Spies, Lies and the War on Terror Book

Supplementary Essay: Pre-emptive War in Context

Reflections on the “cult of the offensive;” pre-emptive war, the Israel lobby and US military Doctrine.
By Paul Todd

In our book, Spies, Lies and the War on Terror, a central theme is the ascendancy of pre-emptive war doctrine in US military strategy and the impact of this on public perceptions and the construction of political narrative. A parallel and closely linked concern is with the overall current of irrationalism which took hold after 9/11, feeding and complementing the growth of pre-emptive doctrines. Given the constraints of space, much historical and supporting argument is left on the sidelines. In what follows, I will attempt a closer genealogical examination.

There are four elements in this. Pre-emption itself as a constant trope in the history of warfare, the radical re-emergence of the concept after the advent of nuclear weapons, the rising influence of Israeli concepts of war on US defence doctrine – and the particular aggregation of all of these in the combination of political and strategic factors leading the Bush administration in the run up to the Iraq war.

The term “war on terror” has been widely derided as both epistemologically illiterate and a transparent catch-all for demagogy and the pursuit of long standing agendas for militarism and crackdowns on civil liberties. These factors are indisputable, in our view, and are treated at some length. There is also, however, a sense in which WoT represents a functioning military concept for the US, and as such, can be located in the evolution of US strategic doctrine. In the early 1980’s – the first period of neo-conservative dominance in US politics – many analysts of international relations became struck by similarities between the “new cold war” prosecuted by the Reagan administration and the state of great power standoff extant before August, 1914.1 In both cases, scholars noted the influence of a “cult of the offensive” on steering military doctrine and pushing arguments for pre-emptive war. For WoT, however construed, pre-emption is clearly a sine qua non. But the very abstraction of the concept has helped advance doctrines of pre-emption across the board. And in this has been greatly expedited by a renewed period of neo-con politics in the Bush administration and the determined push for the Israeli strategic model. To be sure, pre-emption is far from uncontroversial in Israeli defence doctrine itself, but for the US neo-cons and their mentors on the Israeli hard right, a cult of the offensive has been not only strategic boilerplate but an active moral imperative.

The ghost of Marx – warfare, technology and the paradigm of 1914

For millennia, warfare has been an established – and indeed, celebrated – institution in the conduct of human affairs. As much recent scholarship has shown, conflict has been central to both technological/material advance and social cohesion.2 Progress was not secured without a price, however. Writing in the 1850’s, Karl Marx was to observe that, at certain stages in history, economic and technological factors have a tendency to outrun the social and political capability to manage and control them. And nowhere was this thesis more tragically vindicated than in the outbreak of world war one, where a combination of ill-understood technological advance - and the entirely rational fear of losing the march, in an era where military prowess was a defining feature in national identity - was to lead the European great powers into a four year abyss of mass destruction. The dominance, on all sides, of a “cult of the offensive” – a term coined (approvingly) by the French general Joffre - was a massive contributory factor here and one widely recognized in the aftermath.3 There was a wholesale commitment to disarmament, new international institutions and a shift to defensive military strategies - such as the (highly successful) UK air defence system and the (somewhat less so) French Maginot line.

The defeat of the second wave of offence cultists – Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan – after world war two brought a new period of international institution-building. But this was put under immediate threat by a new generation of destructive technology – nuclear weapons. With the stakes of nuclear war so inconceivably high, the idea that pre-emption was not only the logical, but indeed, the moral choice gained a fresh currency. In the US, intense debate raged regarding the possibilities of countering the nuclear threat from Russia by pre-emptive first strike on Soviet nuclear facilities, before they were fully operational. Although subject to highly detailed planning, however, the protagonists of “Operation Dropshot” were restrained by more rational voices in their aim to “reduce the Soviet Union to a smouldering, irradiated ruin.”

