Saving The President From Himself
by Richard Reeves
Link to Article"A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility," said the president of the United States. "I don't believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing." That was President Eisenhower, answering a press conference question in 1954. Times change. We don't really have many press conferences anymore. We have just fought -- or are still fighting -- a preventive war. And we do now have a definition for such a thing in the Department of Defense (news - web sites) Dictionary of Military Terms: "A war initiated in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable and that to delay would involve greater risk." The White House does not like the term "preventive war," at least as it pertains to Iraq (news - web sites). President Bush (news - web sites) and his team prefer "pre-emptive war." But that is a different thing, according to the DOD dictionary: "An attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent." What we did in Iraq, where the threat to us was neither inevitable nor imminent, is only the fourth war in two centuries that might be considered "preventive." That, at least, is the judgment of the Correlates of War Project at the University of Michigan, which since 1963 has been studying the conditions that lead to war and lesser military crises. The project identifies 85 wars and 2,000 military crises around the world going back to the beginning of the 19th century. Only three other wars had "some" preventive motivation. Those three, identified in a book still unpublished, "The Behavioral Origins of War" by Dr. Scott Bennett of Pennsylvania State University and Allan Stam of Dartmouth College, are Germany's attack on Russia in 1914, the Japanese attack on the United States in 1941, and the Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. So we are breaking new ground historically. It is poisoned ground, a pitfall that wiser American leaders have avoided. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. quotes three of them in a book review in the current New York Review of Books:... These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. If you have accounts on these bookmarking sites, you can post this story to share it with others.
|
