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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (112848)	8/26/2003 8:26:47 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

The Achilles' heel of the Bush doctrine ____________________________________ By Gregory Treverton* International Herald Tribune Monday, August 25, 2003 iht.com <<...WASHINGTON Focused on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, the Bush doctrine is anticipatory, pre-emptive and, if need be, unilateral. Yet the doctrine is bedeviled at its core by the capability of U.S. intelligence. . Although the United States has the military power to take out whatever miscreant state it chooses, it still lacks the ability to precisely locate and pre-emptively target weapons of mass destruction, despite all the technical wizardry of its intelligence. Indeed, even determining whether a potential adversary, such North Korea or Iran, is developing and deploying nuclear, chemical and biological weapons will continue to prove difficult. . Although it is logical for Washington to meet the threat from weapons of mass destruction with military force abroad before the United States can be hit, the emerging Bush doctrine of pre-emption or preventive war places stresses on intelligence that it cannot bear. . America's capacity for ISR - intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance - is unparalleled, truly in a class by itself. It is also improving rapidly. However, existing ISR is not good at detecting objects that are hidden under foliage, buried underground or concealed in other ways. Nor is it good at precisely locating objects by intercepting their signals. Would-be proliferators can exploit these weaknesses, taking pains to conceal their facilities or change the pattern of activities at weapons sites, as India did before its 1998 explosion of a nuclear weapon. . None of the limitations on U.S. intelligence-gathering capacity will ease dramatically, at least not soon...>> *The writer was deputy chair of the CIA's National Intelligence Council during the first Clinton administration and is author of "Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information." This comment was written for the Arms Control Association and distributed by Tribune Media Services International. A fuller version can be found at armscontrol.org.