The long-overdue document, an articulation of U.S. strategic priorities that is required by law, lays out a robust view of America's power and an assertive view of its responsibility to bring change around the world. On topics including genocide, human trafficking and AIDS, the strategy describes itself as "idealistic about goals and realistic about means."

THE NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

* FACT SHEET: THE PRESIDENT'S NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY
* National Security Strategy Overview (whitehouse.gov)
* National Security Strategy of the United States 2006 (pdf File)

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The strategy expands on the original security framework developed by the Bush administration in September 2002, before the invasion of Iraq. That strategy shifted U.S. foreign policy away from decades of deterrence and containment toward a more aggressive stance of attacking enemies before they attack the United States.

The preemption doctrine generated fierce debate at the time, and many critics believe the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq fatally undermined an essential assumption of the strategy -- that intelligence about an enemy's capabilities and intentions can be sufficient to justify preventive war.

In his revised version, Bush offers no second thoughts about the preemption policy, saying it "remains the same" and defending it as necessary for a country in the "early years of a long struggle" akin to the Cold War. In a nod to critics in Europe, the document places a greater emphasis on working with allies and declares diplomacy to be "our strong preference" in tackling the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

"If necessary, however, under long-standing principles of self defense, we do not rule out use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack," the document continues. "When the consequences of an attack with WMD are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize."

Such language could be seen as provocative at a time when the United States and its European allies have brought Iran before the U.N. Security Council to answer allegations that it is secretly developing nuclear weapons. At a news conference in January, Bush described an Iran with nuclear arms as a "grave threat to the security of the world."

Some security specialists criticized the continued commitment to preemption. "Preemption is and always will be a potentially useful tool, but it's not something you want to trot out and throw in everybody's face," said Harlan Ullman, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "To have a strategy on preemption and make it central is a huge error."

A military attack against Iran, for instance, could be "foolish," Ullman said, and it would be better to seek other ways to influence its behavior. "I think most states are deterrable."

Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has written on the 2002 strategy, said the 2003 invasion of Iraq in the strict sense is not an example of preemptive war, because it was preceded by 12 years of low-grade conflict and was essentially the completion of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Still, he said, recent problems there contain lessons for those who would advocate preemptive war elsewhere. A military strike is not enough, he said; building a sustainable, responsible state in place of a rogue nation is the real challenge.

"We have to understand preemption -- it's not going to be simply a preemptive strike," he said. "That's not the end of the exercise but the beginning of the exercise."

The White House plans to release the 49-page National Security Strategy today, starting with a speech by national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to the U.S. Institute of Peace. The White House gave advance copies to The Washington Post and three other newspapers.
The strategy has no legal force of its own but serves as a guidepost for agencies and officials drawing up policies in a range of military, diplomatic and other arenas. Although a 1986 law requires that the strategy be revised annually, this is the first new version since 2002. "I don't think it's a change in strategy," Hadley said in an interview. "It's an updating of where we are with the strategy, given the time that's passed and the events that have occurred."

But the new version of the strategy underscores in a more thematic way Bush's desire to make the spread of democracy the fundamental underpinning of U.S. foreign policy, as he expressed in his second inaugural address last year. The opening words of the strategy, in fact, are lifted from that speech: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

THE NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

* FACT SHEET: THE PRESIDENT'S NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY
* National Security Strategy Overview (whitehouse.gov)
* National Security Strategy of the United States 2006 (pdf File)

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The strategy commits the administration to speaking out against human rights abuses, holding high-level meetings at the White House with reformers from repressive nations, using foreign aid to support elections and civil society, and applying sanctions against oppressive governments. It makes special mention of religious intolerance, subjugation of women and human trafficking.

At the same time, it acknowledges that "elections alone are not enough" and sometimes lead to undesirable results. "These principles are tested by the victory of Hamas candidates in the recent elections in the Palestinian territories," the strategy says, referring to the radical group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.

Without saying what action would be taken against them, the strategy singles out seven nations as prime examples of "despotic systems" -- North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Burma and Zimbabwe. Iran and North Korea receive particular attention because of their nuclear programs, and the strategy vows in both cases "to take all necessary measures" to protect the United States against them.

"We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," the document says, echoing a statement made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week. It recommits to efforts with European allies to pressure Tehran to give up any aspirations of nuclear weapons, then adds ominously: "This diplomatic effort must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided."

