The Doctrine of Preemption
- GEORGE F. WILL
We are in a war of terror being waged by people who take ideas with lethal seriousness, and we had better take our own ideas seriously as well.
What
I will say tonight about the war on terror draws heavily on my earlier life as
a professor and student of political philosophy. A long life in journalism and
around Washington, D.C., has taught me not just that ideas have consequences,
but that only ideas have large and lasting consequences. We are in a war of terror
being waged by people who take ideas with lethal seriousness, and we had better
take our own ideas seriously as well.
I think the beginning of understanding
the war is to understand what happened on 9/11. What happened was that we as a
people were summoned back from a holiday from history that we had understandably
taken at the end of the Cold War. History is served up to the American people
with uncanny arithmetic precision. Almost exactly sixty years passed from the
October 1929 collapse of the stock market to the November 1989 crumbling of the
Berlin Wall sixty years of depression, hot war, and cold war, at the end
of which the American people said: "Enough, we are not interested in war anymore."
The trouble is, as Trotsky once said, "You may not be interested in war, but war
is interested in you." And this was a war with a new kind of enemy suicidal,
and hence impossible to deter, melding modern science with a kind of religious
primitivism. Furthermore, our enemy today has no return address in the way that
previous adversaries, be it Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia, had return addresses.
When attacks emanated from Germany or Russia, we could respond militarily or we
could put in place a structure of deterrence and containment. Not true with this
new lot.
Our enemy today refutes an axiom that has governed international
relations for nearly 400 years, since the Peace of Westphalia, when the nation-state
system began to emerge in Europe. The axiom was that a nation could only be mortally
threatened or seriously wounded by another nation by massed armies and
fleets on the seas, and an economic infrastructure to support both. This is no
longer true. It is perfectly clear now that one maniac with a small vial of smallpox
spores can kill millions of Americans. That is a guess, but an educated guess
based on a U.S. government simulated disaster that started in an Oklahoma shopping
center. Smallpox is a strange disease; it has a ten-day incubation period when
no one knows they have it. We are mobile people, we fly around, we breathe each
other's airplane air. The U.S. government, taking this mobility into account,
estimated that in just three weeks, one million Americans in 25 states would die
from one outbreak like that.
On the other hand, the enemies who attacked
us on 9/11 failed to ask themselves the question, "But then what?" That is the
question Admiral Yamamoto asked when the Japanese government summoned him in 1940
and asked him to take a fleet stealthily across the North Pacific and deliver
a devastating blow against the American navy at Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto said he
could do that if his government would design some shallow running torpedoes and
a few other things. He said he could run wild in the Pacific for six months, or
maybe a year. But he asked his government, "Then what?" Yamamoto knew America,
and he loved America. He studied at Harvard and had been back to the U.S. as a
diplomat in Washington. He knew that after Pearl Harbor, Japan would have an enraged,
united, incandescent, continental superpower on its hands, and that Japan's ultimate
defeat would be implicit in its initial victory. Our current enemies will learn
the same thing.
Preemption:
Necessary but Problematic
Meanwhile we have worries and these are not new worries. In
1946, Congress held what are today remembered, by the few who remember such things,
as the "Screwdriver Hearings." They summoned J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the
Manhattan Project, and asked him if it would be possible to smuggle an atomic
device into New York City and detonate it. Oppenheimer replied that of course
it would be possible. Congress then asked how it would be possible to detect such
a device. Oppenheimer answered: "With a screwdriver." What he meant was that every
container that came into the city of New York would have to be opened and inspected.
To enrich uranium is an enormous, complex process that requires scientists and vast physical plants. But once you have it, making a nuclear weapon requires only two or three good physics graduate students. And there is an enormous amount of fissile material floating around the world. |
This year, seven million seaborn shipping containers
will pass through our ports. About five percent will be given cursory examination.
About 30,000 trucks crossed our international borders today. If this was a normal
day, about 21,000 pounds of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin were smuggled into
our country. How hard would it be, then, to smuggle in a football-sized lump of
highly enriched uranium sufficient to make a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon to make
Manhattan uninhabitable for a hundred years?
