WASHINGTON,  One year after President Bush declared Iraq to be part of an "axis of evil," the United States appears ready to carry out its new doctrine authorizing pre-emptive attacks on hostile states and terrorists who represent potential threats to the United States.

While the Bush administration would prefer to have the broad support of United Nations Security Council members before it invades Iraq, it put the world community on notice today that it is fully prepared to act on its own.

"Multilateralism cannot become an excuse for inaction," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said today, referring to the uphill battle to achieve a consensus at the Security Council.

He later added, "We continue to reserve our sovereign right to take military action against Iraq alone or in a coalition of the willing."

The United States has long reserved the right to strike first to defend American troops and territory against imminent threats. But experts say the pre-emption policy is remarkable for several reasons.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the Bush administration has turned pre-emption from an option into a cardinal principle of its foreign policy. It has also made the case for pre-empting threats that are not immediate, but merely prospective, as in the case of Iraq.

Importantly, the administration has talked about pre-emption in a very public way. Pre-emption is no longer a contingency to be discussed behind closed doors, but is advertised in strategy documents, proclaimed in presidential speeches and noted on the White House Web site.

Senior Bush administration officials emphasize that pre-emption is just one of several ways to cope with terrorist threats and the dangers posed by the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical arms. They say the doctrine is needed to deter potential adversaries from developing weapons of mass destruction and to reassure the American public, shaken by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that the government will protect them.

"The 9/11 attacks gave Americans a sense for the first time that they are vulnerable, and they have an expectation that their government will take action to reduce and eliminate threats," said a senior administration official.

"There is also a deterrent element for the bad guys," the official added. "And quite frankly we have to tell the rest of the world community that the world is different, that this is going to require some new measures and that they are probably going to have to act pre-emptively, too."

But the doctrine has many critics, Republicans as well as Democrats. However the Iraq issue is resolved, they say the administration's very public declarations that it has the right to initiate military action has exacerbated the strains between the United States and its allies, particularly because it comes amid unease over the unilateralist streak in administration policy and the United States role as the world's sole military superpower.

"It is not clear to me what advantage there is in declaring it publicly," said Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser who served the first President Bush, said of the pre-emption policy. "It has been common knowledge that under some circumstances the U.S. would pre-empt. As a declaratory policy in tends to leave the door open to others who want to claim the same right. By making it public we also tend to add to the world's perception that we are arrogant and unilateral."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, said the doctrine might "stimulate excessive anxieties" about American policy.

"The image you get of America in the polls abroad is an America that is admired for what it is domestically but increasingly viewed with apprehension for how it conducts itself internationally," Mr. Brzezinski added. "I don't think that is good. I am a great supporter of American power. We are the essential element of global stability. But our power is not so enormous that we can afford progressively to lose the element of legitimacy of that power."

The Precedent
Echoing Ideas of Another Time

The principal themes in the Bush administration's national security strategy echo arguments made by staunch conservatives a decade ago

When Vice President Dick Cheney was defense secretary during the administration of the first President Bush, his aides drafted a document, known as the Defense Planning Guidance, which included many of the provocative themes that the current administration has embraced. The Cheney aides involved in the effort included Paul D. Wolfowitz, now the deputy defense secretary; I. Lewis Libby, now Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, and Zalmay Khalilzad, now the White House envoy to the Iraqi resistance.

The draft document argued that the United States should be prepared to use force if necessary to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. It argued that the goal of American policy should be to maintain United States military primacy and discourage the emergence of a rival superpower. It argued that military coalitions should not necessarily be based on formal alliances but rather on ad hoc assemblies of nations, a practice that meant Washington would not necessarily be bound by the view of its allies.

The draft document stimulated an intense debate when its existence became known, and Mr. Cheney's aides rushed to tone it down.

"The ideas were seen as controversial because they were coming from the Defense Department," one United States official recalled. "And Bush senior was not too comfortable in thinking in those kind of terms."

It was far from clear during the 2000 election campaign that the administration of George W. Bush would revive that agenda. Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, even argued during the campaign that if Iraq and North Korea developed weapons of mass destruction they could be deterred.

"If they do acquire WMD [weapons of mass destruction] their weapons will be unusable, because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration," she wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs in 2000.

Several factors seem to have accounted for the change. As president, George W. Bush and his top aides have turned out to be more conservative than his father and his advisers.

The attacks of Sept. 11 have also transformed American policy. Mr. Bush developed a more aggressive strategy for contending with threats to the United States and gave hard-liners in his administration a fresh opportunity to press their old agenda of ousting Saddam Hussein.

The Changes
Efforts to Pinpoint and Prevent Threats

Mr. Bush's first State of the Union address was an early sign of the impending changes, casting Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil," nations whose pursuit of weapons of mass destruction made them a "grave and growing danger."

