing to admit and that deterrence and the threat of massive retaliation were likely to contain the threat posed by Saddam Hussein far into the future.

Why do you think Saddam didn’t fully open up Iraq to weapons inspectors? Didn’t he take the U.S. threat seriously?

That question points up another curious aspect of Bush administration discourse that has emerged in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, and that is a bit of historical revisionism on the part of senior Bush administration officials who now are saying that Saddam was not letting the inspectors in — and that this was a trigger for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

That is bold historical revisionism. Saddam Hussein was letting U.N. inspectors comb even his presidential palaces for evidence of unconventional weaponry and was going very far in attempting to comply with the inspectors.
The same thing happened in 1998 prior to Operation Desert Fox [a series of U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile strikes on Iraqi W.M.D. facilities]. The standard argument is that we had to go through with Operation Desert Fox because the inspectors were kicked out by Saddam Hussein. In fact, they were withdrawn by the United States because our military believed the inspectors might be injured in an impending U.S. attack.

One of our group members, Greg Thielmann, points out interestingly that there is a curious incentive on the part of potential targets of U.S. military intervention to exaggerate their unconventional weapons capabilities to stave off attack. That could be one explanation for why Saddam Hussein did not produce definitive evidence that all of the chemical and biological weapons stocks that he had assembled prior to the 1991 war had been destroyed. There’s still a lot of room for speculation about that point, though, given the sketchy nature of the accounting. Some people suggest that Saddam wasn’t aware of exactly what was going on in Iraq’s research labs in the last two years of his rule because corruption there was so widespread.

In his 2004 State of the Union Address, President Bush said: “Nine months of negotiations involving the United States and Great Britain succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of diplomacy with Iraq did not. For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of the United States of America” — the implication being that U.S. intervention in Iraq convinced Colonel Qadhafi that America means business, so he’d better give up his W.M.D.s.

In contrast, we’ve apparently eliminated the threat of force in dealing with North Korea, and Kim Il Jong’s regime remains armed and dangerous.

Don’t the conflicting cases of Libya and North Korea tend to support the Bush Doctrine?

I find it curious that the same Bush administration officials who were so quick to discard deterrence in the National Security Strategy [NSS] are now reviving deterrence logic to justify Operation Iraqi Freedom. The NSS said deterrence won’t work against so-called rogue leaders who are allegedly irrational and even insane. Yet now we are hearing that the invasion of Iraq is causing the, quote, “axis of evil” to disarm because the leaders of North Korea, Iran and Libya have made rational and sane calculations that they do not want to be the next target of a U.S. attack.

I see a fundamental inconsistency here, and I agree with [working group members] Dan Reiter and Rodger Payne that deterrence, backed by the threat of U.S. retaliation, still remains a strong guarantor of security, one that probably would have been sufficient to keep Saddam Hussein in check in 2003, and will likely contain Kim Jong-Il, Ali Khamenei and Muammar Qadhafi in 2004 and beyond.

But Reiter also notes that deterrence is substantially less likely to work against terrorist groups than against rogue governments. How do you stop W.M.D. terrorism?

The threat posed by nongovernmental terrorist organizations of global reach presents a novel challenge. Here I would make a nod to William Hartung, who argues persuasively that the best strategies to deal with Al Qaeda-type terrorism involve international cooperation to coordinate diplomatic, economic, law enforcement, intelligence and military tools.

The problem, as Hartung points out astutely, is that an overemphasis on the military tools can interfere with, and even reverse, the effectiveness of the non-military tools of prevention. So I would say we need a more carefully calibrated balance, with more of an emphasis on brains, less on brawn.

It is absolutely absurd, for example, that members of Congress who tout their tough-on-terror credentials keep cutting Nunn-Lugar threat-reduction programs — programs that are aimed at increasing the security of fissile material and providing aid, primarily to Russia and the former Soviet republics, to prevent nuclear scientists from those countries from sharing information that could be used to build unconventional weaponry.

An absolutely key anti-terrorism strategy is public diplomacy, since it has the potential to take away terrorists’ most valuable weapon, which is the reservoir of anti-American hatred that fuels terrorist recruitment. This gets back to the coordination theme: An overemphasis on military prevention is likely to undercut the effectiveness of public diplomacy, which may be the most promising long-term tool we have to counter terrorism.

