Bush Doctrine enters American vocabulary

According to international law as generally understood since the creation of the United Nations, a pre-emptive attack is legal only if a country has certain knowledge that an attack on it is imminent - too imminent for the matter to be taken to the U.N. Security Council.

Pre-emptive war is different from preventive war, in which a country, fearing that another country may become strong enough to threaten it at some time in the future, attacks it to prevent this possibility. Preventive wars are illegal under international law.

This distinction, however, creates a terminological problem: Although preventive war is worse than pre-emptive war, to most ears preemption sounds worse. Many people, therefore, speak of pre-emptive war when they mean preventive war. To avoid confusion, we can use the term pre-emptive-preventive war.

Neoconservatives, the most powerful of whom is Vice President Dick Cheney, had long disliked the idea that America's use of military power could be constrained by the prohibition against preemptive-preventive war. In 1992, his last year as secretary of defense, Cheney produced a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance that said the United States should use force to "pre-empt" and "preclude threats." In 1998, the Project for the New American Century, a neocon think tank, urged President Bill Clinton to "undertake military action" to eliminate "the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction."

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the neocons were able to turn their wish into U.S. policy. In "The New American Militarism," Andrew Bacevich wrote: "The events of 9/11 provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power."

The right to launch pre-emptive-preventive attacks, which came to be known as the Bush Doctrine, was suggested in the president's address at West Point in June 2002, when the administration began preparing citizens for the attack on Iraq. Having stated that deterrence "means nothing" in relation to "new threats," Bush declared: "If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long."

This new doctrine was then fully articulated that September in "The National Security Strategy of the United States." Speaking of "our enemies' efforts to acquire dangerous technologies," this document declared that America will "act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed."

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