The language about confrontation is not repeated with North Korea, which says it already has nuclear bombs, an assertion believed by U.S. intelligence. But Pyongyang is accused of a "bleak record of duplicity and bad-faith negotiations," as well as of counterfeiting U.S. currency, trafficking in drugs and starving its own people.

The strategy offers a much more skeptical view of Russia than in 2002, when the glow of Bush's friendship with President Vladimir Putin was still bright.

"Recent trends regrettably point toward a diminishing commitment to democratic freedoms and institutions," it says. "We will work to try to persuade the Russian Government to move forward, not backward, along freedom's path."

It also warns China that "it must act as a responsible stakeholder that fulfills its obligations" and guarantee political freedom as well as economic freedom. "Our strategy," the document says, "seeks to encourage China to make the right strategic choices for its people, while we hedge against other possibilities."

To assuage allies antagonized by Bush's go-it-alone style in his first term, the White House stresses alliance and the use of what it calls "transformational diplomacy" to achieve change. At the same time, it asserts that formal structures such as the United Nations or NATO may at times be less effective than "coalitions of the willing," or groups responding to particular situations, such as the Asian tsunami of 2004.

Beyond the military response to terrorism, the document emphasizes the need to fight the war of ideas against Islamic radicals whose anti-American rhetoric has won wide sympathy in parts of the world.

The strategy also addresses topics largely left out of the 2002 version, including a section on genocide and a new chapter on global threats such as avian influenza, AIDS, environmental destruction and natural disasters. Critics have accused the administration of not doing enough to stop genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, responding too slowly to the Asian tsunami and disregarding global environmental threats such as climate change.

The strategy document declares that American-led diplomacy to halt Iran's program to enrich nuclear fuel "must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided," a near final draft of the document says. But it carefully avoids spelling out what steps the United States might take if diplomacy fails, and it makes no such direct threat of confrontation with North Korea, which boasts that it has already developed nuclear weapons.

When asked about the omission in an interview today, Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser and the principal author of the new report, said "the sentence applies to both Iran and North Korea."

The 48-page draft of the new "National Security Strategy of the United States," which was released by the White House before a formal presentation by Mr. Hadley on Thursday, is an effort to both expand on and assess the security strategy published by the administration in September 2002, a year after the terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon upended American foreign policy.

But in a reflection of new challenges, the document also covers territory that the first strategy sidestepped, warning China, for example, against "old ways of thinking and acting" in its competition for energy resources.

China's leaders, it says, are "expanding trade, but acting as if they can somehow 'lock up' energy supplies around the world or seek to direct markets rather than opening them up - as if they can follow a mercantilism borrowed from a discredited era."

No such discussion appears in the earlier version of the strategy, and Mr. Hadley said the warning was an effort to get China's leaders to think about "the broader constellation" of their interests.

In a reflection of growing tensions between Washington and Moscow, the administration also expresses deep worry that Russia is falling off the path to democracy that Mr. Bush spent much of his first term celebrating.

"Recent trends regrettably point toward a diminishing commitment to democratic freedoms and institutions," the document reads. In a much tougher tone than the 2002 document, it emphasizes that the future of the relationship with Russia "will depend on the policies, foreign and domestic, that Russia adopts."

Mr. Hadley, who was the deputy to Condoleezza Rice, who was the national security adviser when the 2002 document was produced, said the effort was not intended to formulate new strategy, but to "take stock of what has been accomplished and describe the new challenges we face."

He noted, for example, that dealing with economic globalization - a subject the administration rarely talked about directly until recently - constituted a new chapter, and that in other areas "we've learned something over the past four years."

But chief among the sections that remain unchanged is the most controversial section of the 2002 strategy: the elevation of pre-emptive strikes to a central part of United States strategy.

"The world is better off if tyrants know that they pursue W.M.D. at their own peril," the strategy says. It acknowledges misjudgments about Iraq's weapons program that preceded the invasion three years ago, but it is clearly unwilling to give ground on that decision. The report notes that "there will always be some uncertainty about the status of hidden programs since proliferators are often brutal regimes that go to great lengths to conceal their activities."

