3. Preemptive-Preventive War
This hyphenated term is used here for clarity. The doctrine in question, which involves attacking another country even though it poses no immediate threat, is technically called “preventive war.” This doctrine, which violates international law as reflected in the charter of the United Nations, is to be distinguished from what is technically called “preemptive war,” which occurs when Country A attacks Country B after learning that an attack from Country B is imminent---too imminent to allow time for the U.N. to intervene. These technical terms, however, are problematic, because although preventive war, being illegal, is worse than preemptive war, to most ears “preemption” sounds worse than “prevention.” As a result, many people speak of “preemptive war” when they mean preventive war. The term “preemptive-preventive war,” while somewhat cumbersome, solves this problem.78

Historical Emergence of the Doctrine
This doctrine of preemptive-preventive war had been advocated by neocons long before 9/11. It was contained already in the Cheney-Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, which said that the United States should use force to “preempt” and “preclude threats.”79

In 1996, Richard Perle and other neocons prepared a strategy paper entitled “A Clean Break” for Benjamin Netanyahu, who had recently been elected prime minister of Israel. This paper recommended that Israel, in making a clean break from previous strategies, establish “the principle of preemption.”80

In 1997, PNAC’s “Statement of Principles” argued that to exert “global leadership,” America needs to “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values.”81

In 1998, a letter from PNAC, signed by Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and 15 other members, urged President Clinton to “undertake military action” to eliminate “the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.”82

The Doctrine of Preemptive-Preventive War after 9/11
Although these neocons were anxious to have their doctrine of preemptive-preventive war accepted as national policy, this did not occur during the Clinton presidency or even during the first eight months of the Bush-Cheney administration. After 9/11, however, it did. “The events of 9/11,” observes Bacevich, “provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power.”83

The idea of preemptive-preventive war, which came to be known as the “Bush doctrine,” was first clearly expressed in the president’s address at West Point in June 2002 (when the administration started preparing the American people psychologically for the attack on Iraq). Having stated that, in relation to the “new threats,” deterrence “means nothing” and containment is “not possible,” Bush even took aim at the traditional understanding of preemption, saying: “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” Then, using the language of preemption while really meaning preemptive-prevention, he said that America’s security “will require all Americans . . . to be ready for preemptive action.”84

NSS 2002
However, although the West Point speech provided a first statement of this new doctrine, it was in NSS 2002, published that September, that the new doctrine was laid out at some length. The covering letter, signed by the president, says that with regard to “our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies,” America will, in self-defense, “act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.”85 The document itself, saying that “our best defense is a good offense,” also states:

Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today's threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries' choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.86

To justify this doctrine, NSS 2002 argues that the United States must “adapt” the traditional doctrine of preemption, long recognized as a right, to the new situation, thereby turning it into a right of anticipatory (preventive) preemption:

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. . . . We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. . . . The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, . . . the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.87

With this argument, the authors of NSS 2002 tried to suggest that, since this doctrine of anticipatory preemption simply involves adapting a traditionally recognized right to a new situation, it involves no great change. But it does. According to the traditional doctrine, one needed certain evidence that the other country was going to launch an immediate attack. According to the Bush Doctrine, by contrast, the United States can attack another country “even if uncertainty remains” and even, more flagrantly, if the United States knows that the threat from the other country is not yet “fully formed.”

The novelty here, to be sure, involves doctrine more than practice. The United States has in practice attacked several countries that presented no imminent military threat. But it always portrayed these attacks in such a way that they could appear to comport with international law. The attack on North Vietnam after the alleged incident in the Tonkin Gulf provides an example. But “[n]ever before,” point out Halper and Clarke, “had any president set out a formal national strategy doctrine that included [preventive] preemption.”88 This is a step of great significance, because it involves an explicit statement by the United States that the basic principle of international law, as embodied in the United Nations, does not apply to its own behavior.

Zelikow as Primary Drafter of NSS 2002
Max Boot, a neocon who has become well known through his newspaper columns, has described NSS 2002 as a “quintessentially neo-conservative document.”89 Now that the basic ideas of this document have been laid out, we can see the accuracy of his observation.

We can also see the importance of a still little-known fact: that Philip Zelikow, who would later become the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, was chosen by Condoleezza Rice to be the primary drafter of NSS 2002.90

According to James Mann in The Rise of the Vulcans, after Rice saw the first draft of this document (which had been prepared by Richard Haass, the director of policy planning in Colin Powell’s State Department), she “ordered the document be completely rewritten. She thought the Bush administration needed something bolder. . . . Rice turned the writing over to her old colleague, . . . Philip Zelikow.”91 (Rice and Zelikow had worked together in the National Security Council in the administration of the first President Bush; when the Republicans were out of power during the Clinton presidency, they wrote a book together; and then when she was appointed National Security Advisor for the second President Bush, she brought on Zelikow to help with the transition to the new National Security Council.) Given the content and tone of the document, one might assume that Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz had been involved in the process of creating it. According to Mann, however, “the hawks in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office hadn’t been closely involved, even though the document incorporated many of their key ideas. They had left the details and the drafting in the hands of Rice and Zelikow, along with Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley.”92

Some insight into Zelikow’s views before coming to this task might be garnered from an essay he co-authored in 1998 on “catastrophic terrorism.” In this essay, which suggests that he had been thinking about the World Trade Center and a new Pearl Harbor several years prior to 9/1, Zelikow and his co-authors say:

If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.93

In any case, in light of Zelikow’s close relationship with the Bush administration and especially his authorship of NSS 2002, we cannot take seriously the claim of the 9/11 Commission that it sought to be “independent.”94 As executive director, he had tremendous power to shape the work of the Commission, deciding which issues it would investigate and which not, and he was primarily responsible for the final form of The 9/11 Commission Report.95 The Family Steering Committee, which represented families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, vigorously protested his appointment, calling for “Dr. Zelikow’s immediate resignation” and for the “Commission to apologize to the 9/11 families and America for this massive appearance of impropriety.”96 But these calls were dismissed.

Given Zelikow’s close relationship with the Bush-Cheney administration and his own authorship of NSS 2002, it is certainly no surprise that, as I reported in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions,97 there is no mention of imperial interests that might have served as motives for the Bush-Cheney administration to have orchestrated or at least permitted the attacks of 9/11. The Zelikow-led Commission did not, for example, mention that PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses had suggested that the transformation of the military, through which unipolarity could be enforced more effectively, could occur more quickly if there were to be “a new Pearl Harbor”; it did not mention that the administration had had plans, to be discussed below, to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq prior to 9/11; and it did not mention that 9/11 had been described as presenting “opportunities” by Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, and, in fact, NSS 2002. Once we know of Zelikow’s authorship of that document, moreover, it is also no surprise to see that The 9/11 Commission Report contains a chapter---“What to Do? A Global Strategy”---that provides propaganda for the Bush-Cheney administration’s post-9/11 foreign policy.

I return now to the discussion of possible imperial motives for 9/11 within the Bush-Cheney administration.

End Part III