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Preemptive Action

Long before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, plans to invade Iraq were hatched by a group of “neoconservatives” including President Bush and his brother Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Cheny’s chief-of-staff I. Lewis Libby, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and other like-minded political players and theorists. In 1992, while at the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and Libby, under the general direction of Cheney, produced a document called Defense Policy Guidance, which called for preemptive attack on any states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. The document urged military intervention in Iraq to ensure “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil.” Indeed, it envisioned U.S. military intervention abroad as “a constant feature” of the new world order.

In 1997, the neoconservative Project for the New American Century issued a Statement of Principles (signed by Wolfowitz, Libby, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, among others), which argued that “it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire.” The same group issued a strategy document in 2000 entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century, which called for “a global first-strike force.” The document identified North Korea, Iran, and Iraq—later designated the “axis of evil”—as candidates for regime change (together with Syria and China).

A passage in this document is worth quoting: “The United States,” it argues, “has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” In other words, the war makers were determined to take over Iraq, regardless of whether Saddam Hussein was in power or not. The document projects a “cavalry of the new American frontier” in which there is a permanent U.S. presence in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and elsewhere. The plan calls on the U.S. to consider developing biological weapons of mass destruction.

Also in 2000, Project for the New American Century directors Robert Kagan and William Kristol edited a book called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunities in American Foreign and Defense Policy, which repeated the call for regime change not just in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but also in mainland China. The neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, which includes Richard Perle, chair of Rumsfeld’s Defense Planning Board until being forced to resign because of conflict of interest issues, has vigorously promoted the notion that conflict with China is inevitable.

In June 2001, President Bush told the graduating class at West Point that “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” In 2002 he sent an official “National Security Strategy” to Capitol Hill in which he repeated that “America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.”

The point is that 9/11 provided this group a convenient smokescreen to put into action plans that had been formulated for at least a decade (it ought by now to go without saying that the purported links between Iraq and Al Queda are, to be charitable, tenuous). With the fall of the Soviets as a formidable counterbalance, these visionaries sought to seize the “unipolar moment” and achieve “full spectrum dominance”—a phrase that figures prominently in an official U.S. Department of Defense document: “The United States,” it says, “must maintain … the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance.” This will enable the country to “control any situation,” the document explains, by the application of military force.

And that is what all this theorizing comes down to—the application of superior force, pure and simple. We invade Iraq because we can. Perhaps Syria will be next. For now, we are powerful, and we can do as we wish.

But power has a funny way of fading away. In the collection of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco is a horse bridle in the form of a winged sphinx, dating from the first millennium BCE. It comes from the mountainous region that separates Iran from Iraq, a region hit hard in the first Gulf War. The people from this region conquered Babylon and briefly won full spectrum dominance over the cradle of civilization. But when the wind blows the cradle will rock. These one-time conquerors quickly disappeared, leaving only a few intriguing bronzes to mark their moment of glory, and museum curators can only speculate at the meaning of the winged sphinx. The answer, I suppose, is blowing in the wind.

So empires rise and decline. What will be the legacy of our moment in the sun? A legacy of force or a legacy of reason? For all their flaws, our forefathers forged a constitution that was constructed on principles of fairness and justice. I wish that we would honor those principles now. “Legal war” may seem an odd concept, but wars of self-defense can be justified in the community of nations. This, however, is not such a war. Saddam Hussein’s aggression against his neighbors Iran (we generally supported Iraq in that conflict) and Kuwait came to a halt after the first Gulf War. He is, or was, a despot and a villain, a cruel man who deserved to be overthrown, but he posed no immediate threat to the U.S. By invading Iraq and causing large numbers of civilian casualties, we cannot help but turn the people against us, as young Saddam turned against an earlier wave of British invaders.

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