While the new document hews to many of the administration's familiar themes, it contains changes that seem born of bitter experience. Throughout the document there is talk of the need for "effective democracies," a code phrase, some of its drafters said, for countries that do not just hold free elections but also build democratic institutions and spread their benefits to their populations. "I don't think there was as much of an appreciation of the need for that in 2002," one senior official said.

The new document is also less ideological in tone, and far more country-specific. Syria, for example, received no mention in the older document, but it is cited as a sponsor of terrorism in this one.

Mr. Hadley and other officials said that in using the word "confrontation" the administration did not intend to signal a greater willingness to use military force against Iran's nuclear production sites. But it did indicate a willingness to step up pressure against Iranian leaders, including the threat of penalties that the United States is pressing in the United Nations Security Council.

Even as the White House edited the final drafts of the strategy, the House International Relations Committee voted 37 to 3 for legislation to end American economic aid to any country that invests in Iran's energy sector. The administration has opposed the bill out of concern that it would interfere with efforts to form a common front against Iran in the Security Council.

Still, the wording of the warning about confrontation with Iran comes just two pages after the strategy reiterates the 2002 warning that the United States reserves the right to take "anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack." The juxtaposition is unlikely to be lost on Iran's leaders.

Sections of the new document discuss at greater length the need to strengthen alliances, with specific references to supporting NATO and reforming the United Nations.

Following Mr. Bush's new push to ward off what he has called a dangerous shift toward isolationism, there is a section that refers to the need to "engage the opportunities and confront the challenges of globalization," a word that did not appear in the 2002 document.

The passage hails the "new flows of trade, investment, information and technology," which it says are transforming national security in every area from the spread of H.I.V./AIDS to avian flu to "environmental destruction, whether caused by human behavior or cataclysmic megadisasters such as flood, hurricanes, earthquakes or tsunamis." It stays away from the subject of global warming.

Even more conspicuous by its omission from Sullivan's list was the reality that he was snookered by Bush's lies. It was so much easier, after all, to impugn the patriotism of people who were not.

Moreover, Bush, you see, didn't lie per se, in Sullivan's little bubble-land. Oh no. He was misled by an incompetent intelligence apparatus:

The first was to overestimate the competence of government, especially in very tricky areas like WMD intelligence. The shock of 9/11 provoked an overestimation of the risks we faced. And our fear forced errors into a deeply fallible system. When doubts were raised, they were far too swiftly dismissed. The result was the WMD intelligence debacle, something that did far more damage to the war's legitimacy and fate than many have yet absorbed.

This is very similar to something John McCain said this weekend in his defense of President Bush. It kind of stood out for me, just because we've been hearing versions of it from the right ever since it became clear that Bush in fact led America to war under false pretenses:

Mr. McCain praised the president for his failed effort to rewrite the nation's Social Security system, said he supported the decision to go into Iraq and blistered critics who suggested the White House had fabricated or exaggerated evidence of unconventional weapons in Iraq in order to justify the invasion.

"Anybody who says the president of the United States is lying about weapons of mass destruction is lying," Mr. McCain said.

This is an extension of the rationale we've been hearing from the Bushevistas ever since it became painfully obvious there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq: It wasn't a lie if he believed the WMDs were there. It was just a mistake.

Joseph Sobran offered up an early iteration of this back in 2003:

Well? Does this mean he was lying all along? Not necessarily. In fact, I doubt that he was. And I don't say this out of any fondness for him or trust in his word.

People have subtle ways of misleading without actually lying. One of these is to exaggerate their own certainty. They pretend to be sure of things when they are only guessing.

... This doesn't mean that our rulers were lying to us; they largely believed what they said. It was an enormous and willful failure of judgment, history's most expensive application of "Better safe than sorry."

So we needn't accuse Bush of trying to deceive us. He probably deceived himself first. With all his advisors, experts, access to secret information, and intelligence sources, he simply didn't know what he was talking about. But this should teach us not to trust his judgment.

This line of reasoning has been pervasive on the right, and it couldn't be more plainly self-serving: it not only lets Bush off the hook, it also lets off everyone who not only gleefully accepted his blandishments, but even more gleefully assailed the patriotism of anyone who questioned them.

But the reality of Bush's lies never was completely rationalized away this way, and that's been a source of continual anxiety for the right. The Wall Street Jourtnal even offered an op-ed with the subhed, "What if people start believing that 'Bush lied'?"