To enrich uranium is an enormous,
complex process that requires scientists and vast physical plants. But once you
have it, making a nuclear weapon requires only two or three good physics graduate
students. And there is an enormous amount of fissile material floating around
the world. In 1993, some officials from the U.S. Energy Department, along with
some Russian colleagues, went to a Soviet-era scientific facility outside Moscow
and used bolt cutters to snip off the padlock the sum of all the security
at this place. Inside, they found enough highly enriched uranium for 20 nuclear
weapons. In 2002, enough fissile material for three weapons was recovered in a
laboratory in a Belgrade suburb. And so it goes. The Soviet Union, in its short
and deplorable life, deployed about 22,000 nuclear weapons. Who believes they
have all been accounted for? The moral of this story is: you cannot fight terrorism
at the ports of Long Beach or Newark. You have to go get it. You have to disrupt
terrorism at its sources. This is a gray area. It's a shadow war. But it is not
a war that we have any choice but to fight.
This leads us directly to
the doctrine of preemption, with which there are several problems. First, we do
not yet have as it has been made painfully clear the intelligence
capacity that a doctrine of preemption really requires. The second problem with
preemption is encapsulated in Colin Powell's famous "Pottery Barn principle,"
which Mr. Powell explained to the President before the second war with Iraq began:
If you break it, you own it. Iraq is broken; we own it for the moment. And we
are therefore engaged in nation building.
This is particularly a problem
for conservatives, who understand that societies and nations are complex, organic
things not put together and taken apart like Tinker Toys. The phrase "nation
building" sounds to many conservatives much the way the phrase "orchid building"
would sound. An orchid is a complex, wonderful, beautiful, natural thing, but
it is not something that can be built. Conservatives know it took thirty years
in this country to rebuild the south Bronx. And now we have taken on a nation
to build.
There are those who say that neoconservatives and most
of my friends are neoconservatives, although I am not quite have exported
the impulse for social engineering that conservatives have so rightly criticized
over the years at home. There is, of course, an element in this critique of President
Bush's policies that echoes in part the contemporary liberal version of isolationism.
The old isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s was a conservative isolationism, and
it held that America should not go abroad into the world because America is too
good for the world. The contemporary liberal brand of isolationism the
Michael Moore view of the world is that America should not be deeply involved
in the world because the world is too good for America. This is not a serious
argument, even though seriously held.
Realists know better. They know there was a long, 572-year uphill march from Runnymede to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Even more sobering, our Constitutional Convention was followed in less than 75 years by the bloodiest Civil War the world had ever seen, to settle some leftover constitutional questions. We know from our history how difficult regime change is. |
The serious argument over nation building is an
argument conducted between conservatives of good will with one another. On the
one hand, we have a school broadly called the realist school, and on the other
hand, there is a school associated with Woodrow Wilson and his crusading zeal
for the export of democracy. President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
two intelligent and very good men, have in them a large share of Wilson's crusading
messianic spirit, a spirit that is quite natural to America. Once you enunciate
a country founded on principles that have universality written in them, as our
Declaration of Independence does i.e., "all men are created equal . . .
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" a kind of universal
eligibility for these rights is postulated. What the realists remind us is that
over time, it is the details that matter.
President Bush has said, in
a phrase he got from Ronald Reagan, that it is cultural condescension to say that
some people are not ready for democracy. Tony Blair, in July 2003, after the fall
of Baghdad, came before a joint session of Congress and gave a wonderful, generous,
good ally speech, in which he said that it is a "myth" that our values are simply
"Western values," or simply a product of our culture. Our principles, he said,
are "universal," embraced by all "ordinary people." The problem is that this belief
that every person is at heart a Jeffersonian Democrat, that all the masses
of the world are ready for democracy might lead you not to plan very carefully
for post-war nation building. If this is true, then nation building should be
a snap, because everyone is ready for democracy.
Realists know better.
