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

To: frankw1900 who wrote (105966)	7/17/2003 2:39:58 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi frankw1900; Re: "Well it's not a preemptive war is it? I never saw it as a preemptive war. ..." The world will never care much about what you saw the war as. Here's what the administration said about it: ... The National Security Strategy does not overturn five decades of doctrine and jettison either containment or deterrence. These strategic concepts can and will continue to be employed where appropriate. But some threats are so potentially catastrophic -- and can arrive with so little warning, by means that are untraceable -- that they cannot be contained. Extremists who seem to view suicide as a sacrament are unlikely to ever be deterred. And new technology requires new thinking about when a threat actually becomes "imminent." So as a matter of common sense, the United States must be prepared to take action, when necessary, before threats have fully materialized. Preemption is not a new concept. There has never been a moral or legal requirement that a country wait to be attacked before it can address existential threats. As George Shultz recently wrote, "If there is a rattlesnake in the yard, you don't wait for it to strike before you take action in self-defense." The United States has long affirmed the right to anticipatory self-defense -- from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to the crisis on the Korean Peninsula in 1994. [Bilow: Neither of which involved the US starting a war and killing thousands of innocent soldiers and civilians.] But this approach must be treated with great caution. The number of cases in which it might be justified will always be small. It does not give a green light -- to the United States or any other nation -- to act first without exhausting other means, including diplomacy. Preemptive action does not come at the beginning of a long chain of effort. The threat must be very grave. And the risks of waiting must far outweigh the risks of action. ... whitehouse.gov They made it out to be a "very grave" threat. They lied. And since it's going badly, they're going to be hung for it. -- Carl

To: frankw1900 who wrote (105966)	7/17/2003 2:51:47 PM
From: GST	Respond to of 281500

"The hostilities between the US as UN proxy" -- The US did not go into Iraq in the name of the UN, whether as "proxy" or in any other form of representation. The UN rejected the invasion as unecesary. The US needed some basis to invade and preemption was the only alternative justification -- hence the need to make the US appear to be threatened in some grave and immediate manner. The transparency of the phony threat and the inability of the US to come up with the anything whatsoever to appear justified now, combined with mounting evidence of misleading Congress and the American people is the result of the ill-conceived US decision to invade Iraq without the sanction of the UN.