A Decision Made, and Its Consequences
The political problem is clear: if he initiates an attack without Security Council approval, which now appears likely, he will go to war without the aura of political legitimacy that he and his allies have craved.

"Legitimacy is what this entire effort at the United Nations has been about," Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser in the Clinton administration, said in Washington last week. "A majority vote would convey that legitimacy, even if France vetoed."

No one needed that more than Mr. Blair, after polls in Britain showed significant support for any war conducted with the approval of the Security Council and plummeting support for any war without it. Yet a defeat at the Council would create a legal nightmare as well, because this is a preventive war, not a pre-emptive one. The distinction is important.

Pre-emption, the doctrine made famous last year in Mr. Bush's national security strategy, gives countries the right to strike a nation that is about to strike them. Iraq, most experts say, does not fit the definition, unless Mr. Bush can prove it is handing off weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. So far, he has talked about that prospect, but offered no evidence it is happening.

A preventive war is conducted by a powerful state against a potential enemy that it fears could become powerful some day. That seems to fit the current circumstance, though administration officials do not like to talk about it in those terms, because preventive war has not been judged kindly by history.…

But Mr. Bush is not a man given to explaining his strategy in broad terms. He never speaks of the consequences of a policy of pre-emption or preventive war other than to say — as his aides repeated this past week — that nations like North Korea and Iran should take heed that the United States will not be threatened by weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Bush has turned in recent weeks, as he did again today, to a new explanation: this is a war of "liberation," the liberation of the Iraqi people. The joint statement he issued today with Mr. Blair and Mr. Aznar left no doubt that their goal is to remake political contours of the Middle East and unseat Mr. Hussein.

His problem is that those goals go far beyond any United Nations mandate. And while it speaks of an Iraq that will "enjoy freedom, prosperity and equality in a unified country," there is little question it will involve a lengthy military occupation.

Wars of liberation are popular in America. Occupations — long, messy, expensive — are not.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/international/middleeast/17ASSE.html?pagewanted=all&position=top