Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that "The first draft of the Democratic platform that will be presented to the party's convention late this month ... declares that Mr. Bush's 'doctrine of unilateral pre-emption has driven away our allies.'" It's the sort of talking point I hear so often in anti-Bush circles that I almost just skipped right over it. Liberals should watch their words more closely, though, for political and policy disaster are lurking not far from too-quick condemnations of preemptive war. As the Bush administration tells it, preemption is an excellent thing. If the president sees a threat to the United States, he intends to strike first -- preempting it -- rather than waiting for America to come under attack. Do Democrats really want to be the party of "wait and see," standing idly by while our citizens are killed by terrorists and rogue leaders?
The answer, of course, is "no." Any sensible person would favor preemptive action when warranted, hence the interest in Richard Clarke revelation that Bush and his cabinet didn't seem very interested in repeated warnings from his office and the CIA that al-Qaeda was planning attacks on U.S. soil. The problem with the Iraq War, by contrast, isn't that it was preemptive; it's that it didn't preempt anything. That's the point of the debate about Saddam Hussein's relationship with al-Qaeda, about the state of our intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, and about whether or not the administration tried to lead the public to believe that Iraq posed an imminent threat to American security.
A preemptive war is like shooting the other guy when you see him reaching for his holster rather than waiting to let him get a few shots off first -- a nice trick if you can pull it off. The classic example in international relations was Israel's decision in 1967 to strike against Egypt rather than wait for an Egyptian attack that was clearly coming as soon as Israel demobilized its reserves. But Saddam wasn't reaching, didn't have a gun, and the gun he didn't have contained no bullets. Though he certainly harbored no love for the United States, there's no indication that he had any desire to start a war with us. And even if he did, he had no means -- neither an operational relationship with al-Qaeda nor the mythical aerial drones -- by which to attack us. Last but by no means least, he had no WMD with which to attack. Despite initial military success, U.S. forces didn't preempt anything because there was nothing to preempt.
The Iraq War was what's properly known as a preventative war, when one country (typically a strong one) attacks a weaker country that is growing stronger, in order to forestall a larger, more difficult war later on. During the early years of the Cold War there were some advocates of waging preventative war first against the Soviet Union and then against China, under the theory that it would be better to fight these countries sooner -- before they acquired nuclear weapons -- rather than later. Preventative warfare, from Germany's decision to use a dispute over an assassinated archduke as a pretext for taking on the rising power of Russia to Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, does not have a stellar historical record. Nevertheless, to all things there is a season, and it would be rash to say that waging preventative war, especially against a regime whose internal character is despicable, is always wrong.
The point, however, is that the standard for timing and execution for the two ventures is quite different. A truly preemptive war is waged in the face of an imminent threat to the country: We must act now, or we will be attacked. Under those circumstances, it would be foolish to worry too much about the views of the German government or the effect of war on public opinion in Morocco. Sometimes, a thing just needs doing, and it doesn't matter what else is going on. March 2003 in the Persian Gulf, however, was not one of those times. The threat posed by Saddam and his weapons programs wasn't imminent, or even especially close. The threat was that, over the medium term, the sanctions policy would fall apart and sometime after that Saddam would be able to acquire nuclear weapons at which point he would be a threat to his neighbors and to regional security.
That was a real problem, but it wasn't a crisis. The decisive moment when we had to act was some way off in the future, and the revival of the inspections process (to give credit where due, a consequence of Bush's bellicosity) had pushed the date further into the future. Under the circumstances, nothing terrible would have happened if we delayed the war in order to try and gain the endorsement of the UN Security Council or, at least, a majority of its members. Preemptive wars can't wait -- that's the whole point -- but preventative wars most certainly can.
Indeed, nothing about the timing of the Iraq War made sense in the preventative context. The American military was already strained -- a product of legacy commitments of the Cold War and the Clinton years combined with the recently concluded Afghan war. We were already theoretically committed to the reconstruction of one vanquished adversary and already not doing a very good job of it. Of the three roguish members of the "axis of evil" Iraq was furthest, not closest, from acquiring nuclear weapons. There was also the small matter of al-Qaeda to deal with, as a claim on military and intelligence resources abroad and as a matter of preparation on the home front. And America's political leadership, as we've all been learning for the past year, hadn't even put together a proper postwar plan.
But all this could be forgiven if Iraq were truly a preemptive action, which is what makes criticizing it as such so dangerous. Mistakes were made in the Afghan war, most notably at the battle of Tora Bora, but the American people quite reasonably understood that things often go less-than-perfectly in an emergency situation. Failing to mobilize America's alliances and muddling through a year's worth of occupation would not be good things under any circumstances, but we still toppled Saddam's regime. If there had been something to preempt, we would have successfully preempted it, and Bush could make a strong case that he got the big decision right, even if some of the details went awry. But that's not what happened. With preventative war the details are the big decision, because the whole point is to choose the timing and manner of the conflict in an advantageous way. The administration has manifestly failed to do that, a key point that's only obscured by hasty condemnations of preemption.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect writing fellow. His column on politics and the media appears every Tuesday.
