Too Much History

...1941 On December 7, 1941, the American fleet at Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese Empire...

...He had to assume they would get them...

...He was trying to get the world to sign on to a war against a country he believed would attack in the future (though it had issued no direct threat), using weapons of mass destruction he assumed (but could not prove) it had...

...But no president other than Bush ever faced so many conflicting cross-pressures and strains...

...Bush should adopt this standard and make it the basis of his policy...

...BY NOEMIE EMERY All through the Clinton administration and into the 2000 election, some said we had run out of history...

...Let us not play up the strains of the present by running down those of the past...

...How little he knew...

...Bush has to reframe his alliances in the midst of a hot war, with preemption an ongoing policy...

...and he longed to effect a regime change in Germany...

...Under her rules, the presence of three conditions in a state or nation could justify preemptive use of force: "(1) possession of weapons of mass destruction or clear and convincing evidence of attempts to gain such weapons...

...and that the Western nations would have to rebuild their defeated Axis enemies as part of the new non-Communist bloc...

...Truman faced his worst moments only after containment and NATO were safely in place...

...losses were 19 ships sunk, 265 airplanes struck, and 2,403 dead...

...Between September 11, 2001, and March 2003, George W. Bush came to understand that the assumptions he had held about the world when he'd become president one year before no longer applied to the world he was leading, and that the world order would have to be reconstructed and remade...

...Let us recall, too, that Franklin D. Roosevelt—the greatest political talent of the 20th century, a tested leader elected four times, a man richly gifted in guile and eloquence—could not coax his country into war to save itself and Great Britain until it had been savagely assaulted at home...

...More likely they were simply too busy to pick up every nuance in the swirl of events...

...2) grave and systemic human rights abuses sufficient to demonstrate the absence of any internal constraints on government behavior...

...Bush's enemy is an all-but-invisible shadowy being, with no land or army, but access to multiple weapons of terror...

...Roosevelt conducted his hot war within a mostly stable web of alliances...

...Peace in our time lasted just one year, before pumped up German forces rolled into Poland, setting off a world war that raged on five continents, killed 40 million people, and lasted six years...

...They will be facing infiltration through airports, not cross-border invasions...

...You are trampling on the generally accepted rules of law...

...1962 On October 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy was given a series of photos proving that the Soviet Union was installing in Cuba 16 ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads to Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Mexico City, and all of Central America as well as Washington, D.C...

...Truman understood that his postwar world would have no lasting security unless he turned Japan and Germany into stable democracies...

...Bush is faced with the job of remaking NATO to counter the new terrorist threat or replacing it...

...Kennedy was spared large public protests because his crisis arose and was settled so quickly, and the only debate was among the president's counselors...

...For the Czechs, the events of the year 1938 led to 50 years of enslavement...

...appeared to be serious...

...Let us recall that Truman had time to sell his containment doctrine to an unhappy world before his trial by fire: It was more than two years from Churchill's Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, to the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the American airlift...

...We have a history glut...

...Kennedy had no hostile Even before France blew Hans Blix to contend with, and the up the U.N., it was weapons he confronted were large enough to be photographed, and too clear that organizations large to be easily hidden or carted built to cut off the next away...

...The law has not yet evolved to cope with the world after September 11," writes Clifford Orwin in Canada's National Post...

...It was the first attack by a foreign power on the American mainland since the British burned the White House in 1814...

...It was the first attack on U.S...

...But for Kennedy, preemption was a one-time thing, an aberration in the forty-year run of the Cold War, which quickly reverted to its containment modality...

...President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to rally his countrymen, and prepare a hot war to be fought on five continents, against the armed forces of the three Axis powers...

...Bush understands that his world can have no real security without bringing reform and order to the terror-spawning Middle East...

...Bush's enemies claimed he had advance knowledge of the attacks in New York and Virginia, and allowed them to happen to gratify his desire to make war on Saddam...

...Bush was prepared to make war on Iraq, but he gave Saddam a chance to survive by first demanding that Iraq fully disarm...

...A good place to start would be the suggestions laid down in the April 13 Washington Post by Anne-Marie Slaughter, president of the American Society of International Law...

