In 2001 George W. Bush succeeded Bill Clinton, who had defeated his father, as President of the United States. Like his father the new President Bush suddenly found his world transformed within months of taking office, although this time not in a good way. The transformation came on 11 September 2001 as a result of an extraordinary, audacious and painful attack on the Pentagon and the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, symbols of American military and economic power. During the Cold War, mainstream strategic literature in the US had pondered the implications of a surprise attack, directed against one or more major cities, almost certainly including New York and Washington. Suicidal hijackers turning commercial airliners into guided missiles had played no part in these scenarios. The attacks did not have the impacts of even small nuclear explosions but they were grim enough. As dust clouds rose above Manhattan and the site of the collapsed World Trade Center was designated ‘ground zero’ there was an inkling of what had been avoided for the previous 55 years. The new order was not supposed to include murderous attacks against western cities.
The scene for this stage in international affairs had been set during the first great crisis of the post-Cold War period—over the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in August 1990 and the subsequent push to liberate it, culminating in the Desert Storm campaign of early 1991. In addition to the main objective of liberating Kuwait, the crisis came to be bound up with frustrating Iraq’s drive to acquire nuclear, along with chemical and biological, weapons. The cumulative evidence of this drive, and embarrassing disclosures about the culpability of Western countries in abetting it, led to the rapid deterioration in relations with Iraq during the first months of 1990 and encouraged Western leaders in their efforts to deal decisively with Saddam. As he had shown himself ready to use chemical weapons, against both the Iranians and Kurds, and had also mounted missile attacks against Iranian cities, it was always likely that terror would be part of Iraqi strategy. Unbeknownst at the time, but revealed more than a decade later, Saddam’s understanding of deterrence and WMD was somewhat more complicated than that which others attributed to him in 1990–1991. Since at least the late 1970s, Saddam’s primary reason for wanting to acquire nuclear weapons was to neutralize Israel’s nuclear capability during a conventional war of attrition in which the Arab states would seek to regain the territory lost during the 1967 war.1
Although the 1991 campaign was one-sided that was not how it appeared in anticipation. The plans provided for text book air strikes followed by staff college ground manoeuvers.2 There were also concerns prior to the campaign about how best to deter any Iraqi use of chemical weapons either on the battlefield or against Israel and Saudi Arabia. One possible answer was that nuclear threats might be sufficient for this purpose. The British took the view that past negative security guarantees, that is promises made during the 1978 UN Special Session on Disarmament not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, ruled this out. They assumed that a combination of defensive measures, including protective suits for troops, and overall conventional superiority, meant that the allies could respond as they wished to further outrages without having to perpetrate outrages of their own. Just before the start of hostilities this was made explicit. The French took a similar view.
What we had done is to convey the message to Saddam Hussein and I did this repeatedly in public statements when I was asked about it all the time and said ‘well we reserve the right to decide how to respond and the President will consider use of any of the means at his disposal.’ It was deliberately left that vague but obviously somewhat threatening to convey the message to Saddam Hussein that he was much better off if he never, never crossed over that line of actually using chemical weapons against us.4
Robert Gates, then Director of Central Intelligence, reported later that any retaliation the US would have taken involved inflicting further damage on Iraq, including the civilian infrastructure and the economy, far more than required under the war plan.5 In addition it was made clear to Iraqi commanders in the field that they would be considered personally responsible for the consequences of chemical use. The most specific deterrent threat, made by Secretary of State James Baker to Tariq Aziz on 9 January 1991, was that if chemical weapons were used then the United States would ensure that Saddam’s regime was toppled. In addition, according to Baker, ‘I purposely left the impression that the use of chemical or biological agents by Iraq could invite tactical nuclear retaliation.’6
There were a number of indications that the Iraqis understood the threats of retaliation to include nuclear weapons. This was of course not only a question of an American, but also an Israeli response. There may have been an element of ex-post facto rationalisation here. After all it suited Iraq to present its failure to use its chemical arsenal as a result of high strategy, exalting its position as a country that had to be deterred by the most powerful forces of the most powerful state, rather than because its local commanders were disoriented and frightened or because its means of delivery were unsuitable and in disarray.7 Certainly Israeli studies of the mechanics of using nuclear weapons to deter chemical attacks indicated a number of problems. In addition to the specifically Israeli one of acknowledging a hitherto covert nuclear status, there was also the issue of what to do about poorly executed chemical attacks that failed to make any impact.
