Preventive war, a useful tool

It would be unfortunate if President Bush's doctrine of preemption were a casualty of the Iraq war. We should avoid waging unilateral preventive wars of regime change. But circumstances will probably arise in which the option of using force preventively should be available -- whether to kill terrorists, prevent weapons proliferation, halt genocidal killing or stop the spread of deadly disease. The task is to make the idea a more limited and more legitimate tool for dealing with new security threats.

The Bush doctrine was a major departure from internationally agreed rules that limited the use of force to self-defense in case of an armed attack or military actions authorized by the U.N. Security Council. Following 9/11, the Bush administration expanded the right of self-defense to include the right to use force against terrorist and rogue-state threats before they "fully formed" -- before terrorists struck, rogues used nuclear weapons or dangerous technologies fell into the wrong hands.

A high-level panel appointed by the United Nations secretary-general in response to the Bush doctrine concluded that states have a right to defend themselves not just against actual threats but against imminent ones. It also recognized that force might be appropriate to deal with latent threats (such as terrorism and weapons proliferation), but only the Security Council could authorize its use. The panel contended that Bush's idea of preemption was a recipe for international anarchy.

Welcome as this evolution in international thinking was, it failed to resolve the fundamental difference between today's security threats and those at the time of the U.N.'s founding in 1945. Then, states worried about aggression across borders and external interference in their affairs. Now the main worry is about what states do within their borders -- how they treat their citizens, whether they harbor terrorists or if they are developing weapons of mass destruction.

The U.N. system was not set up to deal with these types of threats, which helps explain why there is no international consensus on what constitutes the new threats and how best to respond to them. Yet the U.S. shouldn't therefore ignore the rules and go it alone. Rather, it should work toward adapting the rules to a world in which sovereignty increasingly depends on how states behave internally.