The 1962 Cuba missile crisis – where US president Kennedy’s successful efforts to reign in the pre-emptive arguments of airforce chief (and “Dropshot” author) Curtis LeMay were mirrored in the frantic orders removing operational missile control from local field commanders by Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev – were to inaugurate a new era of nuclear restraint amongst the superpowers. In some ways, technology itself had come to the rescue. The advent of “survivable” nuclear systems, such as the Polaris submarine, was to underwrite the grim but inescapable logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. But if possession of an assured “second strike” capability was to shelve the 1950’s dreams of such as LeMay for instant success in pre-emptive atomic war, the pre-emptive concept itself was taking on a new life amongst the lesser powers sheltering under the nuclear umbrella.

Summer of War - the other 1967

The Middle East war of June, 1967 is conventionally portrayed as a clear case of justified pre-emption by Israel. The surrounding Arab powers, led by the charismatic Egyptian president Nasser, had been pounding a drumbeat of aggressive rhetoric and military posturing. In April, Nasser had closed the strategic Straits of Tiran - Israel’s sole access to the Red Sea - and ordered the UN peacekeeping contingent from its buffer position in the Sinai between Egyptian and Israeli forces. However, as Tel Aviv, London and Washington well knew, neither Egypt – whose main combat capability was tied down in a losing war in North Yemen – nor the hapless Syrians were in any position to pose a credible threat.

Indeed, the UN Sinai force had been installed after an earlier episode of military pre-emption by Israel – the Suez crisis of 1956. Here, the move by British, French and Israeli forces to seize the Suez Canal, occupy the Sinai and “knock Nasser off his perch”4 had led to robust and unprecedented US economic sanctions by an exasperated president Eisenhower, with the full support of the United Nations. The aborted Suez operation, however, which had seen Israel’s army gaining easy dominance over the poorly-equipped Egyptians, was launched under the governing strategic orthodoxy of Israeli military doctrine – pre-emptive war.

As veteran Israeli politician and diplomat, Shlomo Ben-Ami explains,  “Israel’s military doctrine, as it was established by David Ben-Gurion, has been based on the principle of offensive defence … ‘security’ was elevated to the status of a sacred cow, and the concept of pre-emptive war and the nation in arms to that of a vital existential philosophy.” 5 Moreover, as Ben-Ami further points out, many in the Israeli security establishment believed in actively fostering a state of “armed peace,” wherein, “…The new nation made up of immigrants from all corners of the world had to be galvanised as a people in uniform, a fully mobilised society … the notion of a nation living on a razor’s edge between war and a precarious truce became a collective state of mind.”6 And nowhere was this belief more strongly held than by the principal architect of the 1967 war, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan who, as Ben-Ami observes, “believed in resistance and permanent war, not in peace.”7

The fullest expression of Dayan’s “existentialist” approach to international relations came with the Israeli Blitzkrieg of June, 5 1967. Here, whilst the opening phase – involving the simultaneous destruction of Egyptian/Syrian air and armoured capability – had been meticulously planned in advance, with what Ben-Ami admits as, “Israel’s assertion of her military deterrence [and] frequently disproportionate policy of retaliation” stoking the crisis atmosphere,8 the pattern of conquest on the ground evolved more exponentially, with even Moshe Dayan initially opposed to occupying the Golan Heights. In the rush of events, however, the need for unity amongst the always fractious Israeli ruling coalition and, “an irresistible bacchanalia of passions”9 ensured the triumph of the maximalist option – and one underpinned yet more strongly by the doctrine of pre-emptive war.

The utter single-mindedness of this doctrine was illustrated by the June, 9 Israeli attack on a NSA/US Navy sigint ship, the USS Liberty. A prominently-flagged, 455 ft vessel, festooned with radar and listening antennae, the Liberty was cruising at low speed off the Gaza coast, some twelve miles outside Israeli territorial waters. The two hour long Israeli assault, involving torpedo craft and Mirage fighter-bombers took place after numerous reconnaissance over-flights, on a clear day and with no prior warning. Although official enquiries in Israel and the US were quick to class the incident as “friendly fire,” the sheer scale of the Israeli action – leading to casualties of 206 (34 fatal) and the ship’s total immobilisation – suggests a wider agenda.

