INTRODUCTION
Like all Americans I have
been wrestling with the question of what our country needs to do to defend
itself from the kind of intense, focused and enabled hatred that brought about
September 11th, and which at this moment must be presumed to be gathering force
for yet another attack. I’m speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific
course of action for our country which I believe would be preferable to the
course recommended by President Bush. Specifically, I am deeply concerned that
the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to
seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our
ability to lead the world in this new century.
FIRST THING FIRST: WAR ON
TERRORISM
To begin with, I believe we should focus our efforts first and
foremost against those who attacked us on September 11th and have thus far
gotten away with it. The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and
implemented the cold blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at
large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and
neutralized. I do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted
from this urgent task simply because it is proving to be more difficult and
lengthy than predicted. Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not
jump from one unfinished task to another.
We are perfectly capable of
staying the course in our war against Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network,
while simultaneously taking those steps necessary to build an international
coalition to join us in taking on Saddam Hussein in a timely fashion.
I
don’t think that we should allow anything to diminish our focus on avenging the
3,000 Americans who were murdered and dismantling the network of terrorists who
we know to be responsible for it. The fact that we don’t know where they are
should not cause us to focus instead on some other enemy whose location may be
easier to identify.
Nevertheless, President Bush is telling us that the
most urgent requirement of the moment – right now – is not to redouble our
efforts against Al Qaeda, not to stabilize the nation of Afghanistan after
driving his host government from power, but instead to shift our focus and
concentrate on immediately launching a new war against Saddam Hussein. And he is
proclaiming a new, uniquely American right to pre-emptively attack whomsoever he
may deem represents a potential future threat.
Moreover, he is demanding
in this high political season that Congress speedily affirm that he has the
necessary authority to proceed immediately against Iraq and for that matter any
other nation in the region, regardless of subsequent developments or
circumstances. The timing of this sudden burst of urgency to take up this cause
as America’s new top priority, displacing the war against Osama Bin Laden, was
explained by the White House Chief of Staff in his now well known statement that
“from an advertising point of view, you don’t launch a new product line until
after labor day.”
Nevertheless, Iraq does pose a serious threat to the
stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition
to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq’s search for
weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we
should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. Moreover,
no international law can prevent the United States from taking actions to
protect its vital interests, when it is manifestly clear that there is a choice
to be made between law and survival. I believe, however, that such a choice is
not presented in the case of Iraq. Indeed, should we decide to proceed, that
action can be justified within the framework of international law rather than
outside it. In fact, though a new UN resolution may be helpful in building
international consensus, the existing resolutions from 1991 are sufficient from
a legal standpoint.
We also need to look at the relationship between our
national goal of regime change in Iraq and our goal of victory in the war
against terror. In the case of Iraq, it would be more difficult for the United
States to succeed alone, but still possible. By contrast, the war against terror
manifestly requires broad and continuous international cooperation. Our ability
to secure this kind of cooperation can be severely damaged by unilateral action
against Iraq. If the Administration has reason to believe otherwise, it ought to
share those reasons with the Congress – since it is asking Congress to endorse
action that might well impair a more urgent task: continuing to disrupt and
destroy the international terror network.
I was one of the few Democrats
in the U.S. Senate who supported the war resolution in 1991. And I felt betrayed
by the first Bush administration’s hasty departure from the battlefield, even as
Saddam began to renew his persecution of the Kurds of the North and the Shiites
of the South – groups we had encouraged to rise up against Saddam. It is worth
noting, however, that the conditions in 1991 when that resolution was debated in
Congress were very different from the conditions this year as Congress prepares
to debate a new resolution. Then, Saddam had sent his armies across an
international border to invade Kuwait and annex its territory. This year, 11
years later, there is no such invasion; instead we are prepared to cross an
international border to change the government of Iraq. However justified our
proposed action may be, this change in role nevertheless has consequences for
world opinion and can affect the war against terrorism if we proceed
unilaterally.
Secondly, in 1991, the first President Bush patiently and
skillfully built a broad international coalition. His task was easier than that
confronted his son, in part because of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.
Nevertheless, every Arab nation except Jordan supported our military efforts and
some of them supplied troops. Our allies in Europe and Asia supported the
coalition without exception. Yet this year, by contrast, many of our allies in
Europe and Asia are thus far opposed to what President Bush is doing and the few
who support us condition their support on the passage of a new U.N. resolution.
