RISKING DISASTER TO END A DISASTER:

Now Bush's doctrine of war will be put to the test: Will pre-emption survive the war on Iraq? (Martin Woollacott, March 21, 2003, The Guardian)

Doctrine, it is said, never survives the battlefield unscathed. The strikes aimed at killing Saddam Hussein probably cannot be counted as a true example of that proposition, since the theory of precision weapons does lay down that they are only as good as the intelligence which provides the target, coupled with the speed with which fire is brought to bear.

But they certainly represent the first of the tests of the American and British armed forces, their governments and their doctrines of war at every level, which this conflict will bring. Such doctrines go all the way from the smallest unit in the desert to the command staffs, and beyond them to governments pondering, as they will as soon as the violence ends, what will be the best course, whether military or non-military, in conflicts to come.

President Bush's ultimatum on Monday cited the new national security strategy, first outlined in January 2002, to the effect that, in an age when weapons of mass destruction are increasingly available, waiting to act after the enemy has "struck first is not self-defence, it's suicide". Critics have pointed out that the new doctrine blurs the distinction between pre-emption, which implies an imminent threat, and prevention, which implies more distant dangers.

The doctrine, as so far advanced, also tends to stress military rather than non-military solutions, and unilateral rather than multilateral decisions about the seriousness of threats. Although it does not neglect containment and deterrence, it pushes them down the list. Taken to the extreme, it would seem to allow one country, the US, to attack others at will if it deems them to represent a future rather than a present threat - and it might also encourage other countries to take pre-emptive action of the same kind in their neighbourhoods.

The administration repudiates such sweeping interpretations and seems genuinely convinced that this is a big idea which justifies the Iraq war and will be a key to action for years to come. Much of the rest of the world disagrees, either on the general principle, or on its application to Iraq, deeming the doctrine cover for other motives. In the most immediate sense that doctrine will be tested as it becomes clear what Iraq does possess in the way of weapons of mass destruction.

For the doctrine to be justified to any extent, there must be evidence that Iraq does have substantial stocks, and, equally important, that evidence must not take the form either of the effective use of such weapons against our troops or their transfer to terrorists who could use them in our home countries. The stocks, and any information on serious continuing weapons programmes, would show a degree of real threat, which would go some way to justifying the doctrine in principle. Even if the stocks are very substantial, that would not prove, of course, that the Iraqi regime planned to use them or could not have been deterred by means short of war. But it might nevertheless change the minds of many people across the world.

The completion of the military campaign without such weapons - assuming they exist in some quantity - being effectively used or transferred, would justify the doctrine at the level of execution. It would in other words show that the US had developed the military means to deal with an enemy, or at least this particular enemy, without its action leading to disaster rather than disarmament. To develop the capacity to paralyse an enemy and the speed and flexibility to get in sufficiently close to inhibit the use of weapons of mass destruction has been a preoccupation of reformers inside and outside the American services throughout the 90s. Major-General Robert Scales (author of Yellow Smoke, a new book on such requirements) stresses the weight of firepower, and the speed and especially the cunning of manoeuvre. The British military theorist of the 30s, Basil Liddell Hart, who advocated the "indirect approach", slicing through the enemy to cut up his nervous system, is an inspiration for such officers. What Scales calls the "new American style of war" has to be both fast and indirect, for the consequences otherwise could be horrendous.

Such wars now demand not just victory but the right kind of victory.

Mr. Woollacott is mostly right here, except that he fails to reckon with the fact that containment--or appeasement or whatever we choose to call the twelve years of diplomatic footsie with Saddam--has been a disaster. If we accept the number that is bandied about, that 1.5 million Iraqis have died as a result of the UN sanctions, it's obvious that one hell of a lot would have to go wrong with this war before it becomes a worse option than the "peace" has been. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 23, 2003 7:01 AM