US Vice President: 'Striking First' Necessary in War on Terror

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, June 11, 2002

US Vice President: 'Striking First' Necessary in War on Terror

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US Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that the United States will not shy away from first strikes in the war against terrorists, echoing a policy President George W. Bush intends to adopt as part of a new national security strategy.

"Grave threats are accumulating against us, and inaction will only bring them closer," Cheney told a group of about 100 world conservatives gathered for a White House dinner. "We will not wait until it is too late."

He made the remark hours after the White House confirmed a newspaper report that Bush will formalize the new "strike first" military policy in his first national security strategy expected to be released early this fall.

The Washington Post reported Monday that the Bush administration will for the first time add "preemption" and " defensive intervention" in the strategy as formal options for striking hostile nations or groups that appear determined to use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Bush dropped a hint at the new doctrine in his State of the Union address in January, when he labeled Iraq, Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as an "axis of evil."

He articulated the doctrine for the first time in a commencement address at West Point on June 1 saying all Americans must be "ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives."

Such a preemptive stance is a departure from the Cold War pillars of containment and deterrence that were built around the notion that an adversary would not attack the United States because it would provoke a certain and overwhelming retaliatory strike.

In his speech to the International Democrat Union, a collection of conservative and moderate-to-right politicians, Cheney said the strategy of containment and deterrence will not work in the war against terrorism.

"Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles, or secretly provide them to their terrorist allies," he said.

Officials formulating the new doctrine said the United States has been forced to move beyond deterrence because the September 11 terrorist attacks demonstrated that the nature of the enemy and the threat has changed.

The Bush administration's embrace of the new doctrine has triggered an intense debate inside the Pentagon and among military strategists about the feasibility and wisdom of preemptive strikes against shadowy terrorist networks or weapons storage facilities.

It has also aroused concern among Washington's NATO allies. NATO Secretary General George Robertson said last Thursday that NATO remained a defensive alliance that will "not go out looking for problems to solve."

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