Preemption and Practice

July 12, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS: THE INTELLIGENCE
Bush's Pre-emptive Strategy Meets Some Untidy Reality
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/politics/12PREE.html?position=&pagewanted=print&position=


Even as President Bush turns his doctrine of pre-emptive action against powers threatening the United States into a campaign theme, Washington is
using a far more subdued, take-it-slow approach to the dangers of unconventional weapons in Iran and North Korea.

There are many reasons for the yawning gap between Mr. Bush's campaign language and the reality. One of the most important is woven throughout
the searing, 511-page critique of the intelligence that led America to war last year, released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The report details, in one painful anecdote after another, misjudgments that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies made as they put together
what the committee called an "assumption train" about Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. That same train powered Mr.
Bush's own justification for a pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein, down to his now-discredited argument that the Iraqi leader was developing
unmanned aerial vehicles capable dropping biological weapons on American troops in the Mideast, or perhaps even the United States itself.

The sweeping nature of that report is already fueling a new debate over
pre-emption, on the campaign trail and among the nations the United States
must convince as it builds its case against North Korea and Iran. On
Sunday, Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the intelligence
committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the urgency of those
problems meant there was not much time to fix the intelligence community.

"Let's do it very quickly," he said, "because in a dangerous world, if
you're going to have a policy of pre-emption, whether it be North Korea or
whether it be whatever threat we face," including a possible terror attack
on the United States before the election, "we have to get it right."

Mr. Bush's aides say other countries are citing Iraq to make the argument
that America can never again be sure it is getting it right and thus must
back away from the pre-emption doctrine enshrined in Mr. Bush's 2002
"National Security Strategy of the United States."

China has been the most outspoken proponent of this view, suggesting
publicly that the administration cannot be trusted when it asserts that
North Korea has secretly started up a second nuclear weapons program ? one
based on enriching uranium. Administration officials say the Chinese are
exploiting the Iraq findings for political convenience, because finding a
solution to the North Korean problem will be far simpler if the evidence
of a uranium program can be ignored.

"It hurts us, there is no question," a senior aide to Mr. Bush conceded on
Friday, as the Senate report was published. "We already have the Chinese
saying to us, `If you missed this much in Iraq, how are we supposed to
believe that the North Koreans are producing nuclear weapons?' It just
increases the pressure on us to prove that we are right."

Iran is making a parallel argument. It admits ? even boasts about ? its
efforts to enrich uranium, which it hid for 17 years from international
inspectors until the evidence became overwhelming last year, forcing the
country into a reluctant confession. Now the Iranians argue that the
United States is riding another "assumption train," this time racing to
the conclusion Iran's real goal is making a weapon, rather than seeking an
alternative way to produce electricity.

In the cases of North Korea and Iran, the basis for the American charges
is far stronger than it was in Iraq: Inspectors have seen and measured
fissile material in both nations, and visited facilities capable of making
more.

Yet so far, the International Atomic Energy Agency ? which in retrospect
largely got it right in Iraq ? has declined to back the United States. "We
all think the American assessment is probably right because there is no
other good explanation for the Iranian activities," one senior
international diplomat involved in the search for evidence in Iran said
the other day. "But we still don't have the smoking gun." He said that
after the Iraq experience, "We need smoking guns more than ever."

In public, Mr. Bush's language about responding to threats is as black and
white as it was before his administration's case about the threat posed by
Mr. Hussein began to crumble.

"September the 11th, 2001, taught a lesson I will never forget," Mr. Bush
said recently while campaigning in Cincinnati. Using a line that often
turns up in his stump speech, he continued: "America must confront threats
before they fully materialize. In Iraq, my administration looked at the
intelligence and we saw a threat."

But, in noncampaign contexts, Mr. Bush says there are many ways to disarm
a country, and on Monday he is going to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
in Tennessee, a center of nuclear weapons technology, to speak about his
counterterrorism strategy. Oak Ridge is the repository of the centrifuges,
raw uranium and other nuclear equipment that the United States shipped out
of Libya this year, in the most conspicuous success story yet of how to
disarm a country without attacking it.

Mr. Bush is urging Iran and North Korea to follow the same path. So far,
neither has indicated it would. And so far, the president's aides say, Mr.
Bush has purposefully avoided making the kinds of threats that he made to
Iraq. One reason is a military reality: Iran could strike back against
Israel or American forces in the region, and North Korea could inflict
huge damage on Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

But Mr. Bush's position on Iran and North Korea may also have something to
do with election-year politics. His challenger, Senator John Kerry of
Massachusetts, has made clear that he will make a major issue of both the
intelligence failures and what he termed in a recent interview the
administration's "foolhardy rush" to embrace a pre-emptive attack against
Iraq.

The Democratic Party platform is expected to include a sentence declaring
that the "doctrine of unilateral pre-emption has driven away our allies,"
and Mr. Kerry argued in the interview that while he would reserve the
right to act pre-emptively, he would never make it a core doctrine of
American foreign policy.

Mr. Bush and his aides argue that would be a huge mistake. In the old
understanding of pre-emption, they argue, a country could see an army
massing and then decide whether to strike in advance. In the age of
terror, there would probably be no such obvious warning. Mr. Bush sees
that as a reason for broad presidential latitude. But it is more unclear
than ever before how any president can make that judgment with an
intelligence system that is widely viewed as badly broken.

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