They know there was a long, 572-year uphill march from Runnymede to the Philadelphia
Convention of 1787. Even more sobering, our Constitutional Convention was followed
in less than 75 years by the bloodiest Civil War the world had ever seen, to settle
some leftover constitutional questions. We know from our history how difficult
regime change is. When the president speaks of regime change, he is using a term
from Aristotle. For Aristotle, changing a regime did not mean substituting a few
public officials for other public officials. For Aristotle, a regime meant the
habits, mores, customs, dispositions, public philosophy, and culture of politics
that sustain public institutions. Therefore, regime change is statecraft and soulcraft;
it is changing the temperament of a people. It is very complicated.
Major
League Baseball managers often say in spring training that they are just two players
away from a World Series. Unfortunately, the two players are Ruth and Gehrig.
Likewise, Iraq is just four statesmen away from sturdy constitutionalism. All
they need is a George Washington, a charismatic figure to unify the nation; a
James Madison, a genius of constitutional architecture; an Alexander Hamilton,
who can create from whole cloth a functioning economy; and a John Marshall, a
jurist who knows how to change a constitution from words on parchment into a breathing,
functioning document. Most of all, of course, they need the astonishingly rich
social soil of America in the second half of the 18th century from which Washington,
Madison, Hamilton and Marshall sprang. All of which is to say that Iraq may not
be close to constitutional democracy just yet.
The
Miracle of America
I say this not to disparage the
Iraqi people but to increase our appreciation of what a miracle the United States
is. John Adams said that the American Revolution was accomplished before the Battles
of Lexington and Concord. Everyone used to learn we do not learn these
things anymore Emerson's great poem about the battle of Concord's bridge:
"by the rude bridge that arched the flood/their flag to April's breeze unfurled/here
once the embattled farmers stood/and fired the shot heard round the world." But
before that shot was fired, according to John Adams, independence had already
been accomplished, because the spirit of independence was in the hearts and minds
of the American people, a people prepared to shed blood in defense of their God-given
natural rights.
Churchill gave a speech in which he said, "We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy." No, we are not. We are much tougher than our enemies understand. |
One
of the mistakes our enemies have made and one of the reasons I wish our
enemies would study American history to disabuse themselves of some of their grotesque
errors is their belief that we are squeamish about defending freedom and
about the violence of war. They persist in the assumption that we are casualty
averse. Osama Bin Laden said as much after the Somalia debacle when President
Clinton, after suffering some casualties, immediately withdrew American forces.
Whether or not we should have been in Somalia is another matter, but the means
by which we left Somalia clearly convinced our enemies that we were paper tigers.
People have been making that mistake since General Howe made it in the Battle
of Brooklyn Heights in the Revolutionary War. He chased us across the East River
and figured that was that. It was said again after the Battle of Shiloh in April
1862 up to that day the bloodiest day in American history. Many observers
thought the North would sue for accommodation and, in the words of Horace Greeley,
let our erring sisters go in peace. It did not turn out that way.
A few
days after Shiloh, some men were seen on the still corpse-strewn fields of northern
Maryland, men carrying strange devices. They were from Mathew Brady's photography
studio in New York, and they took pictures. Three months later, these photos became
an exhibit of devastating impact in Manhattan called "The Dead of Antietam." It
was the first time graphic journalism had brought the real face of war to a democratic
public. And it raised the question that to this day affects us and troubles political
leaders: Does graphic journalism first photography and then, of course,
television that brings war into our living rooms, in real time, cause nations
to crack when they see the real face of battle?
The First World War produced
the worst carnage the world had ever seen, but not once during the war did a picture
of a dead Brit or dead Frenchman or dead German or dead American soldier appear
in a newspaper of any of those countries. In the Second World War, the first picture
of an American soldier dead in the surf in the Pacific did not appear in Life
magazine until it had been held up in the War Department (as the Pentagon was
then known) for nine months. The war in Vietnam produced more anxiety about graphic
journalism, where it was suggested that in fact it was television that caused
the American will to break. In fact, the American will never broke but
that is another matter. This has been a constant recurring anxiety in America,
as Winston Churchill could have told us and in fact did tell us when he
came to North America immediately after Pearl Harbor. Churchill gave a speech
in which he said, "We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across
the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of
sugar candy." No, we are not. We are much tougher than our enemies understand.
