In an op ed piece in the Washington Post, historian and former JFK advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. looks at President George W. Bush’s remaining 1,000 days in office….and is concerned about what he sees.
He notes the rumors of a preventive war against Iran and writes this:
The issue of preventive war as a presidential prerogative is hardly new. In February 1848 Rep. Abraham Lincoln explained his opposition to the Mexican War: “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose — and you allow him to make war at pleasure [emphasis added]. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’; but he will say to you, ‘Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’ “
This is precisely how George W. Bush sees his presidential prerogative: Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.
Schlesinger then looks at some history — and how Presidents avoided pre-emptive war, most notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis and during the Cold War Era. Then he writes:
But our Cold War presidents kept to the Kennan formula of containment plus deterrence, and we won the Cold War without escalating it into a nuclear war. Enter George W. Bush as the great exponent of preventive war. In 2003, owing to the collapse of the Democratic opposition, Bush shifted the base of American foreign policy from containment-deterrence to presidential preventive war: Be silent; I see it, if you don’t. Observers describe Bush as “messianic” in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address, “The Almighty has His own purposes.”
There stretch ahead for Bush a thousand days of his own. He might use them to start the third Bush war: the Afghan war (justified), the Iraq war (based on fantasy, deception and self-deception), the Iran war (also fantasy, deception and self-deception). There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.
Maybe President Bush, who seems a humane man, might be moved by daily sorrows of death and destruction to forgo solo preventive war and return to cooperation with other countries in the interest of collective security. Abraham Lincoln would rejoice.
Preventive war can be officially declared as a concept easily enough. But in practice it’s still a difficult sell for any President and any administration.
Note that even the run-up to the Iraq war wasn’t “sold” totally on the idea of just doing preventive war willy-nilly because George Bush felt like it. It was sold by certain info being constantly repeated to the public — info that later turned out, in some key cases, to be false. Preventive war is NOT a concept automatically supported by the political, government, and military elites or the public just because we’re in the 9/11 era. There must be some sort of compelling reason that’s held up to justify it, beyond just assuming a given country is going to be a threat. A convincing case needs to be laid out to justify its use as a policy.
Another aspect makes a future preventive war more difficult for this administration to sell than the Iraq war: major credibility problems. Preventive war assumes the populace will at least largely believe officials and at least silently approve of a preventive strike. But this administration is now enmeshed in so many controversies where its credibility is being called into question — polls show a large chunk of Americans no longer trust it — that will likely require more of an explanation than that it’s just acting on assumption.
But in the case of Iran you must now factor in Tehran’s fire-breathing, defiant, we-dare-you-to-attack-us statements plus various reports about how Iran is seriously speeding up its nuclear program, then put it within the context of threats to Israel and Israel’s repeated statement that Iran must be dealt with.
Is it a different world after 9/11? Most assuredly. Does this mean preventive war is the easy-to-use norm? No, it won’t be as easy a sell as right after 9/11. Preventive war is now an operative concept but it’ll still likely require officialdom to make a strong case to justify it. And for a strong case you need credibility so the case you’re making is considered factual. Credibility remains this administration’s Achille’s heel.
UPDATE: This is an example of the credibility problems this administration now faces when it sounds the alarm about a country.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.