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CONTENTS

1. Introduction: Good-Bye to Deterrence, Hello to First Strikes
2. Editor's Note: 9-11peace.org Now MoveOn Peace
3. One Link: Stop the War Before it Starts
4. Pre-emption as Policy
5. The Possible Consequences of a Pre-Emptive Strike
6. Take Action
7. Credits
8. Get Involved
9. About the Bulletin

 
INTRODUCTION: GOOD-BYE TO DETERRENCE, HELLO TO FIRST STRIKES
"If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long." - President Bush, West Point speech, June 2002

The Bush administration is calling for a "pre-emptive strike of self-defense" against Iraq. For all intents and purposes, a "pre-emptive act of self-defense" is a first strike. Article 51 of the United Nations charter talks about an "inherent right of individual or collective self-defence" against armed attacks, but it clearly indicates that any act of self-defense must occur after an attack on the defending party. And even assuming a reading of this article that provides for self-defense before the attack has begun, the US has as yet provided no conclusive or credible evidence that Iraq is in fact developing or capable of using any type of weapons of mass destruction, nor even that Iraq is planning to attack the US. For these reasons, calling any attack on Iraq one of "self-defense" seems to be more spin than literal truth. If the US is planning on attacking Iraq first, then that is, in effect, an act of US aggression.

Nor is a pre-emptive strike on Iraq a one-time-use policy. According to the just-released document on "The National Security Strategy of the US," it is a method that will be employed by the Bush administration wherever it is deemed justified in order to prevent any other country from nearing the military might of the US (see link below in section 3). This is right in line with the policies outlined in the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), released in January of this year. The NPR espoused a strategy of being prepared to attack countries, possibly with nuclear weapons, in order to prevent them from gaining weapons of mass destruction similar to those of the US. Several countries were named as possible targets for pre-emptive strikes, including Iran, Iraq, and China among others. But "The National Security Strategy of the US" takes this even further, by explicitly stating that the US is prepared to act alone and without a UN mandate, especially in order to protect US interests and maintain the power advantage that the US has enjoyed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other words, pre-emption is the keystone of a continued and expanded US domination in global affairs.

Of course, the report has little to say about the domino effect that an American use of pre-emptive strikes could have around the world. If the US acts on this policy, it is quite likely that several other countries will adopt it as well -- Israel, for one, seems to have already done so, as evidenced by current discussions about a possible strike on a nuclear power plant in Iran. It is quite possible that nuclear-capable countries such as India and Pakistan, which have a long-standing feud, could decide to employ pre-emptive strikes themselves and launch nuclear war; China could also easily become involved, either if the US launches a pre-emptive strike against China itself, if China launches one against the US, or if China launches one against Taiwan, with whom it also has a long-standing dispute. Indeed, faced with the possible threat of pre-emptive strikes from the US, several countries will now have ample justification to develop or build even larger weapons stockpiles. Ultimately, what the Bush administration may have done is abandon years of careful nonproliferation and containment in favor of a new arms race. By setting this precedent, especially by invading Iraq, Bush will most likely cdestabilize international relations and damage global security -- not make the world safer.

Considering all of the above, it is no wonder that many world leaders and even members of the US government are opposed to a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. We need to focus on and fiercely advocate the saner alternatives now, in order to prevent a new era of aggression.

 
EDITOR'S NOTE: 9-11PEACE.ORG NOW PEACE.MOVEON.ORG
There have been several important changes to 9-11peace.org in the last couple of weeks. First of all, the website has been moved and renamed. This is part of a reorganization that has integrated the 9-11peace campaign more closely with MoveOn.org, the organization that supports us.

9-11peace.org has now been renamed MoveOn Peace. The website for MoveOn Peace is:

http://www.peace.moveon.org

Please bookmark this site for future reference.

Along with the changes to the website, there have also been some changes to the bulletin. I will be serving as editor for both the peace bulletin and the US domestic issues bulletin for MoveOn. As a result, this bulletin will be coming out on a biweekly basis from now on.

