Preventive war grasps at straws -- Newsday.com

The preventive war strategy of President George W. Bush was entrenched last week with his doctrine of shoot first - don't worry about aiming - and ask questions later. Apropos of this president, the updated security plan is, alas, a cowboy doctrine drafted not by a fair-minded sheriff but by an hombre outside the law.

As the Iraq war moves into its fourth year this week, the 54-page White House plan reminds us that Bush is unrelenting in pursuit of this ill-advised strategy at the expense of American resources, tax dollars and blood. While the media gags itself with evenhandedness, Jay Leno and Jon Stewart are playing this reckless Bush doctrine for guffaws. Meanwhile, the eggheads debate themselves to a standstill as the White House handmaidens over at Fox News wade in with alibi Bush gibberish.

Those who truly care about the honor and reputation of this great country should take the time to read the National Security Strategy of the United States. It is a chilling document that cuts to the heart of Bush's execution of preventive war. The scenario gets even scarier when one considers that Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court have forfeited all checks and balances on this self-proclaimed "war president" of the lone, unchallenged superpower with the technology to destroy the world.

This war started with the president of the United States ordering a direct, personal assassination of another head of state. What is more, the White House had concocted a false rationale for crossing this most deadly of all Rubicons. The false scare that the dictator had weapons of mass destruction had seriously dissipated, lest we forget, even before the U.S. invasion. Grasping at other straws, the Bush White House pointed with alarm at the danger posed to the continental United States by Iraq's drawing-board missiles with a range of 93 miles.

The section of the new security report on weapons of mass destruction lays out what can only be described as a policy of breast-beating one's way to an alibi. The Iraq war, at one level, was launched over a dictator's bluff. "Saddam Hussein continued to see the utility of WMD," the report quotes from a UN arms inspector's report filed after Hussein was toppled. "He explained that he purposely gave an ambiguous impression about possession as a deterrent to Iran."

Hussein's bluff, which Bush insists on calling a very real "threat," was documented by the UN in what the White House report called "the fullest accounting of the Iraqi regime's illicit activities." Bluffing, as well as hyperbole, is ingrained in the character of the Iraqi dictator, who predicted that the struggle of his feckless army in the Persian Gulf War would be "the mother of all battles." But bluffing at the poker table or in international diplomacy is not an "illicit act" justifying war. Nonetheless, Bush wrote: "With the elimination of Saddam's regime, this threat has been addressed, once and for all."

He then admits "the Iraq Survey Group also found that pre-war intelligence estimates of Iraqi WMD stockpiles were wrong - a conclusion that has been confirmed by a bipartisan commission and congressional investigations. We must learn from this experience if we are to counter the very real threat of proliferation."

What should Bush have learned from the UN and congressional investigations? It is clear that Hussein's bluff at Iran did not constitute a WMD threat to the continental United States. Disclosures about Hussein's hostility to al-Qaida should uncouple in Bush's rhetoric the misdeeds of Hussein from the events of Sept. 11. Indeed, Bush should come to the realization that was never a justification for him to have invaded Iraq or a reason to continue squandering the lives of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

Has the president come to his senses on the constitutional wisdom of declaring war against the country that neither attacks nor poses a real threat against the continental United States? Absolutely not. "We do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy attack."

Is it too late for Congress to save the president from himself? What about the soldiers? The national debt? Civil liberties? Is there any force on Earth that can stop this madness?