First Stike Doctrine Dies
Washington Post By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 6, 2003
Soon after rolling out a new post-Cold War foreign policy doctrine, the Bush administration is scrambling to explain why "preemption" may be appropriate for dealing with Iraq, but not such a good idea in defusing the threat from fellow "axis of evil" member North Korea.
A spate of nuclear brinkmanship from North Korea, which is threatening to push ahead with the production of fissile material for a series of nuclear bombs, has created an unexpected opening for Democrats and opponents of a looming war with Iraq. The critics have seized on the North Korea crisis as an opportunity to attack the administration for apparent inconsistencies in a foreign policy strategy that stresses the need to move beyond the Cold War practices of containment and deterrence.
"What North Korea shows is that deterrence is working," said Joseph S. Nye Jr., dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, who served as a senior Pentagon official during the Clinton administration. "The only problem is that we are the ones who are being deterred."
To blunt the criticism, administration officials from President Bush down are subtly distancing themselves from elements of the new doctrine of strategic preemption announced last summer. They are insisting that the preemption doctrine -- an assertion by the United States that it is willing to use force, unilaterally if necessary, to confront potentially hostile states bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction -- was an option of last resort never intended to apply in all cases.
Last June, in a speech to West Point graduates, Bush declared that containment was "not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies." Those words would appear to apply to North Korea, whose missile and nuclear programs are much more advanced than those of Iraq, and which has an active program of selling its weapons technology to others.
Over the past two weeks, the administration has been forced back on what looks very much like a policy of containment toward North Korea, which has the ability to respond to a preemptive U.S. attack by inflicting massive damage on South Korea and even Japan, two key U.S. allies in Asia. There is widespread recognition, both inside and outside the government, that it is too risky to launch a preemptive military attack on a country that may have one or two nuclear weapons and can deliver a rain of devastating artillery fire on the South Korean capital of Seoul.
On Friday, Bush drew a distinction between North Korea and Iraq at a ceremony for U.S. troops heading for the Persian Gulf for the escalating military confrontation with Baghdad. He said that his administration was "confronting the threat of outlaw regimes who seek weapons of mass destruction," but that "different circumstances require different strategies, from the pressure of diplomacy to the prospect of force."
"What the cases of North Korea and Iraq show is that if the threat is genuinely serious, the preemption doctrine is not pursued," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. "If the threat is not immediate but, as the president said, grave and gathering, then you rely on preemption. It is less risky and more satisfying to beat up someone who is less threatening than more threatening."
Put another way, the paradox of preemption is that it can be applied only to a country that is too weak to retaliate effectively. Of the three countries that Bush placed in the "axis of evil" category in his State of the Union address a year ago, Iraq is generally viewed as the weakest and most vulnerable. Administration officials are ruling out preemption as a tactic for dealing with North Korea or the third "axis of evil" member, Iran.
A senior administration official said in an interview that the administration "never said that it was going to go around preempting in every circumstance. . . . When we discussed the policy, we talked about the fact that it would be rare as an option. There are many other options at one's disposal. In the case of North Korea, we have a diplomatic option, which we don't have in other cases."
The official added that one important lesson to be drawn from the confrontation with North Korea is that "the longer a situation like this goes on, the more limited one's options become. The North Korean problem started a long time ago. It is true that our options are more limited now, because of 20 years of policies that have not managed to deal with the Korean problem."
In the administration's view, the difficulties in finding a satisfactory means of dealing with North Korea are an additional argument for preparing to go to war with Iraq, even in the absence of an immediate, overwhelming threat. "The point is not whether you are more or less threatened by a particular power, but whether you acted early enough," said the senior official. "You should not wait until you don't have very good options."
Although the preemption doctrine was articulated in its most authoritative form in Bush's West Point speech and in a new national security strategy released in September, its intellectual origins go back to the administration of George H.W. Bush.
In 1992, after the Persian Gulf War, Pentagon planners such as Paul D. Wolfowitz, who has since become deputy secretary of defense, drafted a policy statement asserting that the United States reserved the right to use preemptive strikes to stop rogue states from developing weapons of mass destruction.
Known as the Defense Planning Guidance, the draft document also called for the United States to act to prevent the emergence of any rival superpower in the post-Cold War era. The draft sparked great controversy after it was leaked to the New York Times and was substantially rewritten, but many of its key points have reemerged as part of the foreign policy strategy of the younger Bush. Even today, enthusiasm for the ideas embraced in the Wolfowitz draft are much more pronounced in the Defense Department than in the State Department.
"National strategy documents are revealing snapshots of an administration," said an official involved in devising strategy toward Iraq and North Korea. "They tell you something about people's thinking and orientation. But they are not the American equivalent of Mao's little red book. It's not as if we show up in the office each day, reread the text, and see how we can apply it."
Although U.S. officials may not take their own foreign policy guidance literally, other countries' leaders tend to place great stock in formal American pronouncements, administration critics argue. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has drawn on the new administration doctrine and repeated expressions of "hatred" for his regime from Bush to accuse the United States of threatening a preemptive nuclear strike. U.S. officials insist that his fears lack foundation.
Brzezinski says he believes that Kim is not as crazy as he may seem, and that his actions are logical for a megalomaniac Third World dictator who feels threatened by the United States. "He is rationally crazy," Brzezinski said. "The lesson of North Korea for other Third World dictators is to go nuclear as rapidly as possible, and as secretly as possible, and then act crazy so as to deter us."
It is a lesson that does not appear to have been lost on Iraq, which last week urged other Arab countries to follow the North Korean example. "We Arabs need to revise our behavior towards the United States, as North Korea has done, to be respected," said the Iraqi daily newspaper Babel, which is owned by President Saddam Hussein's older son, Uday.
After weeks of going along with Bush's Iraq policy, leading Democrats last week raised their voices to criticize the seeming imbalance between the administration's handling of Baghdad and Pyongyang. Outgoing Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) was one of several who described the North Korea crisis as much more threatening to U.S. interests. "There is no urgency in Iraq," Biden told NBC. "As long as the inspectors and the international community is there, there is little or no prospect of them being able to do much mischief."
Some administration critics argue that the White House has blurred a traditional distinction between preemption and prevention. States have often asserted a right to act in self-defense to preempt an imminent attack by a rival power. Acting to prevent such attacks in the more distant future, as the Bush administration is doing in Iraq, is much more controversial because it provides a justification for states to go to war even when the threat is not imminent.
"My own feeling is that prevention makes sense against terrorists but is unwise as a doctrine against states," said Nye, of Harvard. He noted that President John F. Kennedy rejected a military strike against Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis because he thought that it would smack too much of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Instead, Kennedy adopted a compromise course of blockading Cuba, which was of questionable legality under international law but avoided an immediate military confrontation with the Soviet Union.
A senior administration official argued that Kennedy's blockade of Cuba was tantamount to "an act of war" and provides a good analogy for what Bush is trying to achieve in his policy toward Iraq. "The blockade was an important intermediate step, but no one should doubt that Kennedy was prepared to take those missiles out, if the blockade had failed," the official said. "He was ready to act preemptively."
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