The Imperial Presidency Redux
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By Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Editorial
The Washington Post
Saturday, June 28, 2003
The weapons-of-mass-destruction issue -- where are they? -- will not subside and disappear, as the administration supposes (and hopes).
The issue will build because many Americans do not like to be manipulated and deceived.
It will build because elements in Congress and in the media will wish to regain their honor and demonstrate their liberation from Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld.
It will build because of growing interest in the parallel British inquiries by committees of the House of Commons. Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, formulated the charge with precision: "Instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy, we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled."
And the WMD issue will build because hyped intelligence produces a credibility gap. The credibility gap is likely to undermine the Bush doctrine and block the radical transformation of U.S. strategy to which the Bush administration is dedicated.
The strategy that won us the Cold War was a combination of containment and deterrence carried out through multilateral agencies. The Bush doctrine reverses all that. The essence of the Bush doctrine is "anticipatory self-defense," a fancy name for preventive war. Our new policy is to strike an enemy, unilaterally if necessary, before it has a chance to strike us.
Whatever legitimacy preventive war may claim derives from intelligence reliable enough to persuade responsible people, including allies, that the supposed enemy is really about to strike the United States. If no WMD turn up in Iraq, President Bush will lose a lot of credibility. It seems doubtful that he would be able to lead the American people into wars against Iran or North Korea simply on his presidential say-so. The credibility gap may well nullify the preventive-war policy.
And if a cache of WMD is found buried somewhere in Iraq, that is not sufficient to rescue the president. The bottom-line question is: Why were the WMD not deployed? When Saddam Hussein was fighting for his regime, his power and his life, why in the world did he not use his WMD against the U.S. invasion? Heaven knows, he had plenty of warning.
Unearthing buried WMD would not establish Iraq as a clear and present danger to the United States. Deployment of WMD would have come much closer to convincing people that Iraq was a mortal threat.
Retreat from the preventive-war policy is all to the good, because the Bush doctrine transfers excessive power to the president. Abraham Lincoln long ago foresaw the constitutional implications of the preventive-war policy. On Feb. 15, 1848, he denounced the proposition "that if it shall become necessary to repel invasion, the President may, without violation of the Constitution, cross the line, and invade the territory of another country; and that whether such necessity exists in given case, the President is to be the sole judge."
Lincoln continued: "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion . . . and you allow him to make war at pleasure. . . . If to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you 'be silent; I see it, if you don't.'
"The Founding Fathers," Lincoln said, "resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."
If the Bush doctrine prevails, the imperial presidency will sure be redux.
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The writer, a historian and an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, is author most recently of "A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950," the first volume of his memoirs.
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