Pounding through the media that the prewar intelligence was a conscious lie may incline the American people to believe the whole Iraq enterprise is false, and worse, that the very notion of weapons of mass destruction is also doubtful. The psychology of the big lie can sometimes run out of control.

The problem with all these excuses is that the Bush White House didn't lie about the presence of weapons of mass destruction: they lied about what they knew about them.

It wasn't simply on a couple of occasions that they did so. Rather, it was systematic and pervasive throughout their ceaseless beating of the war drums:

Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

Ari Fleischer, Jan. 9, 2003: "We know for a fact that there are weapons there."

George W. Bush, March 17, 2003: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Donald Rumsfeld, May 30, 2003: "If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

This is not, as lame apologists like FactCheck.org try to argue, a question of "whether or not he knew at the time that the weapons weren't there." It's a matter of claiming to possess real knowledge and hard factual evidence that the White House in fact did not have.

For politicians and rhetoricians, this might be forgivable. But it is a uniquely egregious kind of lie when it comes from the White House, particularly on a matter of national security.

That's because citizens somewhat naturally understand that the president has access to special knowledge that is not available to the rest of us, especially on matters of security; and indeed, this fact was often cited by Bush's defenders during the runup to the invasion. The nation depends upon the executive branch to be making its decisions based on a hard-nosed and accurate assessment of that intelligence, particularly when the lives of American soldiers are on the line.

As John Dean explained some time back, the prospect that Bush, rather than relying on factual analysis, instead skewed the data for the sake of selling a preordained war to the public was cause enough for impeachment, not least because it undermined public confidence in the integrity of the intelligence process:

In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.

This administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable.

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."

It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.

Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies for his political purposes were in the interest of national security. The same kind of thinking might lead a president to manipulate and misuse national security agencies or their intelligence to create a phony reason to lead the nation into a politically desirable war. Let us hope that is not the case.

The intervening months have only strengthened the case that the White House manipulated the data -- and that, while the intelligence was flawed, that wasn't why we went to war:

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Nonetheless, a partisan Congress and a mendacious White House -- which set up a Whitewash Commission whose explicit purpose was to avoid the question -- made damned sure that the question of intelligence manipulation was never answered.

But the issue of the nature of Bush's lies not only has lingered, it remains very much in full force in the debate over Bush's use of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens. That's because Bush's cover -- that this is all super-secret information that must be kept under wraps in order to confound our enemies -- has not changed since the WMD debacle.

Just as subsequent evidence has made abundantly clear that Bush and his cronies lied about what they knew about WMDs, so is there sufficient reason to believe, as Glenn Greenwald points out, that they are almost certainly lying and have indeed rather nakedly broken the law in the process. And once again, in order to escape any consequences for their lies, they are depending on citizens' beliefs that they possess extra special, super duper triple-dog secret intelligence justifying those moves -- which means, as the execrable Joe Klein put it, that "a strong majority would favor the NSA program ... if its details were declassified and made known."

And of course, anyone seeking to bring the White House to ground over the NSA issue is labeled untrustworthy because they're anti-American Bush-haters.

Oddly enough, Andrew Sullivan has decided to pull off his blinkers regarding the NSA matter and has joined Bush's critics. Funny that he still hasn't figured out that he was wearing the same set of blinkers when it came time to invade Iraq.

The fugitive Taliban leader, who carries a $10 million reward, also said a stream of young Afghans were volunteering for suicide missions, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency said.

Last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai called for more Pakistani cooperation in fighting militants after Islamabad derided Kabul's accusations that Mullah Omar was in Pakistan.

On Wednesday, Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said he was sure the Taliban leader was not in Afghanistan, although Taliban spokesmen insist Omar is leading the insurgency from his homeland.

"Mullah Omar is not in Afghanistan, that's as much as I can say with a degree of certainty," Abdullah told Reuters during a visit to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.

Afghan officials complain that the Taliban use Pakistan's tribal regions as a springboard for attacks, and despite Islamabad's denials, many suspect Pakistan harbors long term ambitions to have a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul.

A U.S. commander said last week an upsurge in violence was expected as U.S. and NATO forces extend their reach into parts of Afghanistan where the insurgent presence is greater. [...]