Preemptive war: a prelude to global peril? - National Affairs

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), May, 2003 by Charles W. Kegley, Jr., Gregory A. Raymond

Fear is a great motivator. There are ample reasons to fear terrorists like Osama bin Laden and tyrants like Saddam. The threats are real in this age of globalization in which boundaries are no longer barriers to external threats, a suitcase nuclear bomb or a chemical/biological weapon can obliterate any American city, and a terrorist can strike anywhere and anytime. The U.S. is vulnerable, so there is an understandable compulsion to eliminate threats by any means available, including preemptive strikes.

Preemption is advocated as a policy, but what must be understood is that this strategy goes beyond that goal to a whole other level--to preventive war. The Bush doctrine transcends the established limitations of the use of armed force in self-defense against a prior armed attack. "The President is not `reserving a right' to respond to imminent threats," wrote Duke University professor of international relations Michael Byers in the July 25, 2002, issue of The London Review of Books, "he is seeking an extension of the fight of self-defense to include action against potential future dangers."

As the wording of the Bush NSS illuminates, the line between preemption and prevention is blurry. How does one distinguish intentions from capabilities? Because an adversary amasses arsenals of weapons, does that necessarily mean that those weapons are for aggression instead of defense? Without knowledge of motives, prudence dictates worst-case assumptions. This invites the so-called "security dilemma" that results when one country's arms acquisitions provokes corresponding actions by alarmed adversaries, with the result that all participants in the arms race experience reduced security as their weaponry increases. Preemption addresses the danger by attacking first and asking questions about intentions later.

The quest to redefine international rules to permit preemptive strikes has deeper philosophical, ethical, and legal consequences for the long term, beyond its unforeseen immediate impact. Does it threaten to weaken international security and, paradoxically, U.S. national security as well? To probe this questions, let us look briefly at some historical precedents to preemptive practices in order to put the current policy into perspective. Consider some salient illustrations that precede Bush's rationale:

* In the third Punic War fought between the Roman and Carthaginian empires (264-147 B.C.), after a 50-year hiatus, the Romans bought the advice of the 81-year-old Cato the Elder. Consumed with the fear that renewed Punic power would culminate eventually in Roman defeat unless drastic military measures were taken, he ended every speech to the Roman Senate by proclaiming "Carthaginian esse delendum" (Carthage must be destroyed). Heeding Cato's advice, Rome launched a preventive war of annihilation and, in 146 B.C., some 500,000 Carthaginian citizens were destroyed in an act of mass genocide, and an entire civilization was obliterated. The foreign threat had been met; thereafter, no challenges to Roman hegemony existed--but at what cost? The Roman historian Polybius prophetically lamented, "I feel a terror and dread lest someone someday should give the same order about my own native city." Perhaps this led him to conclude that "it is not the object of war to annihilate those who have given provocation to it, but to cause them to mend their ways." Worse still, this preventive war can be said to have destroyed the soul of Rome. After it, Rome suffered a prolonged period of revolutionary strife, and much later found itself victim of the same savage preemptive measures by invaders it had once inflicted on Carthage. "Val victis" (Woe betide the defeated), the Romans cried after the city was sacked by the Gauls in 390 A.D. Is there an object lesson here? Read on.