It’s been suggested that our failure to find W.M.D.s in Iraq is “the neo-cons’ Waterloo” — that, whether or not Bush is re-elected, this failure has undermined U.S. credibility around the world, and alienated the professional military and intelligence services as well as moderate Republicans and Democrats, to the point that it’s fatally undercut the influence of the unilateralist neo-conservatives who pushed for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The 2004 presidential election may be shaping up as a referendum on this issue. Ed Gillespie, chair of the Republican National Committee, wrote a memo to Republican leaders last October advising them to use “the policy of pre-emptive self defense” as an attack issue to highlight that Democrats come from the party of, quote, “protests, pessimism and political hate speech.” But as disclosures about the Bush administration’s prewar manipulation of public opinion continue to pile up, Democrats can counter with the argument that the GOP is a party of dogma, delusion and deception. This has the makings of a very cynical campaign.

But even if the neo-cons are thrown out, the declaratory policy of preventive warfare set forth in the National Security Strategy of 2002 will still cast a long shadow over the next administration’s efforts to fashion a coherent post-Cold War security strategy. There will be a lot of repair work to be done. That’s why we are trying to tailor our working group research to be salient come March 2005, regardless of who controls the White House.

On Feb. 6, President Bush appointed the Silberman-Robb Commission to investigate intelligence failures in Iraq. The commission also will review U.S. intelligence on weapons programs in North Korea and Iran, and will examine intelligence on the threats posed by Libya and Afghanistan “before recent changes in those countries.” The deadline for the commission to report is by the end of March 2005 — well after the Nov. 2 presidential election, as critics have noted.

A separate independent commission is investigating intelligence failures before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. That group is expected to report its findings this summer.

What do you expect from these commissions?

The key figure in understanding the prewar intelligence breakdown is [Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz. In 1976, Wolfowitz was part of the infamous Team B, an independent group of analysts from outside the mainstream intelligence community who were called in to second guess the CIA’s estimates of Soviet military strength. Team B leaked its alarmist assessments about Soviet nuclear strategy to the public, and even though such assessments turned out to be wildly exaggerated, the leaks stoked public fear and scuttled the SALT arms control process.

Twenty-five years later, Wolfowitz did the same thing when he set up the Office of Special Plans, an independent intelligence boutique formed in the Pentagon to produce alarmist evidence of the Iraqi threat and manufacture rosy forecasts about postwar reconstruction.

Wolfowitz’s boutique leaked the evidence to the media and funneled it directly to policy-makers, circumventing the mainstream intelligence community and manipulating public deliberation in the process.

The problem with the Silberman-Robb Commission is that its investigation is likely to focus narrowly on the mainstream intelligence community, overlooking the key role played by the Office of Special Plans. That would be like ordering a chest X-ray for a patient who comes in with a broken leg.

The mainstream intelligence community actually did a decent job. The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate was full of caveats regarding the Iraqi threat of unconventional weapons. The problem came when politicians started stripping those caveats away and relying on sketchy intelligence data provided by Wolfowitz’s boutique. Imagine ignoring the advice of an established investment counselor and instead basing your whole retirement strategy on stock tips you overhear at the bus stop. That’s a real recipe for intelligence breakdown, and it looks like that’s exactly what happened in our government in 1976 and 2003.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has described the United States as being in a state of war, albeit a new kind of war.

Yet, members of the Ridgway Center’s working group say we’re still enjoying a post-Cold War window of opportunity for deliberation and reflection to rethink our national security strategy, retool U.S. intelligence and enhance cooperation with the vast majority of the world’s populations and governments that oppose terrorism.

After 9/11, the threat posed by unconventional terrorism is frightening and real. But it is a different kind of threat from the specter of all-out superpower nuclear war that could end life as we know it on planet Earth. Respecting that difference is important in realizing that the threat environment is one that demands careful attention but does not necessarily require precipitous action conducted without reflection and careful thought.

One stark example of the latter jumps out: The October 2002 vote in Congress on the joint resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq was essentially a rushed vote. It was engineered to come just prior to mid-term elections.

Now, at the time that the deliberations on this resolution were unfolding, the administration was providing evidence to members of Congress from the classified National Intelligence Estimate that contained important caveats that really did not fit with the Bush administration’s public pronouncements on the immediacy of the Iraqi threat — specifically, I’m talking about the dissenting opinions within the mainstream intelligence community regarding whether Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program. Those footnotes and those caveats in the National Intelligence Estimate should have served as red flags for the need to deliberate more carefully about this decision to go to war and gather more evidence from inspections to determine the exact nature of the threat. But instead, what occurred was that the threat environment was so politically charged that the Bush administration was able to steamroll the vote by using the looming threat of mid-term elections to create a rush to judgment that ended up really distorting Congressional deliberation. I see that as a case study of the failure to craft careful and fitting security policies for a post-Cold War era.