Preventive war

Preventive war is, very simply, the supreme crime that was condemned at Nuremberg . --Noam Chomsky

Bruce's recent post on Preventive War was extremely interesting. It was based on Preventive War and Its Alternatives: The Lessons of History by Dan Reiter April 2006. As Bruce points out in his piece:

I would add here that he presumably means the general public, encouraged by FOX News and other Republican Party publicity outlets, isn't clear that "pre-emptive" war is considered legitimate in international law, while "preventive war" is illegal in international law, and considered a war of aggression like Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland.

Bruce is referring to Reitner's equivocation of pre-emptive and preventive wars:

Preventive attacks are sometimes conflated with preemptive attacks, though the former are usually thought of as addressing medium- or long-term threats, whereas the latter are usually thought of as addressing immediate threats.

Nobody should conflate the two. But sadly many Americans are ahistorical and have forgotten that one of Hitler's major crimes was his use of preventive war.

What is so interesting about this piece is the way preventive war, i.e., illegal agressive war, is seen as merely a tactical distinction. Nevermind that it's illegal since the United States doesn't adhere to any international laws that might encumber the Empire.

Preventive wars really aren't that hard to sell tho the public. Afterall, who could be against preventing war? Of course it has that distinctive double-speak quality about it. War is peace. Freedom is slavery.Ignorance is strength. All you have to do is sufficiently demonize a leader of a country and the shout alot about freedom and democracy and the public will follow.

But there's good reason why preventive war is illegal. Any nation could justify any attack based on such a doctrine. Afterall, any nation could pose a potential threat.

Take the situation in Iran right now. Who poses a threat to who? Take a look at a map of where US. troops are. Iran is completely surrounded by the most powerful military machine in the world. I might be a little more afraid if the situations were reversed and we had Iranian soldiers amassing on the border of Mexico and Canada. And yet we are told that Iran is a grwoing danger to our security. It's a bogus, imoral and highly illegal doctrine that poses a massive threat to the security and pece of the world. It is this Bush doctrine of preventive war that has, perhaps more than anything, undermined our prestige in the world.

As the US invaded Iraq , the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote that Bush's grand strategy was "alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at the time of Pearl Harbor , on a date which, as an earlier American president [Franklin D Roosevelt] said it would, lives in infamy". It was no surprise, added Schlesinger, that "the global wave of sympathy that engulfed the US after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism" and the belief that Bush was "a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein"--Noam Chomsky

| +Save/Share | |