Iraq was not completely deterred during Desert Storm. Scud missiles, albeit with conventional warheads, were launched against Saudi Arabia and Israel, oil wells were set on fire and oil pipelines were opened into the sea. The Scud attacks were in themselves limited in their physical impact but psychologically they did considerable damage and required a variety of extraordinary exertions from the coalition. One response was to deploy Patriot surface-to-air missiles. As with the Scuds they were supposed to stop, these also had a psychological effect, in this case calming, disproportionate to their physical achievements. The net result of this episode was to draw attention to the potential influence of small, and not necessarily very destructive, attacks against civilian populations and to pose the issues of active defence and/or deterrence through punishment in a new light.
The extent to which Saddam’s use of WMD had been deterred became a major point of contention. One explanation suggested that successful deterrence of Saddam never occurred for the simple reason that he had no intention of employing his WMD unless certain conditions were met, none of which were. The event that was most important to be deterred was a move to topple the regime.8 If the chemical arsenal was mainly intended to deter regime change, any use for other purposes would only make regime change inevitable. In addition if, as later suggested, Saddam believed that the Americans may have been naturally inclined to first-use of nuclear weapons as a means of reducing their casualties, Iraqi use of chemical weapons would give the Americans their excuse. For these reasons it is not clear that the implicit US nuclear threats made much of a difference. Saddam’s basic problem was that any use of chemical weapons risked making the situation worse than was already likely to be the case.9
One consequence of this crisis, little noticed at the time, was that an American garrison was left in Saudi Arabia. This outraged radical Islamists, including Osama bin Laden, who vowed to push the Americans out of the Middle East. More noticed was the strength of the American military. This campaign highlighted advances in conventional more than nuclear weapons. The United States had not fought a major war since Vietnam, and those smaller operations that had been undertaken since had rarely impressed. Since the adoption of the doctrine of Air-Land Battle in 1982, with its emphasis on manoeuvre and viewing the battlefield in the round, the American military had been thinking hard about the type of war it understood best and how to exploit the new technologies of precision warfare. Saddam Hussein imagined that well dug-in Iraqi forces would be able to catch the US and its allies in open spaces as they advanced and impose the sort of casualties that no president could accept. He had not begun to think through the implications of American air supremacy or logistical capacity. The war itself turned out to be far more one-sided than anticipated, even in the United States.10
This convincing conventional victory shaped Western perceptions of the likely course of any future major war. With advances in information technology reinforcing Western military strength, there was talk of a ‘revolution in military affairs’. NATO countries appeared to be acquiring an unassailable battlefield advantage. Saddam might even be excused for miscalculating Western strength but after his resounding defeat it was hard to see any other would-be aggressor making the same mistake again. There was every reason to assume that other potential adversaries would look at forms of unconventional war directed against civil society, from terrorism to weapons of mass destruction, to undermine the Western will to prosecute more conventional military campaigns. The lesson of the Gulf War, one Indian general observed, was not to fight the United States without the bomb.
The counters to US conventional strengths were described as ‘asymmetrical’. Instead of taking on Western regular forces the attacks would be directed against civil society. Soon the possibility of crude forms of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons being employed dominated considerations of contingencies involving ‘rogue’ states. The assumption was that their inclination, as they pursued their regional ambitions, would be to deter the West from intervening by raising the entry price to unacceptable levels. This led to American proposals for counter-proliferation strategies, normally interpreted as forms of pre-emption,11 and later to missile defences. Before the attacks on 11 September 2001 there was also a burgeoning literature on the possibilities of terrorist groups gaining access to such weapons.12 Here deterrence seemed more problematic as those likely to initiate such attacks would be more fervent and less easy to pin down, thereby adding to the requirements for improved homeland defence and good intelligence.
Terrorist groups might justify pre-emption, but pre-emption in this case was likely to refer more to vigilance and intelligence gathering in the murky underworld of international politics, backed by diplomacy, police activity and occasional, focused military operations, than sudden and substantial offensive wars.13 Now terrorist groups bent on inflicting mass casualties in support of an extreme political agenda, religious conviction or just some eccentric vendetta against the civilised world rose to the top of global security concerns.
