Maybe they're signalling their willingness to go down one to prevent Iran from making slam?
Nice, JM.
President Bush issued a new national security strategy today reaffirming his doctrine of preemptive war against terrorists and hostile states with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, despite the troubled U.S. experience in Iraq.
I don't see the 'despite'. Iraq wasn't connected to terrorists, and it didn't have chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. So why should our trouble there pose any problem for this strategy?
Hmphf. I'm not talking to you about bridge. You don't call, you don't write...
tall a bald man from a man with hair
That sound vaguely painful.
My typo, on the other hand, is perfectly ordinary.
4: I don't know what you're talking about.
One of the regulars went on the market, the others are actually writing their dissertations. I'm jonesing too.
My understanding of the diplomatic manoeuvring in this particular announcement, though, is that it was aimed directly at Iran, and today I hear that the nuclear negotiator for Iran has just announced that the US and Iran are going to hold direct talks about Iran's role in Iraq...and maybe a few other little matters.
But for sales reasons, the Bush administration decided to describe it as pre-emptive
This is the key to the whole thing. I don't think there was any confusion in the administration as to what the two terms meant. In calling the invasion of Iraq a pre-emptive war, I think the administration was trying to linguistically cement the idea that we really had no other options available than to invade, that if we did not invade immediately we faced certain attack at some future date.
Oh, I think you're right. The reasoning was "Pre-emptive strikes are generally recognized as legitimate self-defense; we want what we're doing in Iraq to be considered legitimate; let's call it pre-emptive rather than preventive." It was an attempt to short-circuit discussion, rather than defend the Iraq War as preventive, but nontheless permissible.
I just hate that now, when someone says pre-emptive, you can't tell if they mean pre-emptive or B-pre-emptive.
I like to remind people periodically that Bush's war wasn't just poorly executed, but completely unnecessary, since Bill Clinton disarmed Saddam Hussein.
A professor of mine once brought this same point up in a lecture, and pointed out that Condoleezza Rice _taught_ IR intro courses, and certainly has the difference down pat -- but is an enthusiastic partner in its current blurring. So basically, ditto 9.
I just hate that now, when someone says pre-emptive, you can't tell if they mean pre-emptive or B-pre-emptive.
I know Orwell comparisons are way overused, but I am constantly reminded of Newspeak in 1984, with its goal of eventually constructing a language in which it would be grammatically impossible to construct a sentence expressing opposition to Big Brother. I mean, who could oppose the "USA PATRIOT" act? By definition, someone who wants the terrorists to win, natch.
The problem is that the correct description of the war, "an act of naked aggression," was a nonstarter. The administration was left trying to decide how best to lie about what they were doing. "Pre-emptive" was even farther from the truth than "preventative" so they went with that, on the general principle that when you lie, you should lie big.
Is it worth trying to get the old definitions back or should we all just say that preemptive war is always wrong?
His imminent, er eminent, grace explains.
17: The problem with abandoning the old definitions and saying pre-emptive war is always wrong, is that it leaves you open to someone reverting to the old definition and asking if you expected Israel in 1967 to wait for the inevitable attack?
I know I'm walking into a minefield here, but this is a genuine question since I have no knowledge whatsover of the 1967 war: is there a consensus that pre-emption in that case was fully justified?
Not necessarily, and I should emphasize that I don't know much about the war either. My impression, though, is that there's a pretty strong consensus among Arabs that pre-emption in that case wasn't justified. But I don't think that's what you meant.
I also shouldn't opine (where's Farber when you need him?) due to ignorance. That said, my impression is that controversy over whether Israel's pre-emptive strike in the Six Day War was justified centers more on whether Israel would have been justified to resist an attack, rather than whether there was any doubt that an attack was coming.
Maybe we could come up with another word for what used to be preemption?
I vote for "prissy." Or "Mexican."
Hmm, not that I know anything about IR, but wouldn't the term be "putative"?
There are some great Truman and Eisenhower quotations on preventive war as "the weapon of dictators" that would be a lot easier to use against them if you didn't have to first explain that by preemptive, they mean preventive.
Pre-emptive action assumes you know the enemies' timeline and intent. You can actually never be absolutely sure. There is always an element of poker, of reading, of analyzing intelligence, sometimes hurriedly so.
The Israeli airstrike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor was, by the definitions in the post, preventative.
Iran says it has no intent to make nuclear weapons. The rest of the world simply can not trust Iran on this based on Iran's record of years of lies and concealment wrt its uranium enrichment program and its nuclear weapons program. These lies concealment and the programs themselves are violations of Iran's treaty obligations. If the world can't trust Iran, and Iran won't let full and unconditional inspections confirm peaceful-only research and production, the going assumption must be that they will continue to violate the NPT and are working towards making nukes.
But what are you gonna do? We know Iran has bomb plans and that they bought them from the Pakistani's who seem to have gotten design help from China... But the hard part is refining and thereby "enriching" uranium. The efficiency of this process and the volume of this process is unknowable with certainty. In other words, it could take Iran two years or ten years to produce one bomb or, perhaps several.
It is indefinite. Therefore action to prevent Iran using a nuke would, in the near term at least, be appropriately called "preventative." However, action taken to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuke might be said to be pre-emptive. It'd pre-empt Iran's becoming a nuclear weapons state. It wouldn't necessarilly pre-empt a war, in fact it might start one. But it does pre-empt something that is in the time-scale of uranium refinement, imminent.
I've always preferred to use "alternative" when most people say "alternate" (and aren't, in fact, referring to switching back and forth each time), myself.
re: alternate vs. alternative. I think you're right about alternate having a sense of regular, periodic substitution. Not completely, we speak of alternate jurors, who substitute only under specific conditions, often enough but by no means every other time. Still, as always, you have a piece of the truth here.