Bush lays groundwork for striking first at nations with weapons of mass destruction.
"And the UN charter allows for self-defense in case of an armed attack,
legal experts doubt it wouldsanction a US
preemptive move to overthrow Iraq - short of a specific
threat by Baghdad. "The rest of the world
would by and largeconsider it illegal,
and American lawyers would have a hard time
putting together ... a proposition it was right,"
says Detlev Vagts, a professor of international
law at Harvard Law School in Cambridge.."
February 7, 2001
By Ann Scott Tyson | Special correspondent of
The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - One bright afternoon in June 1981, Israeli F-16 jets
streaked low across the Iraqi desert. Spotting the gleaming domes of
the unfinished Osiraq nuclear reactor, the pilots decimated it with
bombs - a bold preemptive strike in the name of self-preservation.
The world reaction to the strike was swift and critical, with the United
States and the rest of the UN Security Council unanimously
condemning it.
But now, two decades later, the Bush
administration - warning of time-bomb
terrorists and the spread of deadly mass
weapons - proposes a far more open-ended,
sweeping use of preemptive force than
Israel's.
In a controversial expansion of the Bush
doctrine - the unilateralist "with us or with
the terrorists" foreign policy that followed
Sept. 11 - the administration is making a
stark argument for striking first.
"Defending against terrorism and other
emerging 21st century threats may well
require that we take the war to the enemy,"
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said
last week in a speech at the National
Defense University.
In one extreme scenario - one nevertheless
under consideration by US officials - the Bush administration could
claim the right to overthrow the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein
preemptively. The goal: to prevent Hussein - alone or through
terrorists - from threatening the United States or its allies with
weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
"This is absolutely a new wrinkle," says Kurt Campbell, of the
International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. "There has been no presidential doctrine on
terrorism before now."
In contrast, over the past 20 years, American military strikes against
terrorist targets have been limited and for the most part retaliatory:
• In April 1986, the US struck military sites in Libya in response to
the bombing 10 days earlier of a Berlin discotheque frequented by US
troops.
• In June 1993, in retaliation for Iraq's alleged plot to assassinate
former President George Bush in April, US forces fired Tomahawk
cruise missiles at the Iraqi intelligence service headquarters in
Baghdad.
• In August 1998, 13 days after the bombings of the US embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, the US fired cruise missiles at training camps
in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan suspected of
making chemical weapons.
Yet today, many terrorism experts view such "action-reaction" strikes
as ineffective.
"We learned by experience that bombing installations and institutions
does not work in terms of pressing the regime to do something,"
says Matthew Levitt, a former FBI counterterrorism expert at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy here.
Two central factors drive the shift toward a preemptive policy against
the threat of terrorism and WMD. The first is the realization since
Sept. 11 of US vulnerability to thousands of terrorists trained and
willing to carry out attacks against Americans.
The other is the recognition that time is evaporating for Washington
to act against another, old, long-anticipated threat - chemical,
biological, and, most critically, nuclear weapons programs carried out
by "rogue" states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
"Time is not in our favor," the Pentagon official says. "There is a
sense of urgency because of the Iraqi program, among others. The
Iranian program is moving along in dangerous ways, and this
administration has always been nervous about North Korea and
whether its nuclear weapons program is completely constrained by
the 1994 agreement."
In 1998, a report to Congress by a bipartisan commission led by Mr.
Rumsfeld warned that rogue states were seeking to acquire ballistic
missiles with nuclear payloads, and the US could face a ballistic
missile strike within five years.
Meanwhile, officials say, known links between terrorist groups
actively pursuing WMD and states developing them led President
Bush to decide that preemptive action is warranted - and indeed, as
he said in his State of the Union address last week, the risk of
waiting to act "would be catastrophic."
Yet in what appeared to be a broadening of the war beyond terror,
President Bush indicated that threat of WMD alone would justify
preventative US action. "The United States of America will not permit
the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's
most destructive weapons," he said.
"I think nuclear weapons is what this is all about," says Tom Nichols,
a professor at the US Naval War College in Newport, R.I. "This is a
fundamentally new problem, because nuclear weapons allow a weak
state to inflict a huge amount of damage overnight."
Still, the Bush administration faces an uphill battle in convincing
skeptical European and other allies. And the UN charter allows for
self-defense in case of an armed attack, legal experts doubt it would
sanction a US preemptive move to overthrow Iraq - short of a specific
threat by Baghdad. "The rest of the world would by and large
consider it illegal, and American lawyers would have a hard time
putting together ... a proposition it was right," says Detlev Vagts, a
professor of international law at Harvard Law School in Cambridge,
Mass.
csmonitor.com |