Much against the mainstream of historical analysis, former Sunday Times chief reporter Peter Hounam, has painstakingly assembled a mass of documentary evidence and personal testimony suggesting that the Israeli strike was the lynchpin of a more general US/Israel effort.10 Agreed in the deepest secrecy between close Lyndon Johnson presidential aides and hawks in the Israeli cabinet, the aim of plan “Frontlet 615,” apparently sanctioned in 1966 by the White House 303 intelligence committee, was a staged attack on a US warship designed to draw in US air-strikes on Egypt, in concert with a massive Israeli ground invasion. In the event, however, Israel was to halt at the Suez Canal and soon lose interest in LBJ’s cold war strategising, in favour of more concrete gains in Sinai, the West Bank and Golan.

Although even Ben-Ami, a constant critic of Israeli security policies and pre-emption in particular, was to condemn Egyptian claims of US/UK collaboration in the Israeli war effort as, “the Big Lie,”11 the Arab coalition had characteristically blown its own case by wild exaggeration. But if claims of widespread US and British air-strikes on Egyptian forces were easily put aside by London and Washington, much evidence suggests extensive and active cooperation on the logistics and intelligence sides and moreover, foreknowledge – and indeed, keen encouragement – of Israel’s pre-emptive programme. Like Nasser in the North, the UK was also fighting a losing guerrilla war, in South Yemen. As in 1956, Nasser’s revolutionary leadership was viewed as the root cause of British travails in the Middle East, and there could be no more satisfactory outcome for London than his defeat, or better still, removal. For embattled US President Johnson, a strongly-held personal attachment to Zionism was coupled with the more expedient consideration that a US-aided Israeli defeat of Nasser - viewed as a straightforward Soviet client – could pave the way to re-election. The grounds for possible US participation were to be found in the attack on the USS Liberty.

If emerging evidence suggests that Israeli heavy-handedness and genuine battlefield confusion had overcome initial instructions for a light strafing attack by “unmarked aircraft” (with hopefully minimal casualties), and led to the recall of US strikes on Egypt and the plan’s swift abortion, the die was clearly cast for future US-Israel strategic intimacy.

The doctrine takes hold

For Israeli strategists, a declared policy of pre-emptive strike – backed up by regular exemplar – was taken as a central component for grounding the vital currency of deterrence; “credibility.” In the nuclear realm, this bankroll was viewed by strategic theory, held by such as influential Chicago analyst, Albert Wohlstetter, as critical to setting “escalation dominance” in episodes of threat-bargaining. The pre-emptive doctrine, however, has a further utility for policy makers in terms of alliance management. For a great power, it offers the possibility of avoiding entangling and expensive force deployments by simply issuing a pre-emptive guarantee. But for an influential ally, there are also wide “wag the dog” possibilities – with nuclear weapons as the ultimate tail.

In terms of US-Israel relations, the issue came to a head during the Yom Kippur war of October, 1973. As Pulitzer-winning New Yorker columnist and author, Seymour Hersh has established, “Sometime in this period, the American Intelligence community got what apparently was its first look, via the KH-11 [surveillance satellite], at the completed and operational [nuclear] missile launchers hidden in the side of a hill … The launchers were left in the open, perhaps deliberately, making it much easier for American photo-interpreters to spot them.”12 This took place under heavy US pressure on Israel to accept a US-Egyptian sponsored ceasefire and halt plans to destroy the Egyptian army completely.

