White House Official Defends Preventive War Policy

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — A top White House national security official yesterday said the Bush administration’s preventive war policy is justifiable, despite post-invasion findings that Iraq was not planning to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, March 17).

National security adviser Stephen Hadley said the Bush administration has learned since the March 2003 invasion that better intelligence is needed for appropriately conducting a war to prevent a country from acquiring capabilities the White House believes could be used against the United States.

“We learned a lot of things. … We’ve learned that we need better intelligence. It is difficult.  These kinds of regimes are difficult intelligence targets, but obviously, we didn’t have the intelligence we needed in that particular instance,” he said at an event hosted by the U.S. Institute for Peace.  

Hadley was defending the administration’s reiteration of the policy in its updated National Security Strategy of the United States document, released yesterday.

Prior to the war, senior Bush administration officials alleged Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda, was developing nuclear and other catastrophic weapons, and was intent on using such weapons for blackmail or to attack the United States.

The U.S. intelligence community at the time had unanimously concluded Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and programs — and some agencies believed there was evidence of a nuclear weapons program.

However, the community also unanimously and repeatedly told the administration that Iraq was not likely to use such weapons against the United States or share them with terrorists and was not an imminent threat, the National Journal reported this month (see GSN, March 9).

After the invasion, a CIA-led investigation concluded Iraq had abandoned its WMD programs years earlier and had no intention of attacking the United States with such weapons through terrorist surrogates or otherwise (see GSN, Jan. 25, 2005).

While the U.S. intelligence community was largely mistaken about the existence of Iraqi weapons and programs, it was not responsible for the decision to go to war, according to P.J. Crowley, national defense and homeland security director at the Center for American Progress.

“There was nothing in the intelligence that justified the Bush administration’s rush to war,” he said.

The first version of the National Security Strategy, released six months prior to the war, in September 2002, said the United States could legitimately conduct a preventive war, that is, attack a country on suspicion it might pose a future WMD threat. 

It argued that governments perceiving a potential WMD threat should not be limited to the internationally accepted custom of pre-emption, which holds that a country must have evidence of an imminent threat to attack in self-defense.

“We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries,” it said.

The updated document restates that view, and Hadley defended it.

“I think the basic proposition … remains that we have seen the lethality of terrorist groups and their state sponsors without access to weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot turn away from the risk that those groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction and the threat that that could pose to the United States of America,” he said.

Critics of the preventive war policy say it eliminates a meaningful standard of justification for one country to attack another, opening the door to legitimized international aggression.

“Imagine if every country arrogated to itself the right to attack a state or group that had the capability to inflict harm in the future. Adopting such behavior establishes a new standard of international behavior that will increase the chance of conflict in global hot spots and haunt the United States in the long term,” wrote Center for American Progress staffers Lawrence Korb and Robert Boorstin, in a report last year intended to provide an alternative national security strategy.

Pre-emptive action should still be allowed, Korb and Boorstin wrote. “Any country that has intelligence that it is about to be attacked has the right under the international legal doctrine of anticipatory self-defense to strike first or launch a pre-emptive attack.”

“If there is no evidence an attack is imminent, however, no country has the right to launch an attack or wage a preventive war on another sovereign country,” they added.

Like Hadley, the most recent National Security Strategy document apparently attempts to address such criticisms. It calls preventive war a form of pre-emption, only lacking details about when and where an attack might occur.

“If necessary … under long-standing principles of self-defense, we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack,” it says.

The document also says “we must learn” from the Iraq war that U.S. intelligence “must improve,” and it assures, “We will always proceed deliberately, weighing the consequences of our actions. The reasons for our actions will be clear, the force measured, and the cause just.”

Crowley said the administration’s continued assertion of a preventive war justification “demonstrates that they have learned very little from the experience of the last three years.”

“The critical failures here were the preconceptions that led to their decision to invade,” he said.

The administration held “the preconception, the misconception that [former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] posed a proliferation risk in terms of his willingness to potentially give nuclear know-how to a terrorist organization.”

Hadley, like the document, suggested that the Iraq invasion has been beneficial for telegraphing to other countries that the United States might attack if it suspects they are developing unconventional weapons.

“In some sense, those countries that pursue weapons of mass destruction in secret also learned an important lesson: that there are risks of that kind of behavior and that kind of activity,” he said.

Hadley denied the administration was continuing to enunciate the policy with Iran in mind.

It is “completely wrong to say that our preservation of the doctrine of pre-emption is to preserve it with Iran as the principal case. That is not true,” he said.

“It is a generalized doctrine to be used in cases that are appropriate,” he said.

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