By Keith Epstein
Tampa Tribune, 24 March 2003
WASHINGTON - When President Bush ordered Iraq's invasion because its leaders might someday imperil U.S. interests, he did more than defy world opinion and unravel 50 years of national security strategy.
The blistering bombardment of Baghdad broke with decades of American cultural and moral tradition. The new policy of pre-emption also departed from fundamental beliefs shaping society's attitudes on justified self-defense and violence.
In movies and folk legends, good guys don't draw first. In court, lawyers often argue self-defense, but usually only if their clients were attacked. At home, children are discouraged from hitting unless someone else strikes first, and then only after all else fails.
In baseball, batters can be forgiven for charging the mound, but only if - as in Mets catcher Mike Piazza's recent rage against Dodgers pitcher Guillermo Mota - they are beaned first.
In one campaign against schoolyard bullies, the National Education Association sadly noted boys and girls lack Harry Potter's magic powers. The famed wizard of children's fiction never would wave his wand without provocation.
Through most of U.S. history, the same held true.
"We've never thought of ourselves as a first-strike nation," said University of South Florida history Professor Raymond Arsenault.
"It's one thing to be the world's policeman, but this doctrine has never been in play before. There's a danger when you become so certain you can prevent a crime or an attack before it occurs."
In "Minority Report," a recent futuristic movie about an ultimate solution to crime, actor Tom Cruise plays a police officer who, with the aid of psychics, arrests murderers before they kill, pre-empting violence and sparing victims.
"We seem," Arsenault said, "to be edging towards that surreal world."
Firing The First Shot
"We've made it a point through most of American history not to fire the first shot," said Brandeis University history professor David Hackett Fischer, a specialist in first shots, especially the symbolic one on Lexington Green in April 1775.
Who fired the first shot? The British, Fischer said.
"Don't fire unless you're fired on," cautioned Minuteman John Parker, leader of 70 volunteers who stood up to King George's soldiers in the British Colonies' first battle for independence.
But it was the Americans who fired the "shot heard round the world" in response, noted Fischer, author of "Paul Revere's Ride," "but only after John Adams made sure the cause was just and we hadn't been the aggressors."
"From the beginning, American leaders have been very concerned they shouldn't fire the first shot," Fischer said.
Other early American agitators held similar views. Samuel Adams' maxim was: "Put your enemy in the wrong - and keep him there."
The Declaration of Independence lists more than two dozen offenses committed by Great Britain's King George III - to prove the British started the Revolution, not the Colonists.
"He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people," states the Declaration, using actual acts of aggression to justify the coming violence and unrest of the Revolutionary War.
Why Bush Broke With Doctrine
Today, of course, a distant and aggressive leader can threaten U.S. interests almost immediately. Worse, he could leave destruction to someone else. He could provide shelter or assistance to a pack of terrorists who might do the deed.
Bush and his advisers say that is why, as the bombardment and takeover of Iraq began last week, they broke with years of national security doctrine.
Even a handful of unseen enemies or a small, impoverished nation now can wield powers previously reserved for organized armies of superpowers. They have the capability, for example, to snuff out thousands of lives by crashing hijacked airliners into two of the world's tallest office towers.
Waiting for another such attack, the president said, is "not self-defense; it is suicide."
Any link between Iraq and the attack on the World Trade Center in New York may be murkier than many Americans realize, but the nation's new sense of vulnerability since Sept. 11 has resulted in a new posture of "anticipatory self- defense."
In essence, it is the same reason authorities allow torture of suspects abroad, confinement of people accused of no crime and the rounding up hundreds of Iraqi-Americans for questioning.
"If we wait for threats to fully materialize," Bush said, "we will have waited too long. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge."
U.S. targets may be tyrants such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein or terrorists such as al-Qaida's Osama bin Laden. They may also be suspects, or regimes whose threats are "emerging," not necessarily "imminent."
For the first time, a U.S. president is stating a preventive war is justified, even when the U.S. is not directly challenged and threats are not immediately obvious.
This could be "the most important reformulation of U.S. grand strategy in over half a century," writes John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale University professor of military and naval history, in the March/April issue of "Foreign Policy" magazine.