Beleaguered US President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger’s response was to order a US nuclear alert (DEFCON 3), aimed ostensibly at the Soviets (and as many alleged, Nixon’s congressional critics) but accepted by Soviet leader Brezhnev without demure, as a useful escape clause from an ungrateful client and a losing Middle East war. For Nixon’s mounting domestic opposition, however, the coded signal to Israel – and more straightforward logistics arm-twisting by Henry Kissinger – was to cement a powerful emergent coalition in US politics, “Conservatives who hated communists,” as Kissinger was later to put it, and, “…liberals, who hated Nixon.”13 For what were beginning to be termed the “neo-conservatives,” it had been precisely Israel’s repeated disavowal of pre-emption – at US insistence - during the build-up to Yom Kippur that had caused the initial Arab victories. Determined to reverse both the pressure on Israel and the multilateral diplomacy of Kissinger seen as the main cause, the neo-cons mounted an aggressive campaign to shelve the existing and proposed arms treaties with the Soviet Union (the SALT process) and reconfigure US military doctrine toward pre-emptive war.

There was, to be sure, much opposition here. US/Soviet détente had become fairly institutional by this stage, both in the politico-military establishment and with public opinion in general. However, by 1975 hardline US Defense Secretary (and Kissinger opponent) James Schlesinger had succeeded in promoting “counterforce” as the new US nuclear targeting doctrine. Counterforce involves the precision targeting of enemy weapons systems, as opposed to cities (“counter-value”) and was made possible by advances in US warhead technology. To maintain credibility, though, pre-emptive options have to be present at every step on the escalation ladder. Moreover, complementary to the adoption of nuclear counterforce, Secretary Schlesinger was to make it plain that pre-emption in the conventional realm was also very much on the table. Following the “oil shock” of October, 1973, and continued Arab pressure on the Western powers, James Schlesinger was to hint at a possible US takeover of the oilfields in the Gulf, declaring that, “it is indeed feasible to conduct military operations [in the oilfields] if the necessity should arise”14 - a stance enthusiastically applauded by rightwing commentators, the fast-rising neo-con caucus in congress and at grass-roots level at the US petrol pump.

If Jimmy Carter’s Democratic presidency of November, 1976 had succeeded in seeing off the incumbent Republican Gerald Ford and the conservative bandwagon of Ronald Reagan, the debate on counterforce and pre-emption was also taking on increasing momentum, via the mushrooming network of neo-con lobby groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger. Whilst many differences existed in this milieu – notably between traditional conservatives and neo-cons on blanket support for Israel – there was clear agreement on ditching the SALT treaties and developing ballistic missile defence (BMD), which Nixon had bargained away in the ABM treaty of 1972. Not widely noticed outside the specialist literature, the preferred location for a pre-emptive US missile launch capable of overwhelming Russian ABM systems (due to various technical considerations concerning the angle of re-entry) was the Arabian Sea.

Access to the Arabian Sea required secure facilities, preferably not tied to the vagaries of a local host government. This had, though, been long planned for, with a lease taken up on the British owned island of Diego Garcia from 1964. During the numerous Senate and Congressional hearings on developing Diego Garcia, much DoD disavowal of leaked plans for SLBM support and B 52 basing had failed to convince strong Senate opposition from such as Gary Hart and Edward Kennedy. It had also signally failed to convince the Russians. A little publicised but highly significant factor in drawing Soviet agreement on SALT 1 had been a de-facto moratorium on both expanding the “austere” Island facilities and regular SLBM deployment in the Indian Ocean.15 Many in the US arms control community had hoped to formalise these understandings with a treaty for mutual restraint, if not complete demilitarisation for the Indian Ocean as a whole, and saw an opening in Carter’s first year, where arms control had been a key campaign theme The US/Soviet talks, conducted in Berne, Switzerland, had reached a final stage by 1978, but faced mounting opposition as the “new cold war” bandwagon gathered strength in Washington. Finally, congressional hearings in 1979 were to shelve the putative Naval Arms Limitation Treaty (NALT) on the grounds of Soviet actions in Ethiopia, but mainly that, “restricting our ability to deploy to deploy Polaris missiles is not in the strategic interest of the United States.”16 In Russian eyes, however, the US move into the Indian Ocean represented one more stage on the road to pre-emption.

