Asia Times Online


	June 5, 2002	atimes.com

Front

US hawks embrace 'hot pre-emption'
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - For geo-strategists here, the hot new phrase in the US war on terrorism is "hot pre-emption". Coined in a speech by former secretary of state George Shultz last week, the phrase has already been featured prominently by several influential columnists, including two who strongly favor pre-emptive US military action against Iraq, as a further refinement of the so-called "Bush Doctrine".

While President George W Bush has not yet used the precise phrase, he devoted most of his speech on Saturday to the graduating class of the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, to the idea that Washington will no longer rely on deterrence against terrorists but will strike them first, even if they are found, as in Afghanistan, across international borders.

"If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long," Bush said. "We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.

"The only path to safety is action," he declared. "And this nation will act."

His speech, the most hawkish since his notorious "axis of evil" State of the Union address in late January, must have given Shultz, who served as then president Ronald Reagan's top diplomat, immense satisfaction, given his own battles with former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger over how to respond to terrorist attacks in the 1980s.

After Shi'ite bombers blew up the US Embassy and marine barracks in Lebanon after Israel's 1982 invasion, Shultz called for "active prevention, pre-emption, and retaliation" against terrorists. Weinberger, who prevailed in the intra-administration debate, favored beating a hasty retreat and bombarding presumed enemy positions in the mountains around Beirut with Volkswagen-sized shells from the safety of the US battleship New Jersey, several miles offshore.

That response, according to neo-conservative critics in particular, established a pattern, particularly pronounced in the subsequent administration of Bill Clinton, whereby Islamist militants across the Middle East and South Asia came to believe that Washington could be chased from the region if terrorist attacks exacted a high enough toll on its personnel there.

Bush's West Point speech appeared to have been inspired by Shultz's address to the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, which has just been renamed in his honor.

"This is war," Shultz told an audience of diplomats. "States must be accountable. We are calling on states to step up their internal responsibilities to end any terrorist presence, while saying that we also reserve, within the framework of our right to self-defense, the right to pre-empt terrorist threats within a state's borders. Not just hot pursuit; hot pre-emption."

Shultz, currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California, has argued over the past several months that the war on terrorism should be used to revitalize the international system of nation-states created at the end of the Thirty Years' War with the Treaty of Westphalia, more than 300 years ago.

In Shultz's view, the state is indispensable "as a means of ordering our international existence". But the state's authority - that is, its sovereignty over its territory and what takes place on it - has been badly battered over the last decades by globalization or, in Schultz's words, the ways "information, money, and migrants" have moved across its borders in ways that escape its control.

At the same time, the state has ceded many of its traditional domestic responsibilities to non-governmental entities that have pressed it from below, while international organizations, according to Shultz, have begun to assume some of its other powers - in some cases, even peacekeeping and security - from above. In so doing, the state has surrendered its own accountability.

As states have weakened, "terrorists have moved in on them", Shultz wrote in January. In response, many states, especially in the Arab Middle East, have tended to make deals with terrorist movements in order to protect themselves. Some supported terrorism directly as a matter of state policy.

"If these deals are not reversed, the states that make them and ultimately the international system of states will not survive," he wrote in the Washington Post. "That is why the war on terrorism is of unsurpassed importance."

To the extent that the state has permitted terrorists to operate on its territory, it has surrendered its sovereignty to other states which are threatened by those same forces, according to Shultz, and which can exercise "hot pre-emption".

Columnists William Safire of the New York Times and Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post already have seized on Shultz's analysis as justifications both for the US military action against Afghanistan and Israel's recent raids against targets in the West Bank and Gaza.

Both also noted that the logic of Shultz's formula would also apply to an Indian intervention in Pakistan, which has sponsored and sheltered groups that have committed terrorist actions in Kashmir. However, Hoagland has suggested that the possible escalation of such a conflict into a nuclear exchange reduces the attractiveness of that option.

In his remarks, Shultz himself suggested that a strong Indian action might still be the best course. "Kashmir presents compelling issues, especially since nuclear weapons lurk in the background," he said. "The outline of a potential settlement is much easier to identify than is the process by which to get there.

"As elsewhere, the starting point is to hit hard against terrorism as the method of influencing policy on any side of the problem," he concluded.

(Inter Press Service)

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