Webloggin » The Danger of Non-Preemptive Policies for Defense

I hope the words of Neo-Neocon are considered, with great weight, by those with the authority to do something. Right now the best case scenario is that peace will somehow prevail, owing to factors that now & later defy explanation.

And I’ll have to explain to my grandkids why, in the years after the September 11 attacks, we got this misguided prevailing sentiment going that we can wish evil away by simply wishing it away. It’s going to strike them as mighty peculiar we fell for this old hippy-chestnut right after the worst attack ever carried out on American soil, and I don’t know how I’m going to explain that. The baby boom, I guess. The hippies grew up, and old, into elder-middle-age, that part of life where we think authority should be entrusted to people.

I can only hope there won’t be any grave consequences to this “non-pre-emption” policy in our history books by then.

Why is preserving the right to strike preemptively so important? Unfortunately, the invention of nuclear weapons has changed the nature of war by making a single nuclear strike potentially catastrophic. Atomic bombs have only been used once—technically, twice, but within a few days of each other and as part of the same strategic plan—and although they had the effect of ending World War II and probably preventing the far greater loss of life that would have ensued with an invasion of Japan, their use was certainly not preemptive. They came at the close of a war in which Japan had originally attacked us.

For a long time it was only the USSR and the US who were in the nuclear game. But now we are in a different era, one in which smaller nations—with an eschatological and ideological agenda that is less likely to be deterred by doctrines such as Mutually Assured Destruction—are going nuclear. This is where preemptive strikes can become a useful and perhaps necessary tool to have in the arsenal in order to prevent a possibly huge loss of innocent life from a single and unprovoked attack by such a nation. But because this situation is such a new one, we have not yet developed sensible standards by which to judge when it is not only permissible to act preemptively, but when it might be necessary to do so.

Non-pre-emption means the bad guy has to strike first. It means you wait for the next Pearl Harbor to happen. This is simple, solid logic. All you have to do is think on it awhile, and leave the marijuana alone while you’re doing your thinking. It’s pre-emptive strikes, or else…the first few battles, and probably the entire war, you just let your ass get kicked.

This is not a false-dilemma. There is no in-between.

Some days, I’d be fine with giving up the right to vote if I could just take all the hippies down with me.

[Discuss This Topic with MKFreeberg at House of Eratosthenes]