Abstract
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Fter the berlin wall and the soviet union collapsed, Colin Powell–then chairman of the Joint Chiefs–complained that the United States had scarcely any enemies left: “I'm running out of demons,” he said. “I'm down to Kim II Sung and Castro.”
No need to worry about that ever happening again. The Bush administration, itching for a fight, declared in its September 17 “National Security Strategy” that it has the right to attack anyone at any time.
In the 1990s, U.S. leaders struggled to develop a reliable corps of black-hat states it could list as enemies. Tiny countries–dozens of them–were said to have amazing long-distance missiles and a suicidal desire to send them careening toward the United States. Planners declared that the country had to remain armed and dangerous enough to fight two simultaneous “major wars” in two far-flung areas of the globe–no matter that the potential opponents they were able to i.d. were not actually major players. It was all kind of fun as long as the enemies were mostly imaginary.
On September 11, 2001, though, everything changed. The United States discovered that it had a wow of an enemy. Here was a legitimate foe to whom attention must be paid–or so one would have thought.
It turns out, though, that the elusive Osama bin Laden and his cohort are not really the sort of folks the Bush foreign policy team wishes to fight. They consider Afghanistan more of a fly-swat on their way to take on that 1990s enemies list. And first on the list is Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Believing that any sort of offhand remark they utter should be taken as gospel, administration officials have incessantly beaten the war-with-Iraq drum. In August and September, they floated increasingly unbelievable “evidence” of recent Iraqi perfidy to an increasingly skeptical public. By September 25, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was even suggesting to the PBS NewsHour audience that Saddam Hussein had somehow been involved in the September 11 attack. Of course, she said, she was not “trying to make an argument at this point that Saddam Hussein somehow had operational control of what happened on September 11 … we don't want to push this too far.”
But why, given the imperial pronouncements in the National Security Strategy, are people like Rice making any attempt to convince anyone of anything? Declaring that the United States “can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture,” the document argues that declaring war on others is good for them–even if the new policy does require a little tinkering with the traditional beliefs of “legal scholars and international jurists,” who heretofore have considered preemptive attacks on other nations as legitimate only in the case of an “imminent threat.” (And anyone who disagrees with the new policy is to be tarred and feathered.)
But I agree with the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Marc Racicot, who, speaking of members of Congress, said that an individual's willingness or hesitancy to preemptively attack Iraq “reflects upon character and capacity to lead.”
Indeed it does.