By Richard Wolffe,
Financial Times, UK,
21 June 2002

The Bush doctrine

He started casually enough by reminiscing about his patchy college career and granting amnesty to those who committed "minor conduct offences". But the joking stopped there when George W. Bush addressed the uniformed graduates of the US military academy at West Point this month.

Far from the summer tradition of unmemorable graduation speeches, Mr Bush marked a historic break with the cold war doctrines that have dominated half a century of US foreign and military policy. Declaring that "new threats also require new thinking", he outlined a new era of national security threats and an entirely fresh doctrine of pre-emptive action.

"Deterrence - the promise of massive retaliation against nations - means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies," he explained.

In line with that speech, Mr Bush`s national security staff is now drawing up the most radical overhaul of US foreign policy since the cold war. The plans are already causing rifts in Washington and some senior US officials and conservative foreign policy analysts are expressing substantive reservations about the emerging doctrine and its impact on US national security interests.

Officials who support the doctrine insist that pre-emptive strikes represent just one policy option among many in dealing with rogue states such as Iraq. They say the administration`s first national security strategy, due to be released this year, will paint a far bigger picture of the new era of geopolitics. After September 11, the great powers - from European allies to China and Russia - are now aligned against a common enemy: terrorism.

"Early action means more than just military action," says one senior administration official. "It means counter-proliferation, non-proliferation and co-operative security arrangements with the great powers. It should, most importantly, mean trying to prevent the kind of petri dishes for terrorism that have grown up like Afghanistan."

The doctrine of pre-emption has evolved steadily, in line with the president`s vision for transforming the US armed forces. As he campaigned for the presidency during 2000, Mr Bush repeatedly raised the spectre of "madmen and missiles and terror" to justify his desire for a more agile, more deadly US military.

But since the September 11 terrorist attacks, those fears have taken on a new sense of urgency, leading directly to the emergence of a pre-emptive strategy. In his State of the Union address in January, Mr Bush sketched out the need for prompt intervention. "I will not wait on events, while dangers gather," he said.

Just two days later, Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, was the first official to make explicit the need for pre-emptive strikes, as he detailed his plans for overhauling US forces. "Defending against terrorism and other emerging 21st-century threats may well require that we take the war to the enemy," he told the National Defence University in Washington. "The best, and in some cases the only, defence is a good offence."

But in burying the cold war doctrines, Mr Bush and his national security team are running head first into the clearest foreign policy principles of the Reagan administration. As the Reagan cabinet pursued containment and deterrence against the Soviet Union, it definitively rejected pre-emption.

When the last pre-emptive military strike was launched to destroy Iraq`s nuclear ambitions, the US had no hesitation in condemning the Israelis for bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981. Jeane Kirkpatrick, then US representative to the United Nations, said: "I don`t think anybody in the whole cabinet believed in the use of pre-emptive force and that is why we condemned Israel."

For Ms Kirkpatrick, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a pre- emptive strike against Saddam Hussein`s regime in Iraq poses serious dangers for other non-Islamist regimes in the region. "This involves a real shift of course for American military strategy and tactics and I do have some questions about whether it is a prudent shift of tactics," she says. "The question is whether the consequences would be to win recruits for the most radical Islamists and create more problems for Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or Jordan`s King Abdullah. Iraq has been a secular government and I think we don`t want to participate in driving those secular governments into something more violent and Islamist."

Moreover, if the policies of containment and deterrence worked so well against the Soviet Union`s totalitarian dictators, what is different about the current generation of dictators armed with weapons of mass destruction?

US officials who defend pre-emption point to two main distinctions. First, they suspect - but have released no evidence to suggest - that rogue states including Iraq have either co-operated with the al-Qaeda terrorist network, or are likely to do so in the near future.

Second, they argue that the Soviet Union was nothing like as unpredictable and unbalanced as dictators such as Mr Saddam. "You have to recognise that they don`t have the same kind of stake in the international system," says one senior administration official. "Their entire purpose is to destroy the capability of the US to help defend order in the international system. In that sense they are very different from the Soviet Union."

Other factors have also changed the debate about pre-emptive action in the US. Five decades ago, as the White House first shaped its doctrines of deterrence and containment, the National Security Council rejected the notion of a "preventive" war as "repugnant to many Americans". Moreover, the NSC concluded, international opposition to such action would undermine the world order. "Victory in such a war would have brought us little if at all closer to victory in the fundamental ideological conflict," it said.

Such repugnance among Americans is no longer a factor in US policymaking, at least in relation to Mr Saddam`s Iraq. According to an NBC News poll in April, 57 per cent believe that the US should take military action against Iraq.

That strong public support has emboldened many US officials to cite Iraq as a special case deserving of pre-emptive action. "Iraq was essentially put on notice by the international community and it has violated the terms of its parole," says a senior US official.

But if Iraq poses the most obvious case for pre-emptive strikes, it also highlights the practical problems. Given the administration`s desire to have a change of regime in Iraq, any build-up of US forces in the region is likely to prompt a first strike by Iraq - possibly using the very weapons of mass destruction that the US seeks to destroy.

Pre-emptive strikes would therefore need to be overwhelming and accurate. That requires impeccable intelligence - something that White House officials concede may be impossible in the case of biological weapons, which are easy to hide.

Even officials who support pre-emptive action say the bigger impact of such a strategy may be to shift the rules of the world order against US interests. If other nations, such as India and Pakistan, adopted pre-emption, the risk of nuclear war would rise sharply - at a time when the US ability to use its moral persuasion would be diminished in forcing both sides to back down.

"International relations is not a world of pure Hobbesian struggle," says one senior administration official. "One of the reasons there is not a constant state of war is that we all expect certain rules. We just have to be careful that if we create exceptions to those rules, the exceptions justify it - lest we establish precedents that others will emulate."