National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has been busy trying to justify President Bush’s drive for a preemptive attack against Iraq. Reaching back into American history for authority, she told White House reporters: “Anticipatory self-defense is not a new concept. You know, Daniel Webster actually wrote a very famous defense of anticipatory self-defense.”

It turns out that Secretary of State Webster did make a statement on the subject in 1842. But, far from making a ringing defense of striking first, Mr. Webster actually cautioned against preemptive attack.

The New York Times and Maggie Frazier, a reference librarian at the Bangor Public Library, both checked the Webster quote. It was in a letter to Lord Ashburton when the two diplomats were fixing Maine’s northeastern boundary, eventually formalized in the Webster-Ashburton treaty. There had been some border violence five years earlier. The Royal Navy had burned an American commercial steamboat on the American side of the Niagara river, apparently fearing that some Americans were preparing to attack.

Secretary Webster wrote that striking first in self-defense against possible attack was acceptable “only when the necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation.”

So Dr. Rice’s use of the Webster quote has backfired. The Bush administration had not shown that any Iraqi threat of an attack against the United States is imminent or overwhelming or leaves no choice of means of response or allows “no moment for deliberation.” She should have left Daniel Webster out of it. He argued against her position.