...Once again, France helped the aggressor, aided in this Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...We have so much history now that we have nowhere to put it...

...Bush saw threatening preemptive war as simply his duty as president...

...Sentiments of this sort have been hurled at George W. Bush by dissenters at home, diplomats at the United Nations, French politicians, and demagogues everywhere...

...And the years our present situation resembles are these: 1938 In 1938, the League of Nations, having failed to check Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931, Italian aggression in Ethiopia in 1935, and German aggression in the Rhineland in 1936, lapsed at last into utter inconsequence when it failed to prevent the partition of Czechoslovakia, a sellout that Britain and France hailed as "peace in our time...

...It had been tapped out, like an overused resource...

...To Bush, the more complex split within Europe is peripheral to the war on terror, but it is a distraction and a huge complication in the effort to place the war on terror in a multinational frame...

...The next job for Bush (when he cleans up his old ones) is to try to make sure that it does...

...Truman found that the coalition that had won World War II was no longer stable...

...Truman built NATO to do the job that the U.N...

...Pacifist critics reviled both men as cowboys...

...Roosevelt's aim was to liberate territory and force the surrender of enemies...

...suicide bombers, not tank battalions...

...it highlighted splits that were already there...

...Both of these, and Bush's overthrow of Saddam's regime, were undertaken to prevent an attack with megadeath weapons...

...Which leads us to year number four...

...Specifically, they remember being sold out...

...France spent the decade of the '90s helping Iraq evade U.N...

...The Czechs remember...

...It had run dry, like a well...

...After this war, Bush should sit down with his allies to draw up together the rules and restrictions governing acts of preemption...

...The goal was to lead a unified Europe in the project of checking American power...

...As the U.N...

...Bush's aim is to surgically extract the terrorists from the nations where they nest, a different and new kind of war...

...This, as she says, "sets a very high threshold," while recognizing unacceptable levels of risk...

...In the course of this past year, Hitler or Stalin President Bush and his people made couldn't cope with f ma'or eahch inThe cofTd of foreign relationships...

...Truman and Bush both started from the simple desire to safeguard their country, and gradually moved to the final idea that the only way to fight communism and terror was to end the conditions that made them appealing...

...He is making history more than he ever imagined, but he is also reliving it, in an unusual fusion of incidents...

...Disagreements arose when the danger of megadeath weapons plus terrorist methods collided with established tradition about what was just in war...

...History keeps coming back, sometimes like a bad dinner," wrote columnist Paul Greenberg...

...President George W. Bush had to rally the country, and prepare for a hot war to be fought on five continents, against the worldwide terrorist network, as well as its supporters...

...But he was unable to sell his case to his own people, and was forced to wait for a tragic attack...

...Right now, we look back at Communism as centralized and so easy to contain...

...Iraq did not split the Western alliance...

...and perEven before France blew up the U.N., it was clear that organizations built to cut off the next Hitler or Stalin couldn’t cope with Saddam and Osama...

...Kennedy was never willing to accept a solution that left Soviet missiles in Cuba...

...And who could know, too, that this one-term-plus governor would be the man charged with remaking the Western alliance for the needs of the post-postwar world...

...not just dictators with large ambitions, but madmen with nothing to lose...

...that Russia was an enemy and China becoming one...

...In 2003, the United Nations, having failed to stop numerous incursions and massacres from Bosnia to Rwanda, once more proved its futility when its Security Council split bitterly on the issue of whether or not to enforce its own resolutions against Saddam Hussein...

...Which leads us to year number three...

...Iraq had invaded two neighboring states...

...Of course...

...and (3) evidence of aggressive intent with regard to other nations...

...Nonetheless, Bush determined that the mere presence of such weapons in the hands of a tyrant with Saddam's record posed such a grave threat to the national interest that he was prepared to risk war to have them destroyed...

...Along with this de facto Iraqi alliance went another French subplot: to lead a coalition of the resentful in an effort to thwart the United States...

...Truman's problems, along with those of FDR and John Kennedy, now have all come to President Bush...

...By all accounts, Roosevelt knew from the mid-1930s onward that he would one day have to take up arms against Hitler...

...that France and Germany were now at odds with the United States and Britain, which went to find allies among their former opponents, the once-captive Communist satellites...

...Which brings us to year number two...

...The Truman Doctrine, as it was soon called, "enumerated a heavy precedent for un-thought-out commitments to unassessed regimes in ill-defined places," wrote Derek Leebaert in The Fifty Year Wound...

...In 2003, neither Saddam nor the U.N...

...In the event, it split Europe in half, breaking off its friends (Belgium, Germany, and Russia) from a larger pro-U.S...

...Iraq was believed to be developing sinister weapons...

...At the core of this effort will be the new Gulf War coalition, with the United States and Great Britain as enforcers...

...Bush endured protests for months...

...Necessity will foster its own new inventions, as it did almost 60 years ago, this time without a French veto...

...They failed Saddam and Osama...

...Roosevelt's enemies were nation-states, with formidable armies and large stores of conventional weapons...

...Truman built his new world order after the hot war had ended...

...bloc...

...And he had to take out, before they were usable, weapons that could do devastating harm to the United States...

...could not, of safeguarding the West through collective security...

...Bush was never willing to accept a solution that left weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein...

...Both were surprised by the bad faith of their onetime war partners...

...And so it did, what with hapless attempts to disarm an aggressor, and endless French pleas for more talk...

...But even if NATO had been staunchly united, Bush would have found his Iraqi incursion a hard act to sell...

...He can note that neither Kennedy nor the Israelis followed their acts of preemption with more, and that both made the world safer...

...Some liberal critics will maintain to this day that it was Harry S. Truman who started the Cold War, with his belligerence toward the peaceable Soviet Union...

...he did not have to create one...

...instance by Russia and Germany...

...What others will say, with somewhat more reason, is that it would have been easier to get Stalin to agree to his own containment than to have gotten France to agree to any measure whatever penalizing Iraq...

...Roosevelt's enemies claimed he had advance knowledge of the strike at Pearl Harbor and allowed it to happen to gratify his desire to make war on Hitler...

...For Bush, preemption is becoming a weapon of choice and necessity, an indispensable check on a new world of terror, to be used in self-defense by a new concert of nations...

...On September 11, 2001, the damage done to the American nation with weapons no more complex than three planes filled with jet fuel made President George W. Bush see Saddam Hussein's development of weapons of mass destruction in a new and more sinister light...

...to sense the depth and the breadth of the French disaffection...

...To Truman, the division of Europe was the cause of the Cold War, and its reason for being...

...These are new times that require new tactics and agencies...

...Both were accused by their liberal critics of having started the quarrels themselves...

...rules...

...1946 In the course of the year 1946, President Harry S. Truman came to understand that the assumptions he'd held about the world when he'd become president one year before no longer applied to the world he was living in, and the alliances inherited from World War II would have to be wholly reconfigured...

...Cuba had never attacked the United States (rather the opposite), there was no proof that it possessed nuclear weapons, and no direct threat to fire the missiles was ever made...

...And they failed to sense the wide-ranging panic the idea of preemption would arouse...

...Kennedy introduced his preemption idea in the frame of the Cold War, and returned to deterrence once the crisis had passed...

...The same types will tell you today, with the same straight faces, that the trainwreck in the United Nations and the deepening split in the Atlantic alliance are due to George Bush and his errors and arrogance...

...It's a strange assignment for a frat boy from Texas, but then who could know...

...FDR joined a coalition when Pearl Harbor was bombed...

...and another two years from that to the war in Korea...

...haps did NATO some serious damage), it was becoming evident that organizations built to cut off the next Hitler or Stalin need changes to cope with Saddam and Osama bin Laden...

...Among the 18 European countries that now have signed on with America's latest crusade . . . was the Czech Republic," noted Greenberg...

...By what right have you done this...

...Kennedy had to assume that they did," writes Richard Reeves in Profile of Power...

...Khrushchev railed at Kennedy at the height of the crisis...

...Bush likewise had global support for his retaliatory war on the Taliban, but faced wide resistance outside his own country to a preemptive assault on Iraq...

...tossed itself into the dustbin of history, it became clearer and clearer that aggression would be halted and order restored by a military alliance led by the United States and Great Britain (with Russia in an on-and-off supporting role...

...And the only course remaining was war...

...To Bush, the question of whether terrorists already had Iraqi weapons was irrelevant...

...Instead of seeking to restore the status quo, we should reinvent it," urges Anne-Marie Slaughter...

...Critics have said they were too dense and too insular to register these shadings of foreign opinion...

...Nonetheless, Kennedy decided that the mere presence of such missiles in the hands of a hostile tyrant was so great a threat to the national interest that he was willing to risk war to have them removed...

...They will be facing a world in which the challenges arise not from mighty coalitions but from shadowy networks, not from superpowers but from failed states and rogue states, not just from weapons delivered by missiles and bombers, but also from bombs placed in knapsacks, germs placed in envelopes, and canisters filled with deadly chemical agents...

...France sold Iraq the nuclear reactor that Israel had the good sense to take out in 1981...

...Roosevelt and Bush were both accused of being pushed into war by Jews...

...Bush and Blair will be taking apart and remaking the world put together by Truman and Churchill, reconfiguring it to meet different threats, from different parts of the world...

...Not everyone regarded this imperative as self-evident...

...Instead, history gave him high stakes and great pressures...

...Elected in peace, George W. Bush has become a war president, fighting hot wars and covert wars on terror, while trying to rebuild the Atlantic alliance and bring peace and order to the Middle East...

...We are reliving not one but four past crises...

...Then came September 11, and history came flooding back with a vengeance, swamping us all in a torrent of crisis and incident...

...A fourth plane, brought down by a heroic passenger uprising, was headed for either the White House or the Capitol...

...He can note that this latest Iraq war may make other wars less likely by deterring provocative acts...

...Even before France blew up the U.N...

...In the end, aggression was rolled back and order restored by a military alliance led by the United States and Great Britain, with Russia acting at times as an out-and-out foe, and at times as a critical ally...

...Bush and Tony Blair, when they get to it, will face the task of constructing multinational arrangements—whose shape is not yet wholly clear—to police the world's rogue states and their caches of weapons for perhaps the next 50 years...

...He had already decided as soon as Bundy had shown him the photos that the United States had to take the missiles out...

...Kennedy was prepared either to bomb Cuba or to launch an invasion, but he gave the Soviet Union a chance to back down by first instituting a blockade of the island...

...One of the chores Bush didn't know he'd signed up for in becoming president is redesigning the codes of international law to make room for certain acts of preventive deterrence...

...The hardest job of the 20th century went to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the toughest decisions belonged to Harry S. Truman, who had to name, frame, and contain a wholly new form of trouble...

...So did Kennedy, who told his brother that if he had not laid down his ultimatum, he would have been soon, and quite rightly, impeached...

...He should explain yet again why preemptive acts are now needed, pledge that they will be undertaken neither often nor lightly, and that most threats can be resolved short of the use of force...

...On September 11, 2001, three jetliners hijacked by Islamic terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in suburban Virginia and killed over 3,000 people...

...For the United States (which was not a member of the League), they led to attack and disaster...

...But that's not how it looked at the time...

...No president had a worse job than Franklin Roosevelt, a worse week than John Kennedy, a worse set of choices than Harry S. Truman, so many of which could have gone wrong...

...Bush came to see that the alliance that had won the Cold War was splintering...

...On October 26, 1962, three Russian vessels turned back from Cuba, and the parties were able to reach a peaceful solution...

...He pledged to "do small things with great love...

...soil since the British burned the White House in 1814...

...The question of whether they had nuclear weapons on the island was irrelevant...

...Iraq had never invaded America, and there was no proof that these weapons would ever be turned on American interests...

...Sworn in as president in early 2001, Bush took office believing that "in time of peace the stakes . . . appear small...

...Prior to 2003, there had been two key Western examples of preemptive action: Israel's strike at Saddam's nuclear reactor, and President Kennedy's blockade of Cuba...

...In 2003 as in 1940, preemptive war was a hot issue and a hard sell...