Doctrine of preventive force

“This nation will not wait to be attacked again. We will take the fight to the enemy.”

Those two sentences are the most consequential part of President Bush’s June 28 speech to the nation. He was promulgating the Doctrine of Preventive Force. That doctrine’s first application is the war in Iraq. No more Mr. Patsy waiting for the blow to fall and then belatedly responding.

One battle has already been won. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, has been ousted and jailed. The second battle is ablaze in Iraq itself. Arab terrorists stream across the Syrian border into Iraq thanks to the enmity of Syrian President Bashar Assad and his nonexistent border controls.

If President Bush’s words have meaning, Syria is in his gunsights. As Charles Krauthammer writes in the July issue of Commentary Magazine:

“Syria has tried to destabilize all of its neighbors: Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and now, most obviously and bloodily, the new Iraq. Serious, prolonged, ruthless pressure on the Assad regime would yield enormous political advantage in democratizing, and thus pacifying, the entire Levant.”

The enemy is as much Syria and Bashar Assad as the terrorists in Iraq, perhaps even more than the terrorists themselves. After all, Syria supplies weapons and manpower to help Baghdad suicide bombers prevent the rise of a democracy on Syria’s borders. The Doctrine of Preventive Force (DPF), under discussion among national security intellectuals, calls for resort to force when necessary to prevent attacks even if not yet imminent. In other words, a preventive strike with or without U.N. Security Council approval.

What proponents of DPF recognize, as I believe President Bush does, is that terrorist groups are difficult to deter because their members, willingly or not, are prepared to accept suicide bombing missions on the orders of a shadowy Islamic command headquarters with jihadist money, literally, to burn.

That command structure has not been uncovered by coalition forces. And must be a tactical command structure. Someone recruits the suicide bombers. Somebody buys the suicide vehicles and gets the license plates. Somebody fills the gas tank and packs the vehicles with explosives. Somebody picks the route and target for the suicide bomber.

DPF can only work if the heart of the terrorist conspiracy is torn out of the harboring state, in this case Syria. Coalition armies in Iraq now fight what could be an unwinnable battle because there is, obviously, an endless supply of suicide bombers. Mr. Bush’s anti-guerrilla policy is not new but his will to apply is.

We should remember that the anti-guerrilla policy in Vietnam failed because the Johnson administration did not understand the political dimension of unconventional or low-intensity warfare. In Samuel Huntington’s definition:

“Guerrilla warfare is a form of warfare by which the strategically weaker side assumes the tactical offensive in selected forms, times and places. Guerrilla warfare is the weapon of the weak. It is never chosen in preference to regular warfare; it is employed only when and where the possibilities of regular warfare have been foreclosed.”

But it is a not a comprehensive definition because it omits the political dimension, an inextricable part of guerrilla warfare. And the political dimension requires a population sympathetic with the insurgents or so intimidated by them it will do their bidding.

Henry Kissinger described the importance of guerrilla warfare in the Vietnam war when he wrote: “We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla warfare: The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”

Baghdad, like any large city, is a haven for guerrilla fighters because hideouts abound and part of the population is sympathetic to the terrorists. The guerrilla war will end when the Iraqi people take over the war. That takeover, unfortunately, will not occur soon.

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times.