 
ONE LINK: STOP THE WAR BEFORE IT STARTS
This highly recommended article gives you the entire issue of an attack on Iraq in a nutshell, including the alleged justifications for it, the logistics of the attack, possible complications, legal issues with pre-emption, and the attack's possible consequences. The end of the article describes some alternatives to an attack on Iraq and also some strategic methods for building an effective opposition to the war.
http://www.progressive.org/August%202002/oren0802.html

 
PRE-EMPTION AS POLICY
An attack on Iraq by the Bush administration would be a "major departure from accepted international practice" because it would be "an attack against a sovereign state, aimed explicitly at removing its internationally recognised government, without specific authorization from the United Nations Security Council [unless a Security Council resolution is passed - Ed.], not in response to a prior act of aggression, and carried out not by a multilateral organization but by the world’s greatest military power, acting alone or with the backing only of a few loyal allies." According to the Bush administration, this is justified as an act of self-defense, but what does the UN system actually say about it? This article offers the opinions of several experts, who discuss Article 51 of the UN charter.
http://www.crimesofwar.org/expert/bush-intro.html

In 1981, Israel attacked a nuclear reactor in Iraq, claiming that it was acting in self-defense because Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. The international community was outraged, and roundly condemned the attacks -- even the US temporarily blocked deliveries of F-16s to Israel. At the time, "policymakers and ordinary people around the world clearly sensed that Israel's pre-emptive strike took us all to the top of a slippery slope. If pre-emption was accepted as legal, the fragile structure of international peace would be undermined. Any state could attack any other under the pretext that it detected a threat, however distant." Unfortunately, the international community now seems to be rapidly sliding down that same slippery slope, especially since Bush has now launched his own campaign to pre-emptively strike Iraq: "In effect, he retroactively approved the Israeli strike on Osirak and said the US has the right to strike, pre-emptively, at any nation which it decides is developing weapons of mass destruction or supporting terrorism. It is carte blanche for a war on the world."
http://peace.moveon.org/r2.php3?r=147

The difficulty with a new policy of this nature is that it could provide the justification to attack other countries in the future, even countries with which the US is currently allied. As this journalist puts it, "The real underlying issue of this whole affair...is that the United States, the nation upon which the world is relying and has relied to project order and legality, must follow a process that it has asked other nations to follow."
http://peace.moveon.org/r2.php3?r=148

In this excellent article, Immanuel Wallerstein of Binghamton University notes that there are both political and moral repercussions to adopting the policy of first strikes. After a brief discussion of the attitude towards pre-emption until the present-day, he argues: "But this is not only a question of politics, but of law and of morality, and these two issues seem to be getting less debate. It seems clear to simple people (I am a simple person) that 'forestalling' is not 'defense' for one simple reason: the only way the law recognizes defense is after an act occurs. Intent to engage in an act does not constitute an act, since one never knows if the intent will be carried through. In addition, the forestaller is interpreting this intent, and he can (and quite often does) interpret it incorrectly. In criminal law, I am not legally authorized to shoot someone because I have heard him say nasty things about me and think that one day soon he may try to shoot me. If however, this other person points a gun at me, I may shoot him in self-defense. Without this elementary distinction, we are in a lawless world."
http://fbc.binghamton.edu/92en.htm

"Both world wars began with pre-emptive German attacks on neighboring states, and the vision of a world in which states could attack rival states for fear of what their rivals might someday do was abhorrent to the [UN] charter's authors. And for all its military ventures, justified and not, since 1945, the United States had never repudiated the charter's proscription of pre-emption. Until this summer, when Bush, speaking at West Point, did just that." As this journalist argues, pre-emption is the most terrifying policy of the US administration yet, since it is only on the unsupported assertion that Iraq is an undeterrable threat that "we are prepared to jettison the doctrine of deterrence (really, of international law itself) for one of pre-emption."
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/43/powerlines-meyerson.php

The Nuclear Posture Review, published in January of this year, first comprehensively described the Bush administration's approach to pre-emption. It advocated the use of force and pre-emptive strikes in order to destroy the weapons of countries developing nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons capabilities. It also advocated building and testing smaller nuclear weapons and using nuclear weapons such as these "mini-nukes" in a much broader range of situations (possibly including a first strike), and listed China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia and Libya as possible targets. It seems likely that if the US does indeed launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, then one of these other countries may be next.
http://peace.moveon.org/r2.php3?r=149

Every President is required to submit a comprehensive explanation of their administration's foreign policy to Congress. On September 20, the Bush administration published its own answer to this requirement -- a new 33-page document titled "The National Security Strategy of the United States." According to this document, pre-emptive strikes are not a strategy solely for dealing with Iraq. Rather, they are an integral part of a foreign policy which is built around maintaining US military power. It directly states that "we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting pre-emptively" and discards the principle of nonproliferation, replacing it with a strategy of "counterproliferation." This is because "the president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago." In other words, the US will attack any nation that attempts to match America's military might, while continuing to build more and better weapons.
http://peace.moveon.org/r2.php3?r=150

