Iraq aftermath threatens Bush pre-emption doctrine

3.00pm

WASHINGTON - The controversy over the quality of intelligence cited before last year's United States invasion of Iraq may undermine President George W Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive attacks against potential enemies.

In a television interview yesterday, former top US weapons hunter David Kay said the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had discredited the doctrine, a key element of Bush's national security policy.

"If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and to others abroad, you certainly can't have a policy of pre-emption," Kay said on the US television show Fox News Sunday.

Bush announced his policy in a speech two years ago, after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, when he declared the country could no longer seek simply to deter or contain nations or groups that might pose a threat.

"Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies," he said at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York.

"We must take the battle to the enemy," he said.

Iraq was the first test case of this policy. Before the war, Bush argued that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons posed a "grave and gathering danger." He tried to get United Nations backing for his attack but when that failed went ahead anyway.

Though Saddam was overthrown and later captured, the controversy over the US justification for the war has refused to die. Kay's disclosure that Iraq probably did not have any weapons of mass destruction has only intensified it.

Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine argued that the Bush doctrine was in tatters because of the intelligence failure.

"The removal of Hussein was a blessing for Iraq, the US, and the world more generally. But thanks to the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) screw-up, even more than the postwar troubles, the Iraq mission is also likely to be the first and last example of pre-emption in action," Rose argued in a recent article.

But Phyllis Bennis of the liberal Institute for Policy Studies said there was no sign the president had changed his mind. The US was unlikely to embark on any new military adventure during an election year but if Bush were re-elected in November, all bets were off, she said.

"The decision to go to war against Iraq had nothing to do with intelligence. We went to war because ideologues in the administration were determined to go to war and those ideologues still believe in their doctrine," she said.

Bush's doctrine was not accepted overseas and the attack on Iraq has stoked anti-Americanism throughout the world, University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape said.

"Historically, most countries that have launched such preventive wars have not succeeded," he said. "They often go well initially but the international community turns against the aggressor."

Critics said one problem with the Bush doctrine was that it was inconsistently applied. While attacking Iraq partly on the basis of intelligence which has now been proven to be faulty, the administration has pursued diplomacy toward North Korea, which has been actively pursuing nuclear weapons.

Clifford May, an analyst at the Centre for Defence of Democracies which generally backs the Bush administration, said the country needed a serious debate about pre-emption.

"We do need to discuss and develop a policy on how much risk we are willing to tolerate from those whose intentions towards us are hostile," he said. "There are costs to pre-emptive action but there are also costs to inaction."

In an article in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to put the policy into context. It was, he said, only intended to be used against "undeterrable threats."

"The United States' National Security Strategy does commit us to pre-emption under certain limited circumstances. We stand by that judgment.

"But our strategy is not defined by pre-emption. Above all, the president's strategy is one of partnerships that strongly affirms the vital role of Nato and other US alliances -- including the UN" Powell said.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq