The decision by the American government to attack Iraq has proved extremely controversial. Diverse parties have found diverse reasons to criticize the Bush Administration’s decision to use force against Iraq.

The grounds for this criticism has fallen mainly into four categories: moral, legal, and historical. One of the silliest arguments was made by the International Herald Tribune in a lead editorial on April 14.  They wrote in that “we didn’t not like George W. Bush’s combative doctrine of preemptive use of force when it was formally unveiled . . . because it seemed to walk away from America’s historical inclination to work with other nations to preserve the peace and to rely on force only when it’s security was directly threatened.”

This extraordinary statement reflects a serious but common misunderstanding of America’s history in this century. Obviously, the United States was not “directly threatened” when it entered World War I. President Wilson strongly desired to help the Allies. Something very similar was true of World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt was not alone in his deep concern when Nazi forces swept across Northern Europe--conquering France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and consolidating control of Slovakia and Austria in the first months of the offensive. The American lend-lease program was a concrete expression of Roosevelt’s very real desire to help Great Britain in tangible ways, though it took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to involve the U.S. in war. Then the Americans had good reason to feel directly threatened.

Harry Truman did not send U.S. forces to Korea because he thought the United States was “directly threatened” by the North’s invasion of the South. He, himself, has told us in his memoirs that two factors were critical in his decision to send U.S. troops: his belief that, to contain an aggressive power, it is necessary to stop the aggressor at the beginning--as Hitler had not been stopped when he marched into the Rhineland and Mussolini had not been stopped when he moved into what was then called Abyssinia. And that failure was, in Truman’s view, largely responsible for the death of the League of Nations.

John Kennedy did not dispatch the first American troops to Vietnam because he believed we were “directly threatened.” He and his vice president and successor, Lyndon Johnson, were acting--above all--in response to the doctrine of “containment” which George Kennen recommended in 1947 for responding to the newly aggressive Soviet Union. Containment required “the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting…political points.”

In discussing the military operation against Iraq, the containment doctrine was relied on by the most articulate opponents of the war.

Of course, these are not the only wars (or significant military actions) in which the United States has participated since Vietnam. The U.S. was led by George Herbet Walker Bush in the 1991 effort to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait not because we felt directly threatened, but because President George Herbert Walker Bush believed aggression should not go unpunished. The United States was led into several wars because both he and President Bill Clinton believed we should do our share in multilateral military undertakings. However, it is worth recalling that after the disastrous experience of Mogadishu where twenty U.S. Rangers were killed and 78 were wounded, President Clinton declined to deploy U.S. troops under United Nations command.

In the case of Haiti, President Clinton explained that U.S. forces were deployed because he believed the U.S. should “restore democracy.” In sum, prior to 9/11, only one war in which the U.S. played a major role in this century was undertaken because a President believed “our security was directly threatened” as the editorial writer for the International Herald Tribune asserted. Many Americans like to think so, but it just isn’t so. This editorialist was no more accurate when he charged this Bush administration with “an arrogant go-it-alone stance and an aggressive claim to the right to use preemptive action against threatening states.”

President Bush did not display a “go-it-alone” stance. To the contrary, like his father,

President Jacques Chirac claimed (and claims) that the using of force in Iraq would have been legitimate only if it had been specifically authorized by the Security Council. The U.S., U.K., and the coalition insist that the Security Council had authorized the use of force to secure Iraq’s disarmament in earlier resolutions, notably Resolution 660, which condemned Iraq’s invasion and demanded its withdrawal from Kuwait. UNSCR 678 set a deadline of Jan. 15, 1991 for Iraq’s withdrawal and authorized the use of “all necessary means to uphold and implement SCR 660 . . . ”

For April, 1991, the Security Council followed Resolution 678 with Resolution 687 which spelled out the fact that Iraq was being offered a cease fire in the Gulf war, provided that it “unconditionally accept(s) the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:

(a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research and development, support, and manufacturing facilities related thereto;

(b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than one hundred fifty kilometers, and related major parts and repair facilities;
(and) Decides also for the implementation of paragraph 8, the following

(a) Iraq shall submit to the Secretary General, within fifteen days of the adoption of the present resolution, a declaration on the locations, amounts and types of all items specified in paragraph 8 [the previous paragraph] and agree to urgent, on-site inspection…”

As is well known this year, some eleven and a half years later, the Security Council--in Resolution 1441--unanimously found that Iraq remained in material breach of these requirements and granted Saddam Hussein “a final opportunity” to bring his government into compliance.

Resolution 687 remains as valid today as it did in April 1991. The legal authority to use force to address Iraq’s material breaches is clear and a matter of record. Nothing in Resolution 1441 requires a further resolution, or other form of Security Council approval, to authorize the use of force. “Material breaches” of cease-fire conditions serve as a predicate for the use of force against Iraq. The coalition war vs. Iraq is not now and never has been illegal.

This is the position on which the United States and the coalition rested its case.

Resolution 1441 was passed after U.S. and European inspectors agreed that Iraq had not fully complied with its obligations and was in “material breach” of resolution 687. Resolution 1441 listed nine “binding” steps Iraq must take to give inspectors “unrestricted access” to sites where weapons might be hidden or face “serious consequences”--none named.

Lord Goldsmeldt, the U.K.’s attorney General, argued that the authority to use force derived from the combined effects of resolution 678, 687, and 1441, all of which where adopted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter which specifically allows the use of force to restore international peace and security.  In his view, the combined effect of the resolutions meant “military action against Iraq was legal without a second resolution.” France, most vocally, insisted otherwise.

William Taft, the senior legal advisor at the Department of State, concurred with the U.K., though for somewhat different reasons. Taft emphasized prudential concerns, saying

“We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be greater” and “the necessity of using force to protect against further harm”

Taft also argues that

“the inherent right of self defense embodied in the U.N. charter must include the right to take preemptive action, otherwise the original purpose is frustratred. We cannot wait for a first strike under such circumstances."

“The United States reserves the right to use force preemptively in self defense when faced with an imminent threat . . . ”

The U.S. government never argued only from the need to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. The need for “regime change” was present from the beginning, and is justified in a long line of moral reasoning. It has been nearly a thousand years since John of Salisbury wrote a treatise justifying the murder of tyrants. Legal and moral theory has frequently consider it a just use of force to remove a tyrant who threatened and provoked his own people and the norms of the community.

Saddam Hussein was a clear cut example of a tyrant.

“There is a stark legal and moral case for removing Hussein by force in the interests of the Iraqi people and to preserve the norms of international society.”

Moral dimensions of international affairs have been expanded with the evolution of the “right to intervene.” Bernard Kouchner, appointed by Francois Mitterand to the post of Secretary for Human Rights for France, enunciated a right of “humanitarian intervention” to provide recourse to persons trapped in a state which seriously abused their human right(s?).

The concept is embodied and practice constitutionalized in Security Council Resolution 688 which was adopted in 1991 after Saddam Hussein had driven thousands of Kurds and other minorities into freezing weather without shelter or means of self defense.

Resolution 688

The concept has been further developed by the Security Council and by the President of the Carnegie Endowment Gareth Evans and his collaborator Mohamed Sahnoun in a discussion of the “Responsibilities to Protect” with protection seen as a dimension of sovereignty.

Their thoughtful discussion has indeed “shaken up” the policy debate on intervention.

Today, many voices are raised on behalf of more humanitarian intervention.

Finally, I do not desire to leave this subject without making it entirely clear that the U.S. Administration’s decision to use force in Iraq without a specific authorization from the Security Council has many precedents.

Richard Holbrooke, Bill Clinton’s [ambassador to the U.N. reminded me recently] that

“Three times Clinton did what many Democrats are now saying Bush can’t do. He did it in Bosnia in ’95, in Iraq with Desert Fox in December of ’98, and in Kosovo in ’99. In the Balkans case he had no Security Council Authority.”

Holbrooke added that “in the case of Iraq, December ’98, the U.N. was starting its meeting when they got word that the bombing had begun, and Clinton simply said “We are bombing under U.N. authority because Iraq is in material breach.” Since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, American and British warplanes have repeatedly bombed military targets in and around the no-fly zones in Iraq and all along their actions have no had no U.N. mandate. They have been tolerated by the Security Council.

As the world knows, the Clinton Administration has not even such authorization from the Security Council for its war in Kosovo. No issue has ever been made of it. The humanitarian situation was desperate. Something badly needed to be done.

In Srebrinca, the UN, UNPROFOR, and NATO stood by without trying to take action to save some 1000 Bosnian males from mass murder.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick is a senior fellow at AEI.