The Foreign Service Journal, February 2007

defense against an imminent attack to assert a right of preventive self- defense against a hypothetical danger. But surely the meaning of the law must be understood in light of advances in technology. The attacks we have already suffered in recent times, and are likely to suffer again, will come with suddenness and stealth, not from an enemy army massed on our borders. George W. Bush was not the first to notice this change and to insist that the law must be understood accordingly. Forty-five years ago, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy asserted: “We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a suf- ficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute max- imum peril. Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.” The official slogan of the government of Iran is “death to America,” and its president proclaims his desire to see “a world without America.” Surely we are within our rights to say that possession of nuclear weapons by a regime that proclaims such goals, and that, moreover, is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, constitutes an intolerable threat, against which we may take radical measures to defend ourselves. In a 2004 report, the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change recognized the right of pre-emptive self-defense, and further acknowledged that technology had transformed this right in the way sug- gested by Presidents Bush and Kennedy. It insisted, how- ever, that any state feeling itself threatened in such an implicit way must bring the matter to the Security Council. This is exactly what we have done in regard to Iran’s nuclear project, but so far the council has only given Tehran a gentle slap on the wrist. Article 51 of the U.N. Charter reaffirms each state’s right of self-defense “until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” Manifestly, our security would be undermined by nuclear weapons in the hands of the Iranian regime, and we have the right to act in our own defense unless and until the Security Council takes mea- sures that restore our security. Recreate USIA But isn’t the world at large, and the Middle East in particular, already enraged at America because of the Iraq War? To a great extent, yes. Wouldn’t bombing Iran redouble this anger? Yes, again; in all likelihood, it would. Nonetheless, for the reasons I have outlined, I think it is a path that we must take, however painful. To mitigate the damage, we must do everything in our power to explain our actions and to diminish the anger against us. This will require recreating an arm of the government dedicated to the task of public diploma- cy: the U.S. Information Agency, abolished in 1999 thanks to the determined folly of Senator Jesse Helms, R-N.C. Though USIA was merged with the State Department, State is too unwieldy to be the ideal home for such work; given the department’s other priorities, public diplomacy will always take a back seat. In addi- tion, the resources devoted to it were diminished as a result of the merger. I do not mean to suggest that the anger and disap- proval aimed at us from abroad result merely from a problem in communication. I appreciate that other peo- ple in large numbers disagree with or even condemn our policies, and that this antipathy will be exacerbated by the actions I recommend above. Yet the anger and disagree- ment can be lessened if we have much larger programs for reaching opinion shapers abroad and helping them to understand why we do the things we do. Our true motives — even when we err — are usually more benign than they imagine. From the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 until Sept. 11, 2001, God granted America a 12-year hia- tus from urgent security threats. It fell to President George W. Bush to lead us in facing the new threat that presented itself so horrifically on the latter date. I judge his performance more highly than do many others. There have, of course, been errors. How could there not have been? But his task now is to learn from them, make some adjustments and then devote all of his energy for the remainder of his term to winning the war that has been imposed upon us. F O C U S 40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 That our options in Iraq are not good was brought home by the indigestible goulash known as the Iraq Study Group report.