Mr. Bush followed with a speech at West Point in June in which he argued that deterrence and containment were no longer adequate and vowed to "take the battle to the enemy."

The more elaborate expression of the doctrine is in the administration's National Security Strategy, issued in September. The initial draft was prepared by the staff of the National Security Council but rejected by Mr. Bush, who insisted on a document that would more directly reflect his own principles and which would be in his own voice.

"Sept. 11 has had a transforming effect on people's thinking," a Bush administration official said. "There is a recognition that in this new era you need to do more beforehand, that it is much better to be proactive to prevent threats from emerging. What the strategy document does is provide a framework for planners and foreign policy."

The document made clear that pre-emption was just one way of dealing with potential threats, but it gave more weight to it than before. It emphasized the need for taking "anticipatory action" even if there was some uncertainty about the timing of the enemy's plans.

Experts say Mr. Bush was not talking just about pre-emption in the narrow sense, when an attack seemed imminent, but of the possibility of preventive war to stop threats before they materialize.

In the case of Iraq, Bush administration officials have justified the threat to invade on the grounds that it is implementing United Nations Security Council resolutions. Some have argued that Iraq is, therefore, not a case of pre-emption but an effort to enforce the will of the international community.

But experts say the spirit of the pre-emption policy is driving the Bush administration's Iraq policy. A full-scale invasion and occupation of Iraq is not the only way to enforce the United Nations resolutions and, as Mr. Powell made clear today, the administration is prepared to act in the face of allied objections and without the explicit authorization of the Security Council.

The Debate
Differing Views of Deterrence

As the United States has begun military preparations for an attack on Iraq, the pre-emption policy has fueled a wide-ranging debate. One major argument for the policy, administration officials say, is the possibility that a state like Iraq might give weapons to terrorists, who would use them to attack the United States.

A devastating attack might be carried out, but United States authorities would not know who sponsored it. So, the only way to ensure that the United States is defended to is go to the source: the weapon-producing state itself.

"Containment and deterrence goes back to an era when the only use of force we worried about was one in which the use of force could be directly associated with a country, and that country had an address," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "The whole thing that terrorists introduce is that you not only do not see the threat coming but you do not know where it came from."

Critics, like James B. Steinberg, the deputy national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, say Iraq and other countries would be taking a huge risk by giving such weapons to terrorists because the plot might be uncovered. As a result, they say, there is no reason to think they would not continue to be deterred.

In an October letter to Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency said Iraq was unlikely to sponsor a terrorist attack in the United States with weapons of mass destruction as long as the United States did not attack it.

Another argument for the policy is that by using the threat of force to compel Iraq to disarm voluntarily or taking military action against Baghdad if it refuses, Washington will deter hostile states from pursuing weapons programs or supporting terrorists.

"Whichever way it comes out, disarming Saddam of his weapons of mass destruction, demonstrating to people who are trying to follow in his tracks that the world will ultimately cause you to fail, is a very good demonstration," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

Critics say the administration has undercut that message by declaring a policy that is too sweeping.

The administration, they say, has targeted Iraq because it is weak militarily but has all but ruled out force in the case of North Korea, which the C.I.A. says probably has one or two nuclear weapons. Nor is the administration threatening Iran, which is trying to develop nuclear weapons but is caught up in an internal debate over its policy toward the West. The doctrine of pre-emption, they say, applies to only one of the three "axis of evil" states.

"I think one of the mistakes associated with the articulation of the policy is the very fact that it was made a policy," said Joseph P. Hoar, a retired four-star Marine general and the former head of the United States Central Command. "Pre-emptive strikes have always been a possibility for the U.S. government. It is just that it was never made a declaratory statement of policy."

"I am sometimes concerned that the neo-conservatives in Washington are very quick to play the military card," General Hoar added.

Responding to criticism that it has put too much emphasis on pre-emption, Ms. Rice emphasized in an October speech that Washington had understood from the start that pre-emption could only be undertaken with great caution. The speech came at a time when the United States was striving to mobilize support in the Security Council for its Iraq policy.

"The number of cases in which it might be justified will always be small," Ms. Rice said of pre-emption during the speech. "It does not give a green light to the United States or any other nation to act first without exhausting other means, including diplomacy. Pre-emptive action does not come at the beginning of a long chain of effort. The threat must be very grave."

As Mr. Bush prepares for his second State of the Union address, however, officials have signaled that the administration believes it is at the end of that chain in the case of Iraq and is prepared to shed the mantle of multilateral action if it must and act alone.

As Mr. Powell said today, "We will not shrink from war if that is the only way to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

HOME