A reckless claim
A Times EditorialPresident Bush's latest effort to justify the war in Iraq asserted a right to wage pre-emptive war against nations that pose only a hypothetical threat.
Published July 14, 2004
His original justifications for going to war in Iraq have been discredited one by one, so President Bush is offering new ones after the fact.
The president no longer alleges that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States, or that Iraq had close ties to al-Qaida. (Vice President Cheney still can't bring himself to give up those claims.) Instead, the president argued Monday that his decision to go to war was justified because Iraq "had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists. . . . (emphasis added)"
That rationalization insults the intelligence of the American people and - on the off chance that it is taken seriously - could damage our relations with other governments. For example, North Korea, Pakistan and Iran don't just have the capability of producing weapons of mass murder; they have such weapons. And their connections to terrorist groups and other rogue governments aren't just a matter of conjecture. Those regimes have been active in the international black market for weapons of mass destruction.
According to President Bush's new logic, the United States is free to launch pre-emptive wars against any unfriendly government that might one day possess weapons of mass destruction and traffic with groups tied to terrorism. After all, the president says the United States was justified - even compelled - to go to war in Iraq based on the mere possibility of such a threat.
But the president wasn't really being serious Monday. As a practical matter, he knows that our military forces are incapable of waging another conventional war anytime soon.
Our troops, equipment and other military and economic resources have been so badly overextended by the war in Iraq that our forces would have difficulty responding adequately to a real threat.
And as a matter of morality, the president can't seriously be claiming a right to wage pre-emptive war against nations that pose only a hypothetical threat to our security. Such an assertion would run the risk of encouraging other nations to claim a similar right of pre-emption against the United States, which possesses the world's most terrifying stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and has hostile relations with many governments.
The president could more credibly defend the war on humanitarian grounds or simply acknowledge that he acted on the basis of faulty intelligence. Instead, his Monday speech was just another political effort to salvage some argument, any argument, on behalf of a war that can no longer be defended as an act of self-defense against an immediate threat. Most Americans will see the speech for what it was. We can only hope the rest of the world won't take it seriously as an astonishingly reckless assertion of U.S. military ambitions.