Third, in 1991, a strong United Nations resolution was in place before
the Congressional debate ever began; this year although we have residual
authority based on resolutions dating back to the first war in Iraq, we have
nevertheless begun to seek a new United Nations resolution and have thus far
failed to secure one.
Fourth, the coalition assembled in 1991 paid all
of the significant costs of the war, while this time, the American taxpayers
will be asked to shoulder hundreds of billions of dollars in costs on our own.
Fifth, President George H. W. Bush purposely waited until after the
mid-term elections of 1990 to push for a vote at the beginning of the new
Congress in January of 1991. President George W. Bush, by contrast, is pushing
for a vote in this Congress immediately before the election. Rather than making
efforts to dispel concern at home an abroad about the role of politics in the
timing of his policy, the President is publicly taunting Democrats with the
political consequences of a “no” vote – even as the Republican National
Committee runs pre-packaged advertising based on the same theme -- in keeping
with the political strategy clearly described in a White House aide’s misplaced
computer disk, which advised Republican operatives that their principal game
plan for success in the election a few weeks away was to “focus on the war.”
Vice President Cheney, meanwhile indignantly described suggestions of political
motivation “reprehensible.” The following week he took his discussion of war
strategy to the Rush Limbaugh show.
The foreshortening of deliberation
in the Congress robs the country of the time it needs for careful analysis of
what may lie before it. Such consideration is all the more important because of
the Administration’s failure thus far to lay out an assessment of how it thinks
the course of a war will run – even while it has given free run to persons both
within and close to the administration to suggest that this will be an easy
conquest. Neither has the Administration said much to clarify its idea of what
is to follow regime change or of the degree of engagement it is prepared to
accept for the United States in Iraq in the months and years after a regime
change has taken place.
By shifting from his early focus after September
11th on war against terrorism to war against Iraq, the President has manifestly
disposed of the sympathy, good will and solidarity compiled by America and
transformed it into a sense of deep misgiving and even hostility. In just one
year, the President has somehow squandered the international outpouring of
sympathy, goodwill and solidarity that followed the attacks of September 11th
and converted it into anger and apprehension aimed much more at the United
States than at the terrorist network – much as we manage to squander in one
year’s time the largest budget surpluses in history and convert them into
massive fiscal deficits. He has compounded this by asserting a new doctrine – of
preemption.
The doctrine of preemption is based on the idea that in the
era of proliferating WMD, and against the background of a sophisticated
terrorist threat, the United States cannot wait for proof of a fully established
mortal threat, but should rather act at any point to cut that short.
The
problem with preemption is that in the first instance it is not needed in order
to give the United States the means to act in its own defense against terrorism
in general or Iraq in particular. But that is a relatively minor issue compared
to the longer-term consequences that can be foreseen for this doctrine. To begin
with, the doctrine is presented in open-ended terms, which means that if Iraq if
the first point of application, it is not necessarily the last. In fact, the
very logic of the concept suggests a string of military engagements against a
succession of sovereign states: Syria, Libya, North Korea, Iran, etc., wherever
the combination exists of an interest in weapons of mass destruction together
with an ongoing role as host to or participant in terrorist operations. It means
also that if the Congress approves the Iraq resolution just proposed by the
Administration it is simultaneously creating the precedent for preemptive action
anywhere, anytime this or any future president so decides.
The Bush
Administration may now be realizing that national and international cohesion are
strategic assets. But it is a lesson long delayed and clearly not uniformly and
consistently accepted by senior members of the cabinet. From the outset, the
Administration has operated in a manner calculated to please the portion of its
base that occupies the far right, at the expense of solidarity among Americans
and between America and her allies.
On the domestic front, the
Administration, having delayed almost ---months before conceding the need to
create an institution outside the White House to manage homeland defense, has
been willing to see progress on the new department held up, for the sake of an
effort to coerce the Congress into stripping civil service protections from tens
of thousands of federal employees.
Far more damaging, however, is the
Administration’s attack on fundamental constitutional rights. The idea that an
American citizen can be imprisoned without recourse to judicial process or
remedies, and that this can be done on the say-so of the President or those
acting in his name, is beyond the pale.
