Bush military policy faces review
By Tony Capaccio
Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is reviewing the Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emptive military strikes with an eye to modifying or possibly ending it.

The international environment is "more complex" than when President George W. Bush announced the policy in 2002, said Kathleen Hicks, the Defense Department's deputy undersecretary for strategy. "We'd really like to update our use-of-force doctrine to start to take account for that."

The Sept. 11 attacks prompted Bush to alter U.S. policy by stressing the option of pre-emptive military action against groups or countries that threaten national security. Critics said that breached international norms and set a dangerous precedent for other nations to do likewise.

The doctrine is being reassessed as part of the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review of strategy, force structure and weapons programs. Hicks is overseeing the review.

"We are looking very explicitly at use of force and use of forces," she said. "We are looking at how to articulate the use of the U.S. military instrument — how we use military force to achieve national objectives."

Congress requires the administration to report its national-security strategy annually, and the Pentagon must reassess its policies and war-fighting doctrine every four years. The Obama administration will state its security doctrine for the first time as part of that process.

Bush outlined the doctrine in June 2002 and elevated it to a formal strategy that September. The United States for the first time expressed the right to attack a threat that was gathering, not imminent.

The doctrine was issued as the Bush administration was building global support for military action against Iraq to enforce U.N. resolutions requiring Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to allow unfettered inspections for suspected chemical, biological and nuclear arms and to destroy any such weapons of mass destruction.

"That doctrine was always at odds with international law and norms," said James Lindsay, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The doctrine is now "dead" after the invasion of Iraq, when the United States in March 2003 launched a "preventive war" to eradicate "the threat of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist," he said.
James Mann, an author in residence at Johns Hopkins University, said the doctrine "was presented as not just the 'right' " to strike "before you are about to be attacked, but as an entirely new strategy for dealing with the world.

"I don't think the Obama people believe pre-emption should be defined in this incredibly broad sense — and I think they feel, with some reason, the broad definition really lost American support in the rest of the world."

This kind of thing cuts both ways, because sooner or later some OTHER country with nukes of its own, and a delivery system for them, might have thought that Bush/Cheney and the millions of right wing saber rattling nut jobs that support them, might have thought it would be a good idea to turn the United States of America into a giant ashtray.

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