An Important Distinction

During his debate with John Edwards, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "The effort that we've mounted with respect to Iraq focused specifically on the possibility that this was the most likely nexus between the terrorists and weapons of mass destruction."

"...the possibility ... the most likely..."

As seen by the Bush administration, the danger presented by Saddam Hussein was based on a series of assumptions about what he might do years in the future if he got the chance - or if he even wanted to do so. Therefore he must be defeated now. Welcome to the "Bush Doctrine".

The Bush administration's National Security Strategy clearly states, "We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends... America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed."

In other words, President Bush has committed the United States to a strategy of not just preemptive war - in which there is a clear and immediate danger - but preventative war against nations the administration believes might someday become a threat.

President Bush made it clear that he never considered Iraq an "imminent threat", but merely a "growing threat," and that is the basis of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's charge that the invasion, "was not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal."

The Bush administration feels that any military action taken by the US is good - because "duh" we're the United States. To the administration, any action taken by them to remove potentially dangerous autocratic regimes and replace them with democracies is self-evidently right. The problem is, since it's not absolutely certain the threat will ever materialize (Saddam might have slipped on a banana peel in April 2003 and died) a preventative war is indistinguishable from a war of aggression.

In the late 40s and 50s, war hawks encouraged President Truman to launch a preventative strike against the USSR while we still had a clear nuclear advantage. Truman said in a radio address,

"We do not believe in aggression or preventative war. Such a war is the weapon of dictators, not free democratic countries like the United States."

During the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy was urged to send US military forces into Cuba. Kennedy referred to the option as "this particular Pearl Harbor recommendation," and his administration responded that a preventative strike was,

"...contrary to our traditions, ... a course of action that would cut directly athwart everything we have stood for during our national history, and condemn us as hypocrites in the opinion of the world."

Saddam Hussein's Iraq was not an imminent threat to the US or our allies. He could have been dealt with when we had all our ducks in a row. There was no need to send our troops into Baghdad alone without a plan for peace. There was no need to assume the cost of war and occupation by ourselves, sinking this country ever deeper in debt. There was no need to squander the goodwill of our allies and the credibility of the office of the President of the United States.

There was no need for an unnecessary preventative war when we should have been focusing on the immediate threat presented by al Qaeda. As John Edwards put it during the debate,

Saddam Hussein needed to be confronted. John Kerry and I have consistently said that. That's why we voted for the resolution. But it also means it needed to be done the right way.

And doing it the right way meant that we were prepared; that we gave the weapons inspectors time to find out what we now know, that in fact there were no weapons of mass destruction; that we didn't take our eye off the ball, which are al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the people who attacked us on September the 11th.