In 1974 Journalist John McPhee wrote in a series of New Yorker articles, later turned into a book, about the possibility of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons. There was no ‘particular reason’ he noted in his opening why ‘the maker need be a nation’. He was influenced by Theodore Taylor who had designed small weapons at Los Alamos and had co-authored his own book about the risk of theft from nuclear power stations.14 As reported by McPhee, Taylor had in mind just how a small fission bomb could knock down the World Trade Centre. When they tried to engage those involved in the U.S. nuclear industry about the issue they found it was not taken seriously. One manager of a plutonium reprocessing plant observed that he had enough ‘real problems’ that left no ‘time to imagine them’.15 Later in the 1970s an undergraduate at Princeton wrote his term paper based on open sources showing how a Nagasaki-type bomb with a ten-kiloton yield could be built for just $2000.16 Schelling also worried about future terrorists getting hold of crude devices, and he could see that should they do so this would open up a new ‘domain for strategy’.17 RAND analyst Brian Jenkins had taken the view from 1975 that it was not clear that nuclear weapons would have great strategic value for terrorists. Not only would they face considerable technical obstacles, but their interest was in getting ‘a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.’18
Hints of what might be possible emerged out of some of the more notorious terrorist incidents of the 1990s: the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 and the bombing of US embassies in East Africa in 1998. Yet up to 11 September 2001 the worst that terrorists seemed able to accomplish with conventional explosives alone had been casualties in the low hundreds. These were bad enough, but still attacks of a more severe sort could only be found in popular fiction and occasional policy analysis. ‘Superterrorism’, relying on chemical and biological, or even nuclear, weapons, would cause casualties in the low thousands and upwards but was not assigned a high probability. These did not appear to be the weapons of choice for terrorists and it was recognized they would have problems acquiring and handling them. By 2000 it was being noted, even by some of those who had taken this threat extremely seriously, that the ‘new era … of terrorism has failed to materialise.’19
Those warning of the risks, pre-11 September, assumed that only agents of a hostile state could acquire the capabilities to cause mass casualties. Thus the Hart-Rudman Commission, which had identified ‘unannounced attacks on American cities’ as the gravest threat, also suggested that: ‘Terrorism will appeal to many weak states as an attractive, asymmetric option to blunt the influence of major powers. Hence, state-sponsored terrorist attacks are at least as likely, if not more so, than attacks by independent, unaffiliated terrorist groups.’20 North Korea and Iraq once again appeared as likely culprits, so that this threat also could be seen as having its most credible form as a derivative of the standard scenarios. The risks were highlighted in an influential article by Richard Betts. He drew on a 1993 estimate of millions of casualties resulting from the release of anthrax spores over Washington DC and raised the issue of whether faced with such dangers, retreat might be the best defence. ‘The United States should not give up all its broader political interests, but it should tread cautiously in areas—especially the Middle East—where broader interests grate against the core imperatives of preventing mass destruction within America’s borders.’21
The al-Qaeda group, led by Osama bin Laden, was not quite a non-state actor, because of the position it had gained as effectively part of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It had political demands, but of a nature that put them beyond accommodation. Moreover, by turning commercial airliners into guided missiles, it found a way of causing thousands of casualties through careful planning and training rather than technical prowess and access to noxious materials. It therefore challenged the categories within which security risks had been identified and understood, and pointed to the dangers arising out of weak states and fractured societies, as much as radical regimes which attempted to gain some artificial standing through attempts to construct nuclear devices.
Yet it was this latter possibility that the second Bush Administration chose to focus upon in the aftermath of 11 September, so that the second stage of the ‘war on terrorism’, which had led at first into Afghanistan to deal with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, was widely expected to involve an attempt to change the Iraqi regime. Iraq was included, along with North Korea and Iran as members of the ‘axis of evil’ in Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address.22 A scenario appeared in which it supplied unconventional weapons to terrorist groups. The whole 9/11 experience was taken as a warning that it was vital to deal with such threats before they materialised rather than after.
In a speech of June 2002 to the graduates of the US Military Academy, West Point, Bush described the potential of a fusion of rogue states with ‘superterrorists’, coming together in a frightening combination of destructive technologies and political radicalism. Rather than an old enemy with ‘great armies and great industrial capabilities’ that the US knew how to fight, the new enemy might be ‘weak states and small groups’ intending to blackmail or harm the United States and its friends. The problem, according to Bush, was that such enemies could be beyond deterrence or containment because they have no ‘nation or citizens to defend’. These themes were picked up in the National Security Strategy, published by the Administration in September 2002. In a degree of revisionism, remarkable since a number of key figures in the administration had been close to the conservative critique of mutual assured destruction during the Cold War, there was an almost nostalgic look back to a ‘status quo, risk-averse adversary’ against whom deterrence might work, and when weapons of mass destruction were only ‘of last resort’. The new enemy was as ready for suicide as it was bent on homicide, so that ‘wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents’ had become an end in itself.23
