You Can't Kill Them All

People with cancer think highly of pre-emption: cut the tumor out, fast. Get it before it gets you. That's the way the Bush Administration thinks of terrorism. Last year, its new National Security Strategy stated that "the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world's most destructive technologies," and "to forestall or prevent ... hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively." The idea of this new doctrine is to free the huge American superiority in satellites and smart bombs from traditional constraints, under which an attack must be imminent to trigger the right to strike first. Though the Bush Administration's strategy may have some uses, its limits are already obvious.

Its first test was Iraq. Bush argued that the gentler medicine of sanctions had failed to persuade evildoer Saddam to stop acquiring weapons of mass destruction and helping terrorists. So he overruled what he saw as a feckless U.N. to take the macho-surgeon route, using high-tech force to excise the Iraqi leader. No doubt, getting rid of Saddam is a favor to the world. But at what cost?

Three months after the Commander in Chief proclaimed the war's end, the costs of going fast and nearly alone into Iraq are mounting. Last week Bush had an important psychological win when Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were killed. But with no wmd yet found, his principal argument for pre-emption looks like what lawyers call "reckless disregard for the truth." Or at least a massive intelligence failure. That has corroded Bush's relationship with American voters as well as foreign leaders. And Iraq's postwar stay in intensive care is turning more taxing than advertised, both expensive ($4 billion per month in occupation costs alone, double the original estimate) and dangerous. Two weeks ago marked the point at which the U.S. suffered more deaths than in the whole first Gulf War.

The biggest cost has been to America's "soft power" — its capacity to win the assent of other countries to do its bidding voluntarily, rather than through coercion. A recent Pew Research Center poll of 20 nations and the Palestinian Authority found that majorities in five of seven NATO countries now want a more independent stance toward the U.S.; majorities in seven of eight Muslim countries believe the U.S. might become a military threat to them. In most of the countries polled, support for the "war on terror" has sunk 10 to 30% in the past year.

Being alone doesn't necessarily mean Bush is wrong. But precisely because his goal is to fight terror, it matters that the U.S. has lost respect and regard by throwing its weight around. Terror operates globally, but its wellsprings are largely domestic: countries that are poor or poorly governed, fertile ground for alienation, extremism and the criminal networks that can launder money, forge documents, procure guns or maybe even nukes. America's mighty armies can knock down bad regimes in a hurry, but they're not geared for the 21st century task of draining the terror swamp: the messy, time-consuming work of coaxing failed or failing states toward vitality. Even in functioning countries, nabbing evildoers (where are you, Osama? Mullah Omar? Saddam?) depends crucially on intelligence and help from local security forces — which means goodwill counts.

Two weeks ago at the Progressive Governance Conference, a gathering in the U.K. of center-left activists, the 14 national leaders who attended (including Tony Blair and Thabo Mbeki) almost endorsed a bold departure in international law: "Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it," the international community would have the right to intervene. Only the fear that this might be taken as an endorsement of the Iraq war kept it out of their final communiqué. That's an enhanced vision of pre-emption, one that focuses on the causes of terror. From the other side of the political spectrum, Britain's Conservative shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, spoke recently in favor of streamlining and empowering the U.N. so it can act more decisively — perhaps using its own designated military forces — against the causes of international disorder. For Ancram too, proper focus on root causes would lessen the need for hard-core military pre-emption. "We need to pre-empt and prevent," he has said, "whether the means are military, diplomatic, political or economic — or a combination of them all." That's what a cancer surgeon would say too: Cut if you must, but the best defense against a dangerous tumor is a lifetime of healthy living.