Without question, the primary purpose of any national government is to protect its citizens. Accordingly, preventing attacks is far better than reacting. Paradoxically though, while prevention is the preferred strategy, it does not tend to heighten the popularity of the leaders who pursue it.
Consider this: In 1998, if President Clinton had gone before Congress for authorization of force to topple a fascist regime in Afghanistan called “the Taliban” because they were supporting a bunch of bad guys called al Qaeda, and because doing so would prevent something that might happen after he left office, what would Congress have done?
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Even if they had approved, when we were through sacrificing much national blood and treasure and no attack had ever come, how popular would that decision have made Clinton today? How easy would it have been for some to second-guess whether the threat he foresaw ever really existed in the first place?
Seven years after 9/11 — in which no follow-up attack on our homeland has occurred — many continue to exercise the luxury they have to argue that Saddam Hussein never posed a threat sufficient enough to justify his removal. In their second-guessing, they reason that just because Saddam was doing things such as rewarding the families of suicide bombers with $25,000, there was no need to be concerned Saddam would use resources diverted from the corrupt Oil for Food Program to support attacks against the United States — a country that had foiled his efforts to both annex Kuwait and to subjugate Iraq’s Kurds, and that was now embroiled in a war against fellow Sunnis in Afghanistan.
In 2003 however, our national representatives — those actually charged with preventing attacks — did not have the luxury of second-guessing Saddam’s intentions, capabilities and resources. They took the totality of what they knew and decided prudence dictated Saddam be removed sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately, they were wrong. In hindsight, Saddam did not meet the gold standard criteria for the justifiable use of military force — he was neither a “clear and present danger” nor an emerging threat about to pass the point where he could be stopped. But with his megalomaniacal past, his access to trillions of dollars and his two psychopathic sons waiting to succeed him, he was still a “clear and future” danger. As we found out after Saddam’s full capabilities were revealed in 2003, we were not yet facing our last option – the use of military force. President Bush overreacted because he faced an unpredictable and dangerous dictator in a post-9/11, zero-defect environment. Now multitudes of self-righteous second-guessers loudly exhort the premise that anyone with “good judgment” would have done better.
But good judgment is not always enough. Our best decisions often have residual risk that cannot be eliminated. Making the “right” choices does not necessarily mean we can eliminate all risk. There are no perfect, risk-free solutions. Ironically, one thing our leadership considered then was that the less we confronted worldwide threats abroad, the more we were going to have to restrict personal freedom at home.
On Sept. 11, 2001, we learned of risks in our contemporary world that could not be responsibly ignored. When our leaders confront these risks, their assumptions may sometimes fail them, just as they failed Bush in 2003, because they must always err on the safe side. They too will sometimes overreach. When they do, we should not judge them too harshly, but rather calmly institute corrective measures. For just as we don’t denigrate those who die in car accidents for their “poor judgment” nor belabor Clinton’s decision to show restraint in 1998, we need to stop our endless Monday-morning quarterbacking of Bush’s decision to act in 2003, and move on.
We must recognize national security for what it is — an inexact science of judgment calls.
Larry Smith of Timonium is a U.S. Army major, military intelligence and University of Maryland public policy graduate student.
