Let the church say "Amen"

Preventive War: A Failed Doctrine

If facts mattered in American politics, the Bush-Cheney ticket would not be basing its re-election campaign on the fear-mongering contention that the surest defense against future terrorist attacks lies in the badly discredited doctrine of preventive war. Vice President Dick Cheney took this argument to a disgraceful low last week when he implied that electing John Kerry and returning to traditional American foreign policy values would invite a devastating new strike.

So far, the preventive war doctrine has had one real test: the invasion of Iraq. Mr. Bush terrified millions of Americans into believing that forcibly changing the regime in Baghdad was the only way to keep Iraq's supposed stockpiles of unconventional weapons out of the hands of Al Qaeda. Then it turned out that there were no stockpiles and no operational links between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda's anti-American terrorism. Meanwhile, America's longstanding defensive alliances were weakened and the bulk of America's ground combat troops tied down in Iraq for what now appears to be many years to come. If that is making this country safer, it is hard to see how. The real lesson is that America dangerously erodes its military and diplomatic defenses when it charges off unwisely after hypothetical enemies.

Posted by Prometheus 6 on September 12, 2004 - 6:15am :: War
 
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As a confirmed member of the amen corner I don't recall that the Times and its reporters did a whole heck of a lot to discredit Bush's claims about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction or this extremely dubious proposition of preventive war. Our country is in deeper trouble than we can to admit to or can process and understand. Only the governments of the U.S. China and Russia seems impervious to the fact that the age of empire is over. The roots of the conflict in Chechnya, for example, don't emerge from the Koran but from the Russian Empire's efforts under the Czars and, later, the Bolsheviks to conquer and subjugate a foreign people who have never accepted Russia's claim of dominion over them. These nationalist resistance forces have adopted the tactic of asymmetric warfare to fight powers that are militarily superior to them. I think we can expect to see these types of conflicts emerge in greater numbers all over the world.

Every man, woman and child in the U.S. is at greater risk due to this harebrained belief that larger powers will do what they desire and smaller countries will suffer what they must. Our country has bombed more than 40 other nations since the end of World War II. Do any of us who have sense enough to come in out of the rain believe that other folks would roll over and continue to play dead in the face of our assaults on their families, villages and countries. I am not talking about justification here.

Not one person in the World Trade Center buildings deserved to die. And neither did more than 2 million Vietnamese. Or the thousands of Iraqis who were surely slaughtered during our invasion of that weak and militarily inept nation. But the killing goes on and in a world where mass killing has become the norm talk of innocent victims makes absolutely no sense at all if for no other reason than if there are innocent victims then there must be guilty ones too. What Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols did was simply horrible and quite evil, but for the life of me I still don't understand why David Koresh and his lunatic followers had to be killed by the FBI and the ATF in order to be saved from Koresh's rule.

I'm reminded of a wonderful scene that occurs toward the end of Joseph Heller's great novel "Catch 22" in which Yossarian and Clevinger encounter each other in the urinal the night before Clevinger's court martial. "You haven't got a chance kid," Yossarian says to him, "they hate Jews."

"But I'm not Jewish," Clevinger protests.

"It doesn't make any difference," replies Yossarian. "They're out to get everybody."

They are and things are going to get far worse before they get better.

Posted by  PTCruiser on September 12, 2004 - 7:40pm.