You wrote:
She is at liberty to trade with faulty nations, to even give them weapons
So if we traded weapons to, say, Israel, that would give countries that consider themselves at risk from Israel reason to attack her? Or even us? Or, is the 'fault removing' limited only to the US?
Preemption is a slippery slope. We may not consider Israel a threat to her neighbors, but certainly at least some of her neighbors do (for example, Iran, having seen the Israeli 'preemption' on Iraq's nuclear program years ago). Who is to judge a threat, and have the right to preemptively respond against it?
If we had taken our battle against Iraq to a UN resolution, calling for force as a result of their refusal to fully verify their dismantling of their WMD programs, then we could have occupied some moral and potentially (internationally) legal high ground. Possibly, at that point, the standard for preemption could have been set. We did not, and as we did not find evidence of that threat which would have justified our preemption, we've set a negative precedent for preemption. |