Character
and the Power of Ideas
One hundred years ago, people
believed not only that war was inevitable, but that war was good for us. Without
it, they thought, we would have to look for strenuous domestic challenges that
would be the moral equivalent of war something elevating that would pull
us out of ourselves and into great collective endeavors as war does. Tocqueville
said, "war almost always enlarges the thought of a people and elevates its heart."
Stravinsky, the great composer, said war is "necessary for human progress."
All of these men echoed Immanuel Kant, who said "a prolonged peace favors the
predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest,
cowardice, and effeminacy and tends to degrade the character of the nation."
There is much to be said for the commercial spirit, because the commercial
spirit is a civilizing spirit. It is a spirit conducive to cooperation among peoples
and within a political community. We are today engaged in a great race to see
if we can integrate China into the community of nations with less catastrophic
violence then that which accompanied the attempt 100 years ago to integrate the
newly muscular and buoyant and dynamic nation of Germany into the community of
nations. In the 33 years since President Nixon went to China in 1972, Republicans
and Democrats alike have followed the same national policy, which holds that if
we can only suffuse China with the commercial spirit, it can be tranquilized and
made civilized. The reason for believing this is that commerce, entrepreneurship,
and all the various elements of capitalism form an enveloping, civilizing culture.
Capitalism requires the diffusion of decision-making and the diffusion of
information. Capitalism requires contracts a culture of promise-keeping
enforced by the judicial system. It requires banks to make self-interested, calculated,
and rational allocations of wealth and opportunity. It sublimates the troublesome
passions of mankind into improving the material well-being of people. It is for
this reason that what we want to do with the fever swamps of the Middle East that
produce our enemies is to try and drain those swamps and bring to them enterprise
cultures. It is altogether right that Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of
the war against Iraq, is now going to the World Bank where he can try and help
the next stage of development, which is to spread the commercial spirit. In some
ways, this is the American spirit.
On the other hand, as Tocqueville
warned us, if a people is only concerned with material well-being, only concerned
with commercialism, they lack something they lack the heights of nobility
and character and aspiration. But first things first: get people into this
enveloping culture of capitalism. Nor is this to say that we Americans are a materialist
people. The stupidest political slogan I have heard in three-and-a-half decades
in Washington was the Clinton slogan in 1992, "It's the economy, stupid." The
American people almost never vote their pocketbook as is commonly said, and almost
never vote merely on economics. We are a much more morally serious and complicated
people than that.
In the 1790s, our party system began to coalesce with,
on the one hand, Jefferson advocating a sturdy yeoman republic, a static society
of the kind he lived in, and, on the other hand, Hamilton urging a speculative,
entrepreneurial society with a system of credit, a dynamic urban society. Hamilton's
"Report on Manufactures" was obviously couched in economic terms, but it was not
about economics at all. It was about national character and what kind of people
we would be. Later, Andrew Jackson defined modern democratic populist politics
with his attack on the Bank of the United States. It was not about a bank; it
was about morality. He argued that speculators earn their dishonest living through
banks. Jackson did not understand much about the modern world or capitalism, but
he held that people who earn their living that way are bad people. He thought
it was bad for the soul. And throughout our history it has not mattered whether
we were arguing about abolitionism, immigration, prohibition or desegregation.
All of the great arguments that have roiled American politics over the years have
not been pocketbook issues. They have been about the soul of the country and what
kind of people we would be.
