Q: My question is, if you are elected president, will you reject the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war?
McCAIN: I don’t think you could make a blanket statement about pre-emptive war, because obviously, it depends on the threat that the United States of America faces.
Think Progress noted that the term pre-emptive war refers to a response to an imminent, measurable, and dangerous threat like the massed Egyptian armies on the Israeli border in 1967. The term preventive war in the words of Ted Kennedy in 2002,
By contrast, “preventive” military action refers to strikes that target a country before it has developed a capability that could someday become threatening. Preventive attacks have generally been condemned. For example, the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was regarded as a preventive strike by Japan, because the Japanese were seeking to block a planned military buildup by the United States in the Pacific.
Glenn Greenwald takes it one step further in his denunciation of two popular political writers and calls preventive war a "war of choice" or "aggressive war." His comment:
As is frequently pointed out by historians and other scholars, the types of aggressive wars that McArdle, Drezner and their fellow establishment mavens support inevitably lead to exactly the sort of war crimes and pervasive government lawbreaking which they want to pretend doesn't matter. Here is what lead American prosecutor Robert Jackson said in his closing statement at the Nuremberg Trials:
We charge unlawful aggression but we are not trying the motives, hopes or frustrations which may have led Germany to resort to aggressive war as an instrument of policy . . . It merely requires that the status quo not be attacked by violent means and that policies be not advanced by war. . . .
The central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars. The chief reason for international cognizance of these crimes lies in this fact. Have we established the Plan or Conspiracy to make aggressive war?
Aggressive war is the linchpin of war crimes and tyranny and inevitably produces them. And that's precisely the evidence that is now emerging as a result of the endless, aggressive war people like McArdle and Drezner supported -- the systematic implementation of a regime of torture and lawless detention by the highest levels of our government, the assertion of the right to suspend even the most basic Constitutional liberties such as the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, the seizure of power even to break the law and to immunize the lawbreakers, and the ongoing willingness of our highest government officials to lie about terrorist attacks and the law in order to obtain still more unchecked power.
John McCain promised that there would "be more wars." Will these wars be "preventive?" Will he engage in the same rhetorical hysteria that we heard from the Bush Administration trying to convince us that Iraq was a "imminent, measurable, and dangerous threat?" McCain understands warfare. He understands strength. Will he continue to drag us through the "big muddy?" Is he the old fool that keeps telling us to "move on?"
No comments:
Post a Comment