Regarding other countries, the
Administration’s disdain for the views of others is well documented and need not
be reviewed here. It is more important to note the consequences of an emerging
national strategy that not only celebrates American strengths, but appears to be
glorifying the notion of dominance. If what America represents to the world is
leadership in a commonwealth of equals, then our friends are legion; if what we
represent to the world is empire, then it is our enemies who will be legion.
At this fateful juncture in our history it is vital that we see clearly
who are our enemies, and that we deal with them. It is also important, however,
that in the process we preserve not only ourselves as individuals, but our
nature as a people dedicated to the rule of law.
DANGERS OF ABANDONING
IRAQ
Moreover, if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and
depleted fourth rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as
President Bush has abandoned Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth rate
military there, the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to
the United States than we presently face from Saddam. We know that he has stored
secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.
We have no evidence, however, that he has shared any of those weapons
with terrorist group. However, if Iraq came to resemble Afghanistan – with no
central authority but instead local and regional warlords with porous borders
and infiltrating members of Al Qaeda than these widely dispersed supplies of
weapons of mass destruction might well come into the hands of terrorist groups.
If we end the war in Iraq, the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we
could easily be worse off than we are today. When Secretary Rumsfield was asked
recently about what our responsibility for restabilizing Iraq would be in an
aftermath of an invasion, he said, “that’s for the Iraqis to come together and
decide.”
During one of the campaign debates in 2000 when then Governor
Bush was asked if America should engage in any sort of “nation building” in the
aftermath of a war in which we have involved our troops, he stated gave the
purist expression of what is now a Bush doctrine: “I don’t think so. I think
what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to
build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. We’re going to have a kind
of nation building corps in America? Absolutely not.”
The events of the
last 85 years provide ample evidence that our approach to winning the peace that
follows war is almost as important as winning the war itself. The absence of
enlightened nation building after World War I led directly to the conditions
which made Germany vulnerable to fascism and the rise to Adolph Hitler and made
all of Europe vulnerable to his evil designs. By contrast the enlightened vision
embodied in the Marshall plan, NATO, and the other nation building efforts in
the aftermath of World War II led directly to the conditions that fostered
prosperity and peace for most the years since this city gave birth to the United
Nations.
Two decades ago, when the Soviet Union claimed the right to
launch a pre-emptive war in Afghanistan, we properly encouraged and then
supported the resistance movement which, a decade later, succeeded in defeating
the Soviet Army’s efforts. Unfortunately, when the Russians left, we abandoned
the Afghans and the lack of any coherent nation building program led directly to
the conditions which fostered Al Qaeda terrorist bases and Osama Bin Laden’s
plotting against the World Trade Center. Incredibly, after defeating the Taliban
rather easily, and despite pledges from President Bush that we would never again
abandon Afghanistan we have done precisely that. And now the Taliban and Al
Qaeda are quickly moving back to take up residence there again. A mere two years
after we abandoned Afghanistan the first time, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Following a brilliant military campaign, the U.S. abandoned the effort to
destroy Saddam’s military prematurely and allowed him to remain in power.
What is a potentially even more serious consequence of this push to
begin a new war as quickly as possible is the damage it can do not just to
America’s prospects to winning the war against terrorism but to America’s
prospects for continuing the historic leadership we began providing to the world
57 years ago, right here in this city by the bay.
WHAT CONGRESS SHOULD
DO
I believe, therefore, that the resolution that the President has
asked Congress to pass is much too broad in the authorities it grants, and needs
to be narrowed. The President should be authorized to take action to deal with
Saddam Hussein as being in material breach of the terms of the truce and
therefore a continuing threat to the security of the region. To this should be
added that his continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is potentially a
threat to the vital interests of the United States. But Congress should also
urge the President to make every effort to obtain a fresh demand from the
Security Council for prompt, unconditional compliance by Iraq within a definite
period of time. If the Council will not provide such language, then other
choices remain open, but in any event the President should be urged to take the
time to assemble the broadest possible international support for his course of
action. Anticipating that the President will still move toward unilateral
action, the Congress should establish now what the administration’s thinking is
regarding the aftermath of a US attack for the purpose of regime change.
Specifically, Congress should establish why the president believes that
unilateral action will not severely damage the fight against terrorist networks,
and that preparations are in place to deal with the effects of chemical and
biological attacks against our allies, our forces in the field, and even the
home-front. The resolution should also require commitments from the President
that action in Iraq will not be permitted to distract from continuing and
improving work to reconstruct Afghanistan, an that the United States will commit
to stay the course for the reconstruction of Iraq.
