Even the experts are at loggerheads over this issue:
Posted on Wed, Sep. 04, 2002
Experts disagree on whether Iraq's infractions justify a first strike
By SCOTT CANON
The Kansas City Star
When the Israelis attacked an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and declared the action self-defense, the United States called it illegal.
Now America openly contemplates its own pre-emptive war against Iraq, with the Bush administration insisting it must stop Saddam Hussein before he hits with weapons of mass destruction -- not after.
That finds the White House arguing to justify a first-strike war, a position widely seen to break new ground in American military ventures.
At the heart of the reasoning lies the conviction that waiting out Hussein carries far more risk than attacking him. After all, he has a history of supporting terrorists, of trying to build doomsday devices and of using weapons the rest of the world considers too awful to deploy.
"The risks of inaction," summarized Vice President Dick Cheney, "are far greater than the risks of action."
Polling so far suggests a solid majority of Americans would support military action. Yet critics contend that raiding Iraq would ignore standards -- written and unwritten -- about when to open fire.
Historically and ethically, goes the criticism, civilized regimes struck at enemies either after they'd been hit -- think Pearl Harbor -- or when they were certain they were on the verge of getting hit. Righteous countries, the criticism continues, don't use lethal force simply because of what they contend might happen.
The West, for instance, largely supported the Israelis for being the first to pull the trigger in the 1967 war because the tiny nation had Arab enemies massing at their borders for invasion.
Today's brewing showdown with Iraq, critics argue, does not give the United States such obvious license to begin dropping bombs on Baghdad.
They contend the situation falls far short of standards for the use of force. Under the charter of the United Nations, for instance, only the U.N. Security Council holds the power to authorize military action except for obvious cases of self-defense.
"This doesn't even come close," said Marjorie Cohn, an international human-rights law expert at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego.
If the United States wanted to knuckle down countries acquiring weapons of mass destruction, she said, it could turn its attention to Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Israel and more.
Cohn speculated that muscling Iraq could have much of the world wondering who's next to be pushed around by Uncle-Sam-knows-best chauvinism. Charging into Iraq would make a potentially dangerous situation into a definitely dangerous conflict, she said.
"It's like a beehive," Cohn said. "Do you kick it to make sure there's trouble?"
At the libertarian Cato Institute, its vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, Ted Galen Carpenter, said the doctrine for pre-emptive attacks has traditionally been pursued narrowly -- reserved for specific and imminent threats.
To apply that to Iraq, which is the subject of speculation over its development of nuclear weapons and missiles capable of stretching its range for attack with chemical weapons, seems "extraordinarily broad and vague," he said.
America has long had enemies with such capabilities and intentions. The United States chose not to protect itself with pre-emptive attacks on the Soviet Union -- despite the advocacy from quarters personified by former Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay -- for fear of igniting World War III. Some Americans in the late 1940s debated taking out China's fledgling weapons programs.
"China couldn't have launched all-out war in retaliation...but you would have alienated several generations of Chinese to come," Carpenter said. "Now are we going to create a recruiting poster for Islamic radicals that will bedevil us for generations to come?"
Sometimes, say advocates of the first-strike approach, history doesn't offer up easy models to guide such dilemmas. Never before, for instance, has a despot with a record of using chemical weapons on both foreign armies and his own citizens threatened American interests and sought a nuclear bomb.
To wait for an international consensus, they say, might mean waiting too long.
"The U.S. could stick its head in the sand and wait and pretend there's no threat," said James Phillips, an analyst of the Middle East and terrorism for the conservative Heritage Foundation. "But there's a real danger in that."
He noted that Hussein already tried to assassinate the first President George Bush, sponsored assorted terrorists such as the late Abu Nidal, and repeatedly violated the terms reached to end the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Phillips and others said that military action against Baghdad now would be less a pre-emptive action than a continuation of that war, which began when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Indeed, Bush administration officials have reasoned that U.N. authority for a fresh U.S. offensive lingers in resolutions passed more than a decade ago. (Passing a similar U.N. measure would be hard to imagine today, with leaders in Russia and Europe explicitly denouncing American war plans.) U.S. and British warplanes never stopped bombing military targets and killing Iraqi soldiers in the northern and southern no-fly zones.
Retired Army Maj. Dana Dillon, another Heritage analyst, asks whether U.S. action over the last quarter-century in Panama and Grenada could be seen as pre-emptive attacks.
"Every war is different," Dillon said. "There are different motivations every time."
It matters, he said, that Iraq is not the Soviet Union, with its old but still massive nuclear arsenal, or North Korea, where any military action brings the threat of involving China again.
"It's easier. I don't mean that flippantly," Dillon said. "Our goals are more attainable in Iraq."
Or as a Clinton-era foreign-policy adviser put it, "you pick your fights."
Iraq, said Kenneth Pollack, may be the right fight. It's a country the United States likely could vanquish, and yet one that poses serious threats. He imagines Hussein developing a nuclear bomb and sneaking it into New York Harbor. Or blasting away at his neighbors and shutting down the flow of oil from the region.
"That gets you a global depression. Lots of people died during the Great Depression," said Pollack. He was director of Persian Gulf affairs for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration and now heads national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It is in the vital interests of the United States to stop that from happening."
Whether the action appears pre-emptive, he said, matters less than whether America appears to be going it alone. Pollack said the Arab world, for instance, might be more receptive if we intervened more forcefully in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute.
As well, Pollack said, the United States can make a point of holding itself to a higher standard for a first-strike war by justifying it on Iraq's history of aggression and efforts to amass weapons of mass destruction.
"Iraq," he said, "really is unique."
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