Other presidents usually felt otherwise, even when staring down the prospect of nuclear attack.
Neither President Harry S. Truman, who authorized dropping the first atomic bomb, nor President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who masterminded the liberation of Europe from the Nazis, favored preventive war. Not even when advisers urged first strikes against a new member of the nuclear club: the Soviet Union.
"You don't 'prevent' anything by war - except peace," Truman said.
Mused Eisenhower: "I don't believe there is such a thing. I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy, despite his tough stance during the Cuban missile standoff, refused to launch a preventive attack.
"Pearl Harbor in reverse," his brother, Robert, responded. "For 175 years, we have not been that kind of country."
As with Bush, Kennedy's strategy, a blockade of Cuba, raised eyebrows and questions of international law. But unlike Bush, Kennedy managed to avoid armed conflict with the Soviets, who had put the missiles in Cuba.
"Our arms will never be used to strike the first blow in any attack," Kennedy said earlier in his presidency. "It is our national tradition."
In the earliest days of U.S. history, England had a habit of opening fire - especially when an enemy vessel attempted to catch an upwind advantage.
Most U.S. wars began with provocations, even when circumstances seemed murky, such as in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when American ships fired during a supposed encounter with the North Vietnamese. President Lyndon B. Johnson used the incident to justify escalating the war in Vietnam.
The Spanish-American War began when Spain was accused of blowing up a U.S. ship. The United States stayed out of World War I until Germany sank American vessels in the North Atlantic Ocean. The attack on Pearl Harbor, regarded by the Japanese as preventive, triggered U.S. entry into World War II, ending a long period in which many Americans regarded the German Nazis as Europe's problem.
President Abraham Lincoln went out of his way to make sure the Confederacy fired the first shot in 1861. Confederate President Jefferson Davis obliged with a pre-emptive strike on Fort Sumter, thinking it would unite the South in the Civil War. It gave Lincoln the trigger he needed.
Though rare, there were occasions when the United States struck first.
Native Americans were attacked many times without provocation, as were Mexicans in Texas during the Mexican War.
But mostly, said historian Fischer, "American leaders have usually felt that a provocation was necessary, and that relates to the American way of always wanting to do the right thing in the right way."
Cultural Images Matter
Stories we read and movies we watch reinforce the idea that good guys never start a fight.
Hamlet avenged the murder of his father. The evil ways of the Clantons in Tombstone justified their slayings by Wyatt Earp and the boys in "Gunfight at the OK Corral." And John Rambo's false arrest and roughing-up led to his rampage in "First Blood."
If someone messes with you, you have the moral authority to whack 'em.
"It's a theme that runs through American films, which are really about good and bad and how, for the good guy, there must always be an ethical consideration before pulling the trigger," said USF Professor Bryan Shuler, who teaches movies and American culture.
The rules are simple, he said: "It is good to defend oneself, bad to attack."
Abroad, some caricatures of Bush as a "cowboy" with a twitchy finger may stem from foreigners' love of American westerns.
In "Shane" or "High Noon," the character viewers care about - the gunfighter or sheriff - never starts something. The main character in "Shane," played by Alan Ladd, wants to put violence behind him.
In more recent movies, the good guys aren't entirely good, and the world is a more threatening place. But protagonists still don't act without having to.
"We show the hero as one who's been attacked, not as the aggressor," Shuler said. "This is the way we look at ourselves and the world. Movies are about how we see ourselves, and how we want to be. They are how we create our mythology."
As for the movie version of Operation Iraqi Freedom?
"Maybe it will take the Hollywood version of [Attorney General John] Ashcroft and [Secretary of State Colin] Powell for us to fully understand this war. Who knows?" Shuler said.
"Maybe there's something more to the plot that we don't know yet. Maybe they'll add something. ... Maybe the movie will show it's OK to strike first."
Researchers Buddy Jaudon and Marianne Hoeppner contributed to this story. Reporter Keith Epstein can be reached at (202) 662-7673.
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Citation: Keith Epstein. "Bush's Strategy Abandons U.S. Tradition," Tampa Tribune, 24 March 2003.
Original URL: http://www.tampatrib.com/MGA0SJKLMDD.html
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