Use of Force after 9/11

The events of September 11, 2001, revealed to America and the world a new threat, qualitatively different than the dangers that have faced us in the past. This new threat has required us to adopt new policies to confront it. President Bush eloquently described the threat and the Administration's policy response in an address delivered at the National Defense University on February 11 of this year. He stated: In the Cold War, Americans lived under the threat of weapons of mass destruction but believed that deterrents made those weapons a last resort. What has changed in the 21st century is that in the hands of terrorists, weapons of mass destruction would be a first resort, the preferred means to further their ideology of suicide and random murder. These terrible weapons are becoming easier to acquire, build, hide, and transport. Armed with a single vial of a biological agent or a single nuclear weapon, small groups of fanatics or failing states could gain the power to threaten great nations, threaten the world peace. America and the entire civilized world will face this threat for decades to come. We must confront the danger with open eyes and unbending purpose. I have made clear to all the policy of this Nation: America will not permit terrorists and dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most deadly weapons.1 This policy has many elements, including multilateral efforts to control exports of sensitive goods and technologies, interdiction of shipments of such goods and technologies to regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction through the Proliferation security Initiative, threat reduction activities under the Nunn-Lugar program, and the deployment of missile defenses. The most controversial element, however, has been the idea of preemption laid out in the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States. The National Security Strategy explains preemption as follows: 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 afford to let our enemies strike first. ... The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Yet in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world's most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.2 Preemption should not be viewed separately, but as part of the larger mix of elements that comprise the overall policy. When it comes to dealing with dangerous regimes, the objective of this policy is not, as the critics claim, to encourage US military intervention every time we become concerned that such a regime is seeking weapons of mass destruction. Rather, the objective is to change the calculus of proliferation for such regimes and to cause them to reconsider their operating assumption that efforts to acquire and maintain weapons of mass destruction will make them safer and stronger. In a very basic sense, this policy is similar to the doctrine of deterrence that preceded it during the Cold War. The objective of deterrence was never to bring about a thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Rather, it was to prevent such an exchange by raising doubts in the minds of the Soviets that they could benefit by using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against us. Only if deterrence failed would we find ourselves locked in a thermonuclear exchange, and fortunately, nuclear deterrence never failed during the Cold War. Similarly, cases in which we have to actually use force against emerging state-sponsored weapons of mass destruction ("WMD") threats should be regarded not as successes of our policy, but rather as failures. …