A recent report from the Sunday Herald seems to confirm that an attack on Iraq is part of a larger plan to establish US dominance in the world. According to the Herald, the Project for the New American Century (a conservative think-tank) has published a report authored by Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz in 2000 which calls for a premeditated attack on Iraq in order to take military control of the Gulf Region. It explicitly states that "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
http://www.sundayherald.com/27735

You can read the full report at the Project for the New American Century's website.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm

 
THE POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES OF A PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE
According to analyst Richard Wolffe, there are three potentially dangerous consequences of adopting the policy of pre-emptive first strikes, and attempting to employ the policy against Iraq. 1) If the United States builds up forces near Iraq in preparation for an invasion, Hussein will have incentives to make a first strike -- perhaps with weapons of mass destruction. 2) An attack could win recruits for the most radical Islamists and create more problems for Middle Eastern governments. 3) Other countries such as India and Pakistan might adopt similar tactics with negative consequences such as the heightened possibility of nuclear war.
http://www.gyre.org/news/cache/2274

This article explores the possibility of a strike by Hussein in more detail. According to Ivo Daalder, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, "We've talked ourselves, in many ways, into a war with Iraq because (its) possession of weapons of mass destruction is unacceptable, when it's almost certain that that very war is going to lead to the use of weapons of mass destruction."
http://peace.moveon.org/r2.php3?r=151

In considering an attack on Iraq, we must consider the worst-case scenario -- that Iraq could launch its own pre-emptive strike, possibly against Israel, prompting Israel to retaliate with chemical or nuclear weapons. As a result, Pakistan could also attack India, setting off nuclear war there. The result would be massive deaths and global chaos.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0912-05.htm

Israel may adopt the tactic of the pre-emptive strike even without being attacked by Iraq. In recent weeks, Israel has publicly warned arch-enemy Iran that it will not allow the completion of an Iranian nuclear power plant, since Israel views Iran's attempts to attain nuclear abilities as a threat to national security. According to officials in both the US and Israel, the use of military force has not yet been ruled out by Israel, and Israel could possibly launch its own pre-emptive strike against Iran in the near future.
http://peace.moveon.org/r2.php3?r=152

If Israel becomes involved, it could lead to a larger Arab-Israeli war in which the US is perceived to be siding with Israel against several Arab countries, warns US Senator Joseph Biden.
http://peace.moveon.org/r2.php3?r=153

Another country that could become involved in a nuclear war with Israel is Jordan. It appears that it is possible that an attack on Iraq could be launched from Jordan. Thus "Iraq might seek to pre-empt such an invasion by attacking Jordan. Further an attack on Iraq by the US would to lead to certain massive uprising against the invasion in Jordan, Egypt and the Arab world, plus the possibility of attack on US troops in Iraq from Syria could lead to Israel fearing for its existence triggering its resorting to the use of nuclear weapons."
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0708-05.htm

The greatest danger comes if the US decides to act unilaterally, without a UN resolution. If this were to happen, it would mean that "Washington would be arrogating to itself the right to decide what constitutes a threat to world peace, and what to do about it." As a result, "Nothing would keep other countries from deciding that a threat to their national security justified a preemptive armed strike, [as] President Chirac said this week, citing India and Pakistan, or China in its dispute with Taiwan as possible examples."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0912/p01s03-wogi.html

For more information on the nuclear capabilities of the various countries that could possibly become involved in wars due to the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, and the Nuclear Posture Review, please see our previous bulletin on nuclear threats.
http://www.peace.moveon.org/bulletin21.php3

 
TAKE ACTION
Write a letter to the editor of your local or national paper. Peace Action provides a sample letter for you to work from that specifically addresses the problems with the policy of pre-emption.
http://www.peace-action.org/home/preempt.html

 
CREDITS
Research team:
Dean Bellerby
Joanne Comito
Maha Mikhail
Vicki Nikolaidis
Ben Spencer
Sharon Winn

Proofreading team:
David Taub Bancroft
Madlyn Bynum
Carol Brewster
Melinda Coyle
Nancy Evans
Judy Green
Mary Kim
Dagmara Meijers-Troller
Alfred K. Weber

 
GET INVOLVED
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