Our enemy has ideas. They are vicious, bad, retrograde, medieval, intolerant, and suicidal ideas, but ideas nevertheless. And we oppose them with the great ideas of freedom and democracy, which America has defined better than anyone in the world. And we turn to these people with an energy they could not have counted on. |
Well, the
kind of people we are is a people who rise to the challenge of the new kind of
enemy we have today. Our enemy has ideas. They are vicious, bad, retrograde, medieval,
intolerant, and suicidal ideas, but ideas nevertheless. And we oppose them with
the great ideas of freedom and democracy, which America has defined better than
anyone in the world. And we turn to these people with an energy they could not
have counted on. Edward Grey once said, "The United States is like a gigantic
boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can
generate." And these enemies improvidently lit a fire under us.
We have
done this before. In September 1942, General Les McGraw of the Army Corps of Engineers
bought for the government about 90,000 acres of Tennessee wilderness. There was
nothing there no roads, no towns, nothing. It was along the Clinch River,
in eastern Tennessee, not far from Knoxville. But very soon there were streets
and shops and schools and homes and some of the finest physics labs the world
had ever seen. And 35 months later, on a desert in New Mexico, there was a flash
brighter than a thousand suns and the atomic age began. Thirty-five months from
wilderness to Alamogordo. That is what America does when aroused, because, as
I say, we are not made of sugar candy.
Today we are the legatees
of all the giants on whose shoulders we stand. We live in circumstances our parents
did not live in, or our grandparents. We live in a time in which there is no rival
model to the American model for how to run a modern industrial commercial society.
Socialism is gone. Fascism is gone. Al-Qaeda has no rival model about how to run
a modern society. Al-Qaeda has a howl of rage against the idea of modernity. We
began in 1945 an astonishingly clear social experiment: We divided the city of
Berlin, the country of Germany, the continent of Europe, indeed the whole world,
and we had a test. On one side was the socialist model that says that society
is best run by edicts, issued from a coterie of experts from above. The American
model, on the other hand, called for a maximum dispersal of decision-making and
information markets allocating wealth and opportunity. The results are clear:
We are here, they are not. The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant
Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the
Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.
We must struggle today
with the fact that the doctrine of preemption is necessary, and with the serious
problems it entails. But what we must have overall is the confidence that our
ideas are right. I grew up in Lincoln country and I am reminded that in 1859,
with war clouds lowering over the country, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech at the
Wisconsin State Fair. In the course of this speech, Lincoln told the story of
an Eastern despot who summoned his wise men and gave them an assignment. Go away
and think, he said, and come back and give me a proposition to be carved in stone
to be forever in view and forever true. The wise men went away and came back some
days later, and the proposition they gave to him was: "And this, too, shall pass
away." Lincoln said: perhaps not. If we Americans cultivate our inner lives and
our moral selves as industriously and productively as we cultivate the material
world around us, he said, then perhaps we of all peoples can long endure. He was
right. We have and we shall persevere, in no small measure because of the plucky
brand of people, true to these ideas, such as those that have formed around the
college we here celebrate tonight.
This is Meaghen Gonzalez, Editor of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these articles especially for believers like you.
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Acknowledgement
George F. Will. "The Doctrine of Preemption." Imprimis 34, no. 9 (September 2005): 1-7.
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu), 33 East College St, Hills dale, Michigan 49242. Subscriptions to Imprimis, are free upon request, ISBN 0277-8432. 800/437-2268.
The Author
George
F. Will writes a twice-weekly column that appears in more than 450 newspapers
and a biweekly column in Newsweek. He also appears regularly on ABC’s
This Week on Sunday mornings. In 1977, he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
He has published seven collections of his columns as well as several other books,
including Statecraft
as Soulcraft: What Government Does and Men
at Work: The Craft of Baseball which topped national best-seller lists
in the number-one position for over two months. Will was born in Champaign, Illinois,
and was educated at Trinity College in Hartford, and Oxford and Princeton universities.
Prior to entering journalism, Will taught political philosophy at Michigan State
University and the University of Toronto, and served on the staff of U.S. Sen.
Gordon Allott. Until becoming a columnist for Newsweek, Will was Washington
editor of the National Review, a leading conservative journal of ideas
and political commentary.
The above is adapted from a speech delivered
on May 23, 2005, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Dallas,
Texas.