Bush's Thousand Days - WaPo - Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

[rndmprsn]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/23/AR2006042301014.html

The Hundred Days is indelibly associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Thousand Days with John F. Kennedy. But as of this week, a thousand days remain of President Bush's last term -- days filled with ominous preparations for and dark rumors of a preventive war against Iran.

The issue of preventive war as a presidential prerogative is hardly new. In February 1848 Rep. Abraham Lincoln explained his opposition to the Mexican War: "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure . . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't.' "...

...The Cuban missile crisis was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in all human history. Never before had two contending powers possessed between them the technical capacity to destroy the planet. Had there been exponents of preventive war in the White House, there probably would have been nuclear war. It is certain that nuclear weapons will be used again. Henry Adams, the most brilliant of American historians, wrote during our Civil War, "Some day science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race shall commit suicide by blowing up the world."

But our Cold War presidents kept to the Kennan formula of containment plus deterrence, and we won the Cold War without escalating it into a nuclear war. Enter George W. Bush as the great exponent of preventive war. In 2003, owing to the collapse of the Democratic opposition, Bush shifted the base of American foreign policy from containment-deterrence to presidential preventive war: Be silent; I see it, if you don't. Observers describe Bush as "messianic" in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address, "The Almighty has His own purposes."

...There stretch ahead for Bush a thousand days of his own. He might use them to start the third Bush war: the Afghan war (justified), the Iraq war (based on fantasy, deception and self-deception), the Iran war (also fantasy, deception and self-deception). There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.

[Norquist Nemesis]

1. Well, the first thing I'd do is blue pencil "preventive"

and slap it squarely, unabashedly onto the administration with the "Bush Doctrine of PRE-EMPTIVE War".

Preventive is an oxymoron. One does not prevent a war by starting one. :freak:

[11cents]

3. The reference to "preventive" war is correct.

Preemptive war is accepted as legal under international law -- that is, when a nation is facing an imminent attack, it's legal for it to react preemtively to prevent that attack. It would have been legal for the US to preemptively attack the Japanese air fleet when it was preparing to take off for Pearl Harbor, for example. The doctrine of "preventive war", on the other hand -- whereby a nation attacks when it is not itself in imminent danger of an attack, in order to prevent some future threat from arising -- is not accepted as legal. As Schlesinger correctly says, what the Bush regime has promoted has been the doctrine of preventive war, not preemptive war.

[DemoTex]

2. 1000 more days of fear & loathing.

I. Don't. Think. I. Can. Make. It. Another. Fucking. Day. Muchless. 1000.