The Congressional
resolution should make explicitly clear that authorities for taking these
actions are to be presented as derivatives from existing Security Council
resolutions and from international law: not requiring any formal new doctrine of
pre-emption, which remains to be discussed subsequently in view of its gravity.
PRE-EMPTION DOCTRINE
Last week President Bush added a troubling
new element to this debate by proposing a broad new strategic doctrine that goes
far beyond issues related to Iraq and would effect the basic relationship
between the United States and the rest of the world community. Article 51 of the
United Nations charter recognizes the right of any nation to defend itself,
including the right in some circumstances to take pre-emptive actions in order
to deal with imminent threats. President Bush now asserts that we will take
pre-emptive action even if we take the threat we perceive is not imminent. If
other nations assert the same right then the rule of law will quickly be
replaced by the reign of fear – any nation that perceives circumstances that
could eventually lead to an imminent threat would be justified under this
approach in taking military action against another nation. An unspoken part of
this new doctrine appears to be that we claim this right for ourselves – and
only for ourselves. It is, in that sense, part of a broader strategy to replace
ideas like deterrence and containment with what some in the administration
“dominance.”
This is because President Bush is presenting us with a
proposition that contains within itself one of the most fateful decisions in our
history: a decision to abandon what we have thought was America’s mission in the
world – a world in which nations are guided by a common ethic codified in the
form of international law -- if we want to survive.
AMERICA’S MISSION IN
THE WORLD
We have faced such a choice once before, at the end of the
second World War. At that moment, America’s power in comparison to the rest of
the world was if anything greater than it is now, and the temptation was clearly
to use that power to assure ourselves that there would be no competitor and no
threat to our security for the foreseeable future. The choice we made, however,
was to become a co-founder of what we now think of as the post-war era, based on
the concepts of collective security and defense, manifested first of all in the
United Nations. Through all the dangerous years that followed, when we
understood that the defense of freedom required the readiness to put the
existence of the nation itself into the balance, we never abandoned our belief
that what we were struggling to achieve was not bounded by our own physical
security, but extended to the unmet hopes of humankind. The issue before us is
whether we now face circumstances so dire and so novel that we must choose one
objective over the other.
So it is reasonable to conclude that we face a
problem that is severe, chronic, and likely to become worse over time.
But is a general doctrine of pre-emption necessary in order to deal with
this problem? With respect to weapons of mass destruction, the answer is clearly
not. The Clinton Administration launched a massive series of air strikes against
Iraq for the state purpose of setting back his capacity to pursue weapons of
mass destruction. There was no perceived need for new doctrine or new
authorities to do so. The limiting factor was the state of our knowledge
concerning the whereabouts of some assets, and a concern for limiting
consequences to the civilian populace, which in some instances might well have
suffered greatly.
Does Saddam Hussein present an imminent threat, and if
he did would the United States be free to act without international permission?
If he presents an imminent threat we would be free to act under generally
accepted understandings of article 51 of the UN Charter which reserves for
member states the right to act in self-defense.
If Saddam Hussein does
not present an imminent threat, then is it justifiable for the Administration to
be seeking by every means to precipitate a confrontation, to find a cause for
war, and to attack? There is a case to be made that further delay only works to
Saddam Hussein’s advantage, and that the clock should be seen to have been
running on the issue of compliance for a decade: therefore not needing to be
reset again to the starting point. But to the extent that we have any concern
for international support, whether for its political or material value, hurrying
the process will be costly. Even those who now agree that Saddam Hussein must
go, may divide deeply over the wisdom of presenting the United States as
impatient for war.
At the same time, the concept of pre-emption is
accessible to other countries. There are plenty of potential imitators:
India/Pakistan; China/Taiwan; not to forget Israel/Iraq or Israel/Iran. Russia
has already cited it in anticipation of a possible military push into Georgia,
on grounds that this state has not done enough to block the operations of
Chechen rebels. What this doctrine does is to destroy the goal of a world in
which states consider themselves subject to law, particularly in the matter of
standards for the use of violence against each other. That concept would be
displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President
of the United States.
I believe that we can effectively defend ourselves
abroad and at home without dimming our principles. Indeed, I believe that our
success in defending ourselves depends precisely on not giving up what we stand
for.