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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (81390)	3/11/2003 11:56:23 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<democracies do not wage aggressive wars> And we maintain that self-image, by the simple expedient of defining all our wars as defensive. So, we are going to send 300,000 soldiers to the other side of the world, and overrun a nation that has never attacked the U.S., and it's a defensive war, to Perle. Just like Vietnam was a defensive war, because if we didn't fight there, the dominoes would start falling, and keep falling till all was lost. So it was a preemptive defensive war, because eventually the Communists would get to Los Angeles, if we didn't stop them at Hue. Just like the last 37 times we've sent soldiers into Caribbean and Latin American nations. Haiti and Cuba and Nicaragua and Grenada and all the rest, some of them 3 or 4 times each. All defensive, but most not important enough to call a war, so they were just preemptive defensive police actions. And Israel, as a democracy, is incapable of aggressive wars. So, for instance, the 1956 war was defensive. Israel started shooting first, but Nasser's Egypt had bought tanks and warplanes from the Soviet Union, and was obviously getting ready to attack Israel (at some indeterminate point in the future), so it was a pre-emptive defensive war. The Egyptians might have used those tanks and warplanes to attack Israel, the Egyptians sounded like they were going to attack (sometime), so the Israelis had no choice. Following the principle of non-aggressive pre-emption inherent in democracies, the tanks rolled. Defensively moving from their own frontiers, deep into Egypt, up almost to the Suez canal. And, using this same reasoning and self-image, we will now preemtively seek to stop any (more) nations from acquiring nuclear weapons, because they might attack us in the future, with those weapons that they might acquire. And all of this is just defense.