The New Cold War

The Russian involvement in the 1978-9 Ethiopia/Somalia conflicts had been a gift to Washington hard-liners, notably National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski, who was actively seeking ways to further entangle the bankrupt Soviet empire in protracted regional wars, notably the gathering Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, as is well known, became the test-bed for the  “Reagan Doctrine” of aggressively attacking the Soviet Union’s third world allies and grew into the CIA’s biggest ever operation. But in parallel with guerrilla assaults on pro-communist regimes, the doctrine of pre-emptive nuclear war was also a gathering force. Reagan’s “Star Wars” announcement of 1983 – although presented as a defensive measure – was clearly a statement of intent, even if the actual technology was (and remains) highly fallible. The alliance between pro-Israel neo-cons and more conventional cold warriors found expression in the 1982 “strategic understanding” between Israel and the US. And if hopes for a formal, NATO-style alliance were stymied by the disastrous Israeli invasion of Lebanon of that year – a move explicitly defended by Prime Minister Begin as, “a war of choice”17 – pre-emption, nuclear and conventional, was becoming inexorably mainstream.

As Albert Wholstetter – academic tutor to leading neo-cons Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and overall movement guru – was fond of pointing out, a pre-emptive option is the only rational response to an overall assumption of adversary irrationalism. How this is arrived at derives from game theory, pioneered in a methodological context by Wholstetter in his Chicago seminars of the early 1960’s. However, a stance predicated on deterrent irrationalism elides, necessarily, into irrationalism per se – a point recognised by Henry Kissinger in his famous (or infamous) advocacy of “madman theory,” concerning the supposed utility of disproportionate military threats.

“Remoralising US foreign policy:” irrationalism and the rise of political religion

The power base of the Reagan Republicans – as well captured by US writer Craig Ungar, in a recent study18 – had been increasingly drawing on Christian fundamentalists, whose grass-roots mobilising skills were rivalling those of AIPAC, and where a close alliance of “Christian Zionism” was being forged. And the price of this support was found in taking on the fundi’s agenda of “remoralising” US foreign policy – that is, a stance of black-and white, zero-sum policy choices, whose expression was found in Reagan’s own frequent recourse to a Manichean rhetoric of good and evil.

Thus, at the close of the Reagan presidency, we can consider the rise of three sources of politico/religious-inspired irrationalism in the world system. Christian fundamentalists in the US, Zionist fundamentalist in Israel and the US and Islamist fundamentalists in Afghanistan and the Middle East armed and bankrolled by the US to attack the “evil empire.”

There was, though, a fourth and more profound, if routinised, irrationalist well-spring – market fundamentalism. This was the moment of the “End of History,” wherein the workings of the market were viewed as a source of moral value rather as much as merely an historically contingent means of organizing aspects of collective social needs. But capitalism’s drive for “creative destruction,” eulogised by such as neo-con activist Michael Ledeen and earlier detailed in classic sociological analysis by Max Webber and Thorsten Veblen, was to ground an altogether novel and unpredictable phase in post-cold war politics, when combined with the developing doctrine and technology for pre-emptive war.

Reagan’s administration, as we have discussed in our book, made extensive preparations for nuclear war-fighting (Star Wars, Pershing 2, etc) and on several occasions in 1983-4, nearly triggered a Soviet nuclear response. With the former Soviet Union itself now embracing capitalist “shock therapy” in the early 1990’s, the “moral imperative” prop for nuclear pre-emption had dropped away. Left flourishing, however, was the conception that US cold war triumph was part of a natural order – or at least, should be made so. Hence, as we have also discussed, the efforts of Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney at the Pentagon to establish the pre-emptive principle as a part of the US strategic furniture.

Despite mounting near-unilateral military efforts in Iraq and the Balkans, the doctrinal case for pre-emption as such found few takers in a decidedly risk-adverse Clinton administration. Steeped in the “institutionalist” tradition in US foreign policy, Clinton/Gore were uninterested in missile defence and – in any event – had little rapport with a Pentagon still firmly wedded to the “Powell Doctrine” of either overwhelming military force in extremis or, in practice, doing nothing. The neo-cons, however, were marshalling their forces. A Republican congress, returned in 1996, had reinstated calls for BMD and had their demands partially conceded by a by now increasingly distracted White House. Also on the march was the idea that the US was in danger of squandering the “unipolar moment” as the motor of world history and needed a clear commitment to pre-emption across the board to cement American exceptionalism as a permanent global feature.

