The Doctrine of Preemption

I had a few words with some individuals on a somewhat left of center blog. The interaction began with me offering a few bits of information that I thought cleared up some misconceptions of the blog owner in her understanding of war planning. Well ultimately, I came to the conclusion that the author of the post wasn't really interested in my opinion given the one sentence, soundbite response I got following some counterpoints to her arguments. I did decide to post again following her complaints of a conservative blogster on another blog not being interested in alternative points of view (seemed familiar to me considering my experience there) but to date no response to that comment either. Time will tell.

Her brother however did respond and did seem interested in honest discourse on the war, preemption and such but given the low key welcome I got from his sister I have for now opted not to respond to him either. This article by George Will did make me think of him as it discusses the difficult doctrine of preemption and why America's ideals are worth safeguarding through such early action. An outstanding read at any rate from one of the conservative icons, Mr. George Will.

The Doctrine of Preemption

What I will say tonight about the war on terror draws heavily on my earlier life as a professor and student of political philosophy. A long life in journalism and around Washington, D.C., has taught me not just that ideas have consequences, but that only ideas have large and lasting consequences. We are in a war of terror being waged by people who take ideas with lethal seriousness, and we had better take our own ideas seriously as well.

I think the beginning of understanding the war is to understand what happened on 9/11. What happened was that we as a people were summoned back from a holiday from history that we had understandably taken at the end of the Cold War. History is served up to the American people with uncanny arithmetic precision. Almost exactly sixty years passed from the October 1929 collapse of the stock market to the November 1989 crumbling of the Berlin Wall — sixty years of depression, hot war, and cold war, at the end of which the American people said: "Enough, we are not interested in war anymore." The trouble is, as Trotsky once said, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." And this was a war with a new kind of enemy — suicidal, and hence impossible to deter, melding modern science with a kind of religious primitivism. Furthermore, our enemy today has no return address in the way that previous adversaries, be it Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia, had return addresses. When attacks emanated from Germany or Russia, we could respond militarily or we could put in place a structure of deterrence and containment. Not true with this new lot. Read more of this great article here.