After the 1991 war the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) was tasked with eliminating all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was supposed to facilitate this effort but in practice put its effort into thwarting it. Progress was largely the result of vital intelligence gleaned from informers and defectors. The Iraqi tactics came to be described as ‘cheat and retreat’ in that they were obstructive until it looked as if the Security Council, and specifically the United States, was on to them. The difficulties grew as attention concentrated on biological weapons, where there were strong grounds for suspicion that a production capacity and a stockpile was being hoarded. Unfortunately, unlike nuclear weapons and missiles, the relevant items were so portable and concealable that they might defeat any verification system. UNSCOM depended on its inspectors being able to visit any site they chose when there were grounds for suspicion. Iraq claimed that this was an affront to its dignity and sovereignty. By the late 1990s Russia and China, and to some extent France, were tiring of this issue, and were looking to find a way to end sanctions in the hope that Saddam would not be so bold as to flaunt any residual capacity for mass destruction.24
A very different view was slowly gaining ground in Washington policy circles. By the late 1990s, a group of influential ‘Iraq hawks’ were arguing that Saddam posed a significant threat and that the policy of containment was not working. In 1998, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act which stated that American policy would be to support ousting Saddam. Though paying lip-service to the hawks, Clinton was not prepared to change the substance of US policy. But with the election of Bush, the Iraq hawks became increasingly vocal, and after 9/11, they became louder still. The American debate about Saddam shifted accordingly. Instead of the contained despot, Saddam was re-defined as ‘an evil madman bent on the destruction of the United States and willing to run virtually any risk to himself or his country to fulfil this goal’.25 Saddam was discursively linked to terrorism, and the idea of terrorists armed with WMD that could be used against American targets was not to be tolerated. In October 2002 Bush warned: ‘America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud’.26
The strategy shifted from deterrence to prevention and pre-emption. ‘To forestall or prevent such hostile acts’, the United States would, ‘if necessary, act preemptively.’ In December 2002 a document on the Administration’s National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction brought together the various strands of the developing policy, talking of a ‘new concept of deterrence’ that represented a ‘fundamental change from the past.’ The key feature was that it would be ‘comprehensive’ and ‘seamless’, integrating diplomatic efforts, including arms control, backed by deterrence and active defences should deterrence fail and preemptive action to respond to developing threats. The link was also made to an operational nuclear strategy: ‘The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force—including through resort to all of our options—to the use of WMD against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies.’27
This strategy had been gestating for some time but it was gradually unveiled against the background of the increasing crisis over Iraq, with the Administration apparently determined to move beyond the unequivocal disarmament of Iraq to a change in regime.28 North Korea, which withdrew from the NPT in January 2003, having had its clandestine uranium enrichment programme publicly exposed by the Bush Administration several months earlier, demonstrated the limited applicability of the new doctrine, in that there was no rush to build up a case for a preemptive war in East Asia. Nor did the Iraqi case completely fit the general policy. Saddam Hussein had shown no personal interest in martyrdom and presided over a state with territory to defend. It was therefore not clear that he was beyond deterrence, while an attack on Iraq, even to eliminate his most noxious capabilities, risked doing more harm than it prevented, in terms of the impact on the Middle East, provoking the actual use of the weapons to be eliminated, a vicious battle for Baghdad and a long-term responsibility for the country’s reconstruction. In addition, it was unclear that his capabilities, reduced during the earlier period of UN controls, while still full of potential, offered much of an immediate offensive option. The issue then was not so much one of pre-emption, to interfere with an imminent attack, but of preventive war, to prevent the construction of the means to attack over time. The distinction, first articulated decades earlier, had been in the context of developing ideas on first strikes—the ultimate pre-emptive act, but always presented in terms of an anticipation of an imminent strike by the opponent. Unlike prevention, in which action is taken before military superiority is lost, pre-emption assumes a risk of being caught out immediately without action and some risk of being caught in retaliation after an only partially successful action. There was therefore nothing particularly new in the exploration of this issue, nor in the discovery that preparations for pre-emption and deterrence were not inevitably exclusive.
As the Iraqi crisis came to a head in the autumn of 2002, President Bush accepted the necessity of a further attempt to revitalize the UN process. In November a stern new Security Council resolution was passed unanimously, with strict schedules and uncompromising demands for Iraqi compliance. Because the US threat to use force was so credible and so far-reaching in its implications for the Iraqi regime, Saddam Hussein’s adamant refusal to offer full co-operation evaporated, which at least opened up the possibility of a peaceful, if temporary, resolution of the crisis. Iraq provided as demanded a full and comprehensive account of its WMD programmes but as it did not confirm that these programmes were continuing it was dismissed by the US and UK. At the same time inspectors began to visit dubious sites in Iraq, American and British forces began to prepare for war. The British sought further authorization from the Security Council to take military action, but they struggled to find support, not least because the inspectors were still at work and little of note had yet been discovered. When the United States decided that time had run out for Iraq the British joined in. The war began on 20 March. The conventional phase was concluded with the toppling of the regime in a matter of weeks. That led to a period of chaos and violence in Iraqi affairs. Meanwhile, no WMD were found. The combination of this failure to locate WMD and the deadly insurgency that followed the invasion, meant that ideas of ‘pre-emption’ and ‘prevention’, fell out of favour, especially if they involved ‘regime change’ and post-conflict ‘stabilization’. Yet two other members of the ‘Axis of Evil’ still had active nuclear programmes, far more advanced than those of Iraq.