History will judge harshly?

The neo-cons had, throughout the Clinton administration, been constructing a broad-based alliance, drawing on the grass-roots structures of Christian fundamentalism, the lobby skills of pro-(greater) Israel organizations such as AIPAC and JINSA, massive corporate finance – not least from the burgeoning arms industry – and media hegemons such as Rupert Murdoch. The two-term Bush administration was the result. But a token of this success, in whose very completeness was left virtually unremarked upon, was the embrace of pre-emptive war doctrine as US strategic mainstream.

George W. Bush’s National Security Strategy of the United States, of September, 2002 presents an unvarnished picture of the now-ascendant world-view; “The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. ... History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action.”

These perspectives were forcefully re-stated in 2006;

…If necessary, however, under long-standing principles of self defense, we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. When the consequences of an attack with WMD are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize. This is the principle and logic of pre-emption. The place of pre-emption in our national security strategy remains the same.[emphasis added] We will always proceed deliberately, weighing the consequences of our actions. The reasons for our actions will be clear, the force measured, and the cause just.

And thus, as many in the conventional “realist” US policy establishment were to deplore, the Iraq war of March, 2003 had become America’s own “war of choice,” with fabricated WMD claims as the ostensible casus belli. But if such luminaries as former National Security Advisor Brent Scocroft and indeed, George H. W. Bush were aghast at the disguarding of 50 years of perceived US strategic success (and explicit rebuttal of their own actions during the Gulf war of 1991), such protestations were brushed aside as mere passé trappings of the reality-based community

Reality, though, returned to haunt the crippled Bush administration with a vengeance. And if Bush and Cheney (and Tony Blair) had remained true to the last in cheerleading Israel’s chaotic re-invasion of Lebanon of August, 2006, plans for the most ambitious Israeli pre-emption yet – the mooted air assault on Iran of June, 200819 – were quashed as being too, “extremely stressful for US forces.”20 It was, though, a possibly close run thing. In December 2005, US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) had announced that a new Joint Functional Component Command for Space and Global Strike met requirements necessary to declare an initial operational capability. “Global Strike” assumes the capability to launch over 10,000 precision warheads on a given target set simultaneously. The requirements were met, it said, “following a rigorous test of integrated planning and operational execution capabilities during Exercise Global Lightning [an annual military exercise].” This was announced in a STRATCOM press release. As widely reported,21 a succession of US military build-ups took place over this period, against a background of similarly massive Israeli manoeuvres in the Eastern Mediterranean. These were launched by governments palpably on the run and floundering for a grand gesture to put their seal on history.

If, in September 2008, the all-too-visible hand of market realism has apparently put paid to the years of magical thinking that so transfixed post-9/11 debates on national security, the dance is clearly not over yet. Ballistic missile defence sites are springing up in former Warsaw Pact facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, transparently aimed at Moscow. Well financed (if unsuccessful) coup-mongering continues against US opponents in Latin America. And perhaps most blinkered of all, attempts remain unabated toward absorbing more former Soviet territories – Georgia and Ukraine – into the NATO structure, after the US-aided “colour revolutions” that replaced corrupt ex-communists with corrupt pro-western operators. Ukraine, it should be noted, is a leading player in no-questions-asked arms dealing – one S. Hussein was a leading customer – and in Georgia, Harvard-educated President Shackashvilli sprung a no-brainer predictable Russian response by launching a large-scale pre-emptive bombardment of breakaway South Ossietia, apparently in the belief that he was already in the club.

We can perhaps leave the last word to London University analyst Dan Plesch, who has done much to shed light on the strategic undergrowth here; “A ‘successful’ US attack [on Iran], without UN authorisation, would return the world to the state that existed in the period before the war of 1914-18, but with nuclear weapons.”22