Abstract
He knew “preventive war” wouldn't prevent anything but peace.
In the year-long Showdown with Saddam,” as one news channel tagged it, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld systematically portrayed himself as a plain-speaking guy in the mold of the now much-beloved Harry Truman.
Despite his many faults, Truman was a straight shooter. Rumsfeld is anything but; he is a masterful dissembler.
Consider Rumsfeld's games with the words “preemption” and “prevention.” In late September, shortly after the administration's new preemption strategy was unveiled, a reporter asked Rumsfeld why he had used the words preemption and prevention “almost interchangeably” during testimony on the Hill.
Rumsfeld acknowledged that there were “differences” between the two words and that he had been “a bit sloppy in using them somewhat interchangeably.” But he then slopped around some more, suggesting in the end that the two words meant roughly the same thing.
In a television interview the following day, Rumsfeld grew even bolder, lumping together “preemptive action,” “preventive action,” “anticipatory self-defense,” and “self-defense.” They all meant pretty much the same thing, he said–“call it what you wish.”
Well, no. In international law and diplomacy, you do not get to define life-or-death words as “you wish.” Only Humpty Dumpty or a hegemon would think that he could get away with that. (And who can forget conservative commentator Bill Kristol's argument in the July/August 1996 issue of Foreign Affairs that the proper role of the United States was to engage in “benevolent global hegemony”?)
The Bush administration, which has seldom been candid about anything other than its desire to achieve dominance in every military sphere, has tried to hoodwink the American people about what it means by preemption. That is no small matter because the proclaimed right of preemption lies at the heart of the new National Security Strategy of the United States.
Flim-flam aside, what the administration is describing in its strategy is preventive war, not preemptive war.
Even the Defense Department understands the difference. The department's official Dictionary of Military Terms defines preemptive action as one “initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent.” In contrast, a preventive war is “initiated in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve greater risk.”
Contrary to Rumsfeld's obfuscations, in international law and practice there is a huge difference between preemptive and preventive war. The former is often justified, morally and legally. The latter is unworthy of a country that regards itself as a law-abiding nation–a land that often sees itself, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, as the “last, best hope of earth.”
Preemptive war has a factual basis. In June 1967, for instance, Israel could, according to many observers, lawfully initiate hostilities because it was factually apparent to everyone that Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq had massed their forces on Israel's borders. Indeed, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the charismatic Arab leader, had declared that if war came, the goal would be the “destruction” of Israel.
In contrast, preventive war is based on looser and sometimes highly subjective evidence, which is often not apparent to other nations. Country “A” believes, rightly or wrongly, that country “B” has hostile intentions. Therefore it had better strike first. “A” thus takes upon itself the multiple roles of investigator, judge, jury, and executioner.
The Rumsfeld-Bush doctrine of preventive war is breathtaking. It was not concocted merely to justify “regime change” in Iraq. In theory, it applies to any nation the United States defines as presenting a future threat.
Rooting out stateless terrorists is one thing; we can cheer that. But striking a sovereign nation, even a bad-guy nation, is another matter. Unless evidence of imminent attack from such a nation is overwhelmingly compelling, a first strike–preventive war–is a clear violation of international law.
There is considerable evidence to suggest that Rumsfeld understands that. He has been a super-achiever since leaving his diapers behind. Rumsfeld surely knows the difference between preemptive and preventive. How else can one explain his frequent invocation of the doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense,” which he declares to be an ancient formulation fully sanctioned by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter? It is as if he believes that repetition will transform a lie into truth.
Rumsfeld has been pushing the anticipatory self-defense canard for quite a while. The January 2001 report of the “Space Commission,” a congressionally mandated task force Rumsfeld chaired, endorsed anticipatory self-defense. The report was issued before Rumsfeld was installed as defense secretary.
Anticipatory self-defense is indeed ancient. Kingdoms, city-states, nation-states, and empires have for millennia initiated wars under the color of self-defense–or in its more recent and sophisticated variation, “restoring the balance of power.”
In the fifth century B.C., Sparta and its allies went to war against the Athenian Empire partly because Athens had grown so powerful and arrogant as to threaten–in Sparta's view–the entire Hellenistic world.
During the second decade of the last century, war engulfed Europe in part because of the complex action-reaction dynamic involved in the attempts of various states to anticipate war. Later in the century, Japan justified preventive war against the United States because America, in the summer of 1941, had frozen Japanese assets in an effort to short-circuit Japan's ambitions in East Asia. From Tokyo's perspective, America had already declared economic war on Japan.
These observations, however, should not be taken as supporting those who believe that the United States should always turn the other cheek in the face of provocation. The old Roman general, Vegetius, was not simply blowing smoke when he said, “Let he who desires peace prepare for war.”
But it does not follow that a great and just nation should go out of its way to look for war–much less, to start wars. Anticipatory self-defense? That is precisely the dishonorable and disreputable rationale for war that the United Nations was created to vanquish.
Preventive war, which the Bush administration labels preemption, is said to be a way of securing the peace. When bad guys everywhere learn that Uncle Sam really means business, they will see the error of their ways and turn to more constructive pursuits. The United States will be beyond challenge.
“Apparently, this one has everyone's name on it.”
That is a seductive idea, one that has been put forward before, although it seldom has been held in high regard by Americans who believe that the stars-and-stripes stand for something grander than the law of the jungle.
By the late 1940s, a host of U.S. military men and foreign policy experts believed the Soviet Union was a rising threat to American security, which it may have been. Something had to be done before the Russkies got stronger.
Very early in the Cold War, America's top military men began making atomic-war plans–first “Pincher,” then “Broiler,” and then “Crankshaft.” The plans differed in operational detail, but the central feature remained the same: The United States should be prepared to strike first, if necessary, before the Soviets got stronger. In short, engage in preventive nuclear war.
Or as Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews said in a speech in August 1950, the United States must be ready “to pay any price, even the price of instituting a war to compel cooperation for peace.”
Plain-spoken Harry Truman, who put an end to such loose-cannon talk, got it right in his Memoirs when he said of Matthews and others who had taken up the preventive-war chant: “There is nothing more foolish than to think that war can be stopped by war. You don't ‘prevent’ anything but peace.”