Bush's Brain: The Preemptive Strike In a Washington Post op-ed piece last week, Bush's Brain, Richard Cheney, laid out the case for the military's global hunt for weapons of mass destruction. There are terrorists with nukes! There is an al-Qaeda attack in the offing! There is an al-Qaeda attack under way! Bush's Brain says that because of these possibilities, he can no longer put at risk America's national security by leaving open any possibility that his policy of preemption might not work. The problem with Cheney's piece, which was written before the Sept. 11 attacks, is that these terrorist threats can't explain the Administration's policy. Yes, in the past the Administration did act pre-emptively and the world did not end. What the terrorist threats to the United States now do is to raise the costs of any future terrorist attack. Any other country that might come under attack -- like India or Japan -- will be hesitant to side with the United States. So for any terrorist state, there is less of a chance for protection if they attack the United States. There is no upside to preemption. The costs of preemptive strikes -- to civilian populations in faraway lands -- is always much higher than a preemptive attack that fails. There are times when preemption makes sense. If a state has the capabilities to attack the United States -- and is close to doing so -- preemption can ensure the safety of the American people. The Administration does not have those capabilities, and the threat is not close enough to the United States to warrant preemptive action. The Administration seems obsessed with preparing for war with Iraq. After all, many of the people who advise Cheney and President Bush are the same people who have argued for military action against Iraq in the past -- and with much success. These advisers are convinced that the current threat is serious enough to justify re-invading Iraq (or attacking its neighbors) and disarming the world. We are far more likely to live in a safer world if these threats turn out to be real, than if they are imagined. The preemption doctrine, Cheney's central argument for the administration, is not designed to create a safer world. It is designed to create a more dangerous one. We have the option to get involved or not in every possible crisis that we can imagine. Some are real and some are imagined. We need a doctrine that would let us decide which is which. Bush's Brain is unwilling to be clear about the costs of this new doctrine. In the first place, we need to be clear that we do not know how effective the preemption doctrine will be. Yes, we can plan for "no surprises" -- but "no surprises" might very well lead to a much larger surprise than any of us imagine right now. Morever, we are now talking about the costs of the "surprise" in general, not just the cost to people in distant lands. Some of those people will be people in the United States, and some will be people from the rest of the world. We can't say whether people from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia will support a U.S. effort to attack Iraq. They might, depending on the circumstances. (Do we take this idea further and assume that if it is an Islamic fundamentalist attack, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia will automatically back us?) We can't say what this situation might cost Americans. Would Americans like it if these potential targets of a preemption policy actually saw this as a threat? We could ask what the chances are that any other country will get involved in our war against Iraq, but that wouldn't be terribly helpful, either. A nation like Germany or Japan -- or, more probably, Russia -- might support an Iraqi war with the hope of getting some money from a big U.S. reconstruction effort. (The Administration's desire for a new world order suggests that their thinking about the war, should it come, would include more than just Iraq. This is a policy aimed at the entire world, and even countries with no links to terrorists and no direct involvement in Iraq, like Germany, are in the way.) Some might argue that this is unrealistic. But the Administration is talking about preemption as a strategy for a new world order. We can't tell, yet, who the beneficiaries of this new world order would be. Are we, for example, willing to support new wars if they are intended to be pre-emptive weapons against terrorists -- but unintended weapons of mass destruction? This question suggests that this whole debate is actually a distraction. The debate is about what the world needs to be safe from terrorist attacks. Are terrorists more dangerous than they were a year or a month ago? Do we need more military spending than we did a year or a month ago? No. The question we should be asking ourselves is, Do we want to spend more money to try to create new weapons? The answers to these questions have almost nothing to do with the question of whether or not we should have preemption as a strategy. If anything, the Administration ought to be spending more time trying to prevent any attacks in the first place, not trying to fight them. An effective anti-terrorism program would include policies that we can implement now to reduce the chance of an attack. The real danger in this "Bush's Brain" strategy is that it will lead to a war in the Middle East that -- like all wars -- will cost more than it is worth. What did the Second World War cost? A lot. Was it worth it? It changed the world and made it a safer place. The cost of this war could easily be worth it. (In fact, when the war was over, I heard someone say something to the effect that the best way to reduce anti-war sentiment at home was to create a threat to the United States that justified war.) But at this point, we can't even know that a war would reduce the threat of terrorism. And we can't figure out whether such a war would make the world safer. There are those who think that a war against Iraq will have some benefits in that it will make the American public safer from attacks, especially from terrorists. But we don't know that -- the Administration will never admit it -- and we can't even see what the costs of this policy would be in the long term. The more likely scenario is that this would cause the world to hate us and make them more likely to be the victims of attacks in the future. Those who support the Bush's Brain plan have an extremely difficult time explaining how they would react in a world where every country in the world would have to defend itself. There is one point, though, where Cheney's rationale makes perfect sense. He says that this new doctrine is to save us from "fear itself." He is right. This fear is what caused 9-11. The fear that the United States would allow attacks to go unanswered -- that we would just sit and wait -- was what drove the terrorists. The Administration's plan may not work -- but it may save a generation of Americans from fearing for their lives every day. _______ About author Eric Schmitt is a fellow at the Century Foundation and teaches at The New School. This work is based on his book, Torture Taxi: How America Keeps the Deaths of CIA Prisoners Secret, from which this article draws heavily. New from AlterNet: First Ever Congressional Election Database "For us, the next step is to make sure that the information we provide gets into the hands of those who make campaign decisions so that they can build a better political process in the future." This is the message of the new online, searchable database, Voter News Service (VNS), put out by VotersUnite.org. "VNS represents the biggest leap in online election information and activism since Howard Dean's 2004 run for president," stated John Grebe, co-chair of the VotersUnite.org board. "We wanted to create a data base that combines the best attributes of political blogs and traditional databases in one. Voters Unite provides a great service and we are looking forward to building on this important tool in the coming years." The searchable database already contains millions of entries of newsworthy election information that occurred since 1996 in every election since then