Preemptive War Is the Wrong Weapon

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Preemptive War Is the Wrong Weapon
Wed Oct 22, 2:41 PM ET - Yahoo!

BusinessWeek Onlin


By Stan Crock

If you want to see how cynical President Bush's growing legion of critics are about the Administration's Iraq policy, take a gander sometime at the electronic newsletter sent out by Chuck Spinney, a retired Pentagon analyst. He starts out with a quote from the late journalist H. L. Mencken: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."



Spinney then quotes Nazi Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering, who explained at his Nuremberg trial how easy it is for leaders to get the people to do their bidding. "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger," Goering said. "It works the same way in any country."

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Even if threats of further, more horrible terrorism are real, the U.S. doesn't face the possibility that its government will somehow be overthrown and that the country will be seized by a foreign power -- a threat to American sovereignty that could justify the Administration's heated rhetoric. That's an important distinction in international law. Protecting the sovereignty of nations lies at the heart of the U.N. charter established after World War II, and it has been the foundation of international law since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.


Cheney & Co. have pushed the Bush doctrine of preemption beyond protection of sovereignty into new, dangerous territory, in my view. The U.N. certainly wouldn't stand in the way if terrorists threatened the U.S. rule of law and way of life. It's Washington that's threatening an international rule of law from which it benefits, by intervening where there's no such danger.




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