I think Rich’s point about an act of war against North Korea is well taken, and reminds me of an interesting new book by Alan Dershowitz called Preemption – A Knife that Cuts Both Ways. (I reviewed it for the upcoming issue of Commentary.) Dershowitz makes three points that are especially salient here.

First, we have a doctrine of preemption but not very well-developed standards for employing it. I think a lot of this owes to the UN charter, which holds war in singular disrepute (i.e., as if there were no things worse than war, which is odd given that the charter emerged after a noble war that defeated the Nazism), and that a first resort to it is presumptively wrong (the charter literally requires a nation to absorb a first strike before responding — a restriction that flies in the face of the traditional right of self-defense and that has never been taken seriously. But still, what justifies preemption under international law? How certain must the evidence be? How imminent the threat?

When the Israelis hit the Osirak plant in Iraq in 1981, the Iraqis were not that close to having a nuke, but their rhetoric about planning Israel’s destruction was abundant and unambiguous. No one appears to think North Korea is about to nuke us, or that it is aiming its test missile at us – but all sensible people think this is a necessary phase in developing a capability to nuke us that they *might* eventually use. Is that imminent and certain enough to justify a preemptive attack, today, under international law? I doubt it.

Second, preemptive attacks have negative political consequences that hamstring options down the road. The Israelis preempted their enemies to great effect in 1967; but the fall-out was that they had to absorb the first strike in 1973. A preemptive attack would have cost them the support of the U.S., which would have been catastophic. But, of course, the Israelis were not then facing a nuclear attack, which would drastically have changed the calculus (see Osirak, supra). Has our initiative in Iraq made it much more difficult for us to opt for preemptive action in Iran and North Korea? Of course it has.

Finally, taking the long view, preemptive action can look better in history than it does in real time. The Israelis were roundly condemned — including in this country — for Osirak. A quarter century later, denying Saddam nukes looks a lot better and is remembered fondly, at least here in the West.

I was most impressed by Speaker Gingrich’s example in yesterday’s NRO symposium: “Imagine the North Korean dictator in a moment of insanity has placed a nuclear weapon atop of the Taepodong-2. Imagine he believes that taking out Seattle is the best way to impress us with how serious he is.” That is certainly a compelling case for preemption in my book. But the problem in the here and now is that you do have to “imagine” it. If we preempt, we’ve got to have better than imaginary evidence (which is to say, intelligence we feel confident crediting about a reasonably certain and reasonably imminent threat) – otherwise we make it much more difficult to preempt when we may really need to.