WORLD | A NATION AT WAR: A NEW DOCTRINE

A NATION AT WAR: A NEW

DOCTRINE; Pre-emption: Idea With a
Lineage Whose Time Has Come
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN MARCH 23, 2003
In January 1998, a lineup of conservative policy advocates warned President
Clinton in an open letter that the ''containment'' of Iraq was a failure and that
removing Saddam Hussein from power ''now needs to become the aim of
American foreign policy.''

Among the 18 signers were Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Richard

L. Armitage and Richard N. Perle, all former officials in Republican
administrations. At the time, the men were affiliated with academic centers and
policy institutes, with no particular expectation that they would, within five years,
be in a position to turn their ideas into policy.

The second Persian Gulf war represents far more than simply a triumph for
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, or for Mr.
Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, and Mr. Perle, chairman of the Defense
Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, not to mention their colleagues in the
conservative news media.

It also reflects, at least in the view of some, the ascendance under President
Bush of the conservatives' idea that chemical, biological and nuclear weapons
programs of ''rogue states'' must be confronted with pre-emptive or even
preventive action before an imminent threat materializes.

The origins of the current war are, in fact, rooted in a series of policy
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pronouncements by these and other conservative intellectuals that date fromlogin
the
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early 1990's, after the end of the cold war and the inconclusive end of the gulf war
in 1991, which left Mr. Hussein in power.

These conservative policy makers and intellectuals nurtured their views and kept
alive the cause of deposing President Hussein during the mid- and late 1990's
through scholarly conferences, foreign policy magazines and forums at research
institutions. Then, when many of them returned to power in the administration of
George W. Bush, their views ended up dominating the administration's policy,
defining an important shift in United States foreign policy thinking.

When Mr. Bush began filling the top layers of his administration, many of
these ardently anti-Hussein intellectuals were appointed to powerful jobs,
including Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, and I. Lewis
Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

But even as they gained critical mass in the new administration, it was not
until after Sept. 11, 2001, that they succeeded in pushing Iraq to the top of Mr.
Bush's foreign policy agenda. It was then that the president came to share their
deep concern that Iraq might give unconventional weapons to terrorist groups.

''Without Sept. 11, we never would have been able to put Iraq at the top of our
agenda,'' a senior administration official said. ''It was only then that this president
was willing to worry about the unthinkable -- that the next attack could be with
weapons of mass destruction supplied by Saddam Hussein.''

Not everyone around Mr. Bush is comfortable with the Iraq war being seen
as a symbol of a new doctrine.

''The battle over the direction of American policy will continue,'' another
senior administration official said, adding that the debate about how to neutralize
the threat from Iran and North Korea -- the other two nations in the ''axis of evil''
cited by Mr. Bush -- would begin even before the fighting in Iraq ended.

In fact, ever since Mr. Bush and his team started talking about the need to
deal pre-emptively with foreign threats, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and
some others in the administration have emphasized that such actions are only a
part of the large set of options available to the United States.
 Asked the other day if the Iraq war reflected a broader doctrine of pre-
emptive attacks on enemies, Mr. Powell replied, ''No, no, no.'' He said Iraq was
being attacked because it had violated its ''international obligations'' under its
1991 surrender agreement, which required the disclosure and disarmament of its
dangerous weapons.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Powell said the publicity over the doctrine of
pre-emption, enshrined in the administration's National Security Strategy
published last year, overlooked the fact that pre-emption was only one tool
among many. A victory in Iraq did not mean that military action would be used
against other countries, he said.

''I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say that now this one's pocketed, on
to the next place,'' Mr. Powell added.

Still, even some of Mr. Powell's colleagues in the State Department have been
surprised by how quickly the doctrine of pre-emption has taken hold in the
administration, transforming a once obscure idea that had been floating around
conservative policy circles since at least the first Bush administration, into a
powerful policy strategy. In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense Cheney's aides --
including Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, the administration's
envoy on Iraq -- prepared a document known as the Defense Planning Guidance,
which argued that the United States should be prepared to use force to prevent
the spread of nuclear weapons.

The document also suggested that the United States should be ''postured to
act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated.''

But when drafts of the document leaked, just as the first President Bush's re-
election campaign was heating up, it embarrassed the administration as being too
hawkish and was shelved.

The principle of pre-emptive action was picked up in 1996 in an influential

article in the journal Foreign Affairs by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, the
editor of The Weekly Standard and the former chief of staff to Vice President Dan
Quayle, titled ''Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.''

Mr. Kristol and Mr. Kagan wrote that the 1990's under Mr. Clinton were a
time of passivity toward the threat of terrorism comparable to the 1970's, when
Ronald Reagan felt the same way about American attitudes toward the threat of
Communism.

In 1997, a few dozen well-known conservatives founded the Project for a New
American Century, which called for a more aggressive American foreign policy,
and included figures like Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz.

Mr. Kristol now notes that Mr. Clinton himself had begun embracing many
of the ideas of pre-emptive action. In a speech on Feb. 17, 1998, at the Pentagon,
Mr. Clinton said the United States ''simply cannot allow'' Mr. Hussein to acquire
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons arsenals. In a foreshadowing of what
Mr. Bush would say a few years later, Mr. Clinton spoke of ''an unholy axis'' of
terrorists and the ''outlaw nations'' that harbor them.

At the end of 1998, Mr. Clinton authorized bombing raids on Iraq, prompted
by Mr. Hussein's refusal to cooperate with weapons inspectors, but the
impeachment scandal made many in Congress -- particularly Republicans --
skeptical of his sincerity. Partly as a result, the bombing ended quickly.

The letter to Mr. Clinton that year from Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz and
the 16 other conservative figures has been cited by many in foreign policy
debates, most recently last week in the British Parliament, where Peter Kilfoyle, a
leading antiwar dissenter, mentioned the letter to dispute Prime Minister Tony
Blair's assertion that the war against Iraq was provoked by Mr. Hussein's latest
actions. He said policy makers ''set out very clearly'' their intentions well before
the current crisis.

Officials recall that an aggressive policy toward Iraq had been high on the
agenda of Mr. Bush's advisers since the earliest days of his administration. The
weekend after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to officials, when
Iraq was pressed by Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz as a high priority, Mr.
Powell argued that it was important first to deal with Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and
the Taliban.

By the spring of 2002, however, Afghanistan was occupied by American

forces, and the conservatives in the administration once again pushed for action
on Iraq. Building on the ''axis of evil'' theme, Mr. Bush spoke at West Point in the
summer of 2002, declaring that while ''in some cases'' deterrence still applied,
''new threats required new thinking.''
 ''If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long,'' he
declared.

The principle of pre-emptive action was then incorporated into the

administration's National Security Strategy in September 2002 and has appeared
in virtually every pronouncement on Iraq in the six months since then.

Policy analysts inside and outside the administration are now asking whether
a successful campaign in Iraq would encourage the administration to apply the
doctrine to Iran and North Korea, both of which are now further along in their
nuclear weapons programs than Iraq.

Administration officials who advocate military pre-emption say such an

approach would not necessarily apply to those countries, in part because North
Korea could retaliate and because Iran, even if there was a change in government,
would not be likely to abandon its nuclear program.

But there is little doubt that the fundamental debate will continue. ''This is
just the beginning,'' an administration official said. ''I would not rule out the same
sequence of events for Iran and North Korea as for Iraq, but circumstances do not
compel you to end up in the same place.''

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