MidEast Report

PREEMPTIVE, PREVENTIVE
I've noticed a tendency in much of the news media to refer to Bush's invasion of Iraq as a "preemptive war." Bob Woodward does it in his new book Plan of Attack, and Hendrik Hertzberg does it in his review of that book. The term is incorrect. The Iraq invasion was not preemptive, it was preventive, and this is a very significant distinction.

Jeffrey Record writes in his examination of the Bush Doctrine:

The Pentagon's official definition of preemption is "an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent." In contrast, preventive war is "a war initiated in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve great risk."

The difference between preemption and preventive war is important. As defined above, preemptive attack is justifiable if it meets Secretary of State Daniel Webster's strict criteria, enunciated in 1837 and still the legal standard, that the threat be "instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation." Preemptive war has legal sanction. Preventive war, on the other hand, has none, because the threat is neither certain nor imminent. This makes preventive war indistinguishable from outright aggression, which may explain why the Bush Administration insists that its strategy is preemptive, although some Cabinet officials have used the terms interchangeably.

Bush and his water-carriers have continually insisted that Bush never claimed the Iraqi threat was imminent (he only strongly implied it by using just about every synonym for "imminent" available in the English language), so it seems odd that journalists such as Woodward, Hertzberg, and others would cooperate in the recasting of the Iraq invasion as "preemptive" rather than "preventive" war, given that an "imminent" threat is the most important factor distinguishing one from the other.

That said, I agree with the Bush Administration that, in this age of transnational terrorism and more easily obtainable and transportable WMD, it would be irresponsible to have a policy of national self-defense that hinges on Webster's outdated 1837 definition of imminent threat. What I object to is that Bush and his minions clearly tried to create the impression of just such a threat to gain public support for, and reduce the political cost of, the Iraq invasion.

posted by Matt Duss @ 2:55 PM