Professor Backs Some Preemptive Strikes on 'Colbert Report'

In an interview with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz said Wednesday that a preemptive strike against a nuclear armed Iran may be in America’s best interest.

The episode of The Colbert Report featured an approximately five-minute interview with Dershowitz, who was promoting his new book, “Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways,” which was released today.

The Colbert Report, a spin-off of Jon Stewart’s popular fake news program “The Daily Show,” features one-on-one interviews with host Colbert. Though he is famous for his levity and wit, Colbert asked about many serious issues during the short interview, including Dershowitz’s opinion of the ongoing war in Iraq and the possibility of launching a preemptive strike on Iran.

Calling Dershowitz “one of America’s foremost legal minds”—and saying that he too would have been one had he ever applied to law school—Colbert began the interview by asking about the knife and “why it’s cutting us.”

“Preemption means simply [that] we get the bad guys before they get us, and that could sometimes be a good thing,” Dershowitz said. “You try to kill us, you try to invade us, you try to terrorize us, and we’re going to get you first.”

“But there are tremendous risks involved in doing that,” he added, “because we can get the wrong people, we can get them too early, [or] we can provoke an attack. So it’s a knife that cuts both ways.”

When Colbert asked him directly whether he was for or against preemption, Dershowitz took a nuanced stance, saying that he favors it in some circumstances but opposes it in others. “It all depends,” he said.

In response to another Colbert question, Dershowitz said that part of the reason he opposed the war in Iraq was because it diverted troops that could be needed for nations that pose a “greater danger.”

Dershowitz said Iran was a nation that might pose such a threat.

“You get the president of Iran saying, ‘They did a cartoon, we’re now going to kill everybody and we’re willing to die for this cartoon,’” Dershowitz said.

He said he was especially leery of nations possessing nuclear arms.

“Preemption against a nuclear bomb by a guy who wants to start World War III over a cartoon might not be such a bad idea if we have to do it,” he said.

He later said that Iran might be the only nation in the world that would use a nuclear bomb if it acquired one, and that the former chief Pakistani nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, who aided nuclear weapons programs in Iran, North Korea, and Libya, deserved a “Nobel War Prize” and is the “most evil, dangerous person on the face of the Earth today.”

When Colbert asked toward the end of the interview about Israel’s use of peremptory strikes as a tenet of defense policy, Dershowitz, who is also the author of “The Case for Israel,” “The Case for Peace,” and “Why Terrorism Works,” said Israeli policies could serve as a guide, but the model is not one to be copied.

“Israel has been the [specialist] with preemption—they target and they kill terrorists before they can kill them first,” Dershowitz said. “Sometimes they do it too frequently and we have to learn a little bit from them [on] how to prevent terrorism, but we have to do it better.”

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.