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When Vice President Dick Cheney was defense secretary during the administration of the first President Bush, his aides drafted a document, known as the Defense Planning Guidance, which included many of the provocative themes that the current administration has embraced. The Cheney aides involved in the effort included Paul D. Wolfowitz, now the deputy defense secretary; I. Lewis Libby, now Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, and Zalmay Khalilzad, now the White House envoy to the Iraqi resistance.
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The draft document argued that the United States should be prepared to use force if necessary to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. It argued that the goal of American policy should be to maintain United States military primacy and discourage the emergence of a rival superpower. It argued that military coalitions should not necessarily be based on formal alliances but rather on ad hoc assemblies of nations, a practice that meant Washington would not necessarily be bound by the view of its allies.
The draft document stimulated an intense debate when its existence became known, and Mr. Cheney's aides rushed to tone it down.
"The ideas were seen as controversial because they were coming from the Defense Department," one United States official recalled. "And Bush senior was not too comfortable in thinking in those kind of terms."
It was far from clear during the 2000 election campaign that the administration of George W. Bush would revive that agenda. Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, even argued during the campaign that if Iraq and North Korea developed weapons of mass destruction they could be deterred.
"If they do acquire WMD [weapons of mass destruction] their weapons will be unusable, because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration," she wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs in 2000.
Several factors seem to have accounted for the change. As president, George W. Bush and his top aides have turned out to be more conservative than his father and his advisers.
The attacks of Sept. 11 have also transformed American policy. Mr. Bush developed a more aggressive strategy for contending with threats to the United States and gave hard-liners in his administration a fresh opportunity to press their old agenda of ousting Saddam Hussein.
The Changes
Efforts to Pinpoint and Prevent Threats
Mr. Bush's first State of the Union address was an early sign of the impending changes, casting Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil," nations whose pursuit of weapons of mass destruction made them a "grave and growing danger."
Mr. Bush followed with a speech at West Point in June in which he argued that deterrence and containment were no longer adequate and vowed to "take the battle to the enemy."
The more elaborate expression of the doctrine is in the administration's National Security Strategy, issued in September. The initial draft was prepared by the staff of the National Security Council but rejected by Mr. Bush, who insisted on a document that would more directly reflect his own principles and which would be in his own voice.
"Sept. 11 has had a transforming effect on people's thinking," a Bush administration official said. "There is a recognition that in this new era you need to do more beforehand, that it is much better to be proactive to prevent threats from emerging. What the strategy document does is provide a framework for planners and foreign policy."
The document made clear that pre-emption was just one way of dealing with potential threats, but it gave more weight to it than before. It emphasized the need for taking "anticipatory action" even if there was some uncertainty about the timing of the enemy's plans.
Experts say Mr. Bush was not talking just about pre-emption in the narrow sense, when an attack seemed imminent, but of the possibility of preventive war to stop threats before they materialize.
In the case of Iraq, Bush administration officials have justified the threat to invade on the grounds that it is implementing United Nations Security Council resolutions. Some have argued that Iraq is, therefore, not a case of pre-emption but an effort to enforce the will of the international community.
