Interesting article on Bush’s insistence on a ‘preventive’ war against Iran.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had been an adviser to JFK points out how various previous presidents who at various points had been in uniform themselves had avoided any preventive wars during crucial times. With 1000 more days left for the world to bear with ‘Dubya’ and his wild ill-motivated paranoia, let’s see how much is yet to be imposed…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/23/AR2006042301014.html
“…this week, a thousand days remain of President Bush’s last term – days filled with ominous preparations for and dark rumors of a preventive war against Iran.”
*"…This is precisely how George W. Bush sees his presidential prerogative: **Be silent; I see it, if you don’t . However, both Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, veterans of the First World War, explicitly ruled out preventive war against Joseph Stalin’s attempt to dominate Europe. And in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy, himself a hero of the Second World War, rejected the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a preventive strike against the Soviet Union in Cuba.*It was lucky that JFK was determined to get the missiles out peacefully, because only decades later did we discover that the Soviet forces in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons and orders to use them to repel a U.S. invasion. This would have meant a nuclear exchange. Instead, JFK used his own thousand days to give the American University speech, a powerful plea to Americans as well as to Russians to reexamine “our own attitude – as individuals and as a nation – for our attitude is as essential as theirs.” This was followed by the limited test ban treaty. It was compatible with the George Kennan formula – containment plus deterrence – that worked effectively to avoid a nuclear clash."
*“…But our Cold War presidents kept to the Kennan formula of containment plus deterrence, and we won the Cold War without escalating it into a nuclear war. Enter George W. Bush as the great exponent of preventive war. In 2003, owing to the collapse of the Democratic opposition, Bush shifted the base of American foreign policy from containment-deterrence to presidential preventive war: Be silent; I see it, if you don’t. Observers describe Bush as “messianic” in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose.
…There stretch ahead for Bush a thousand days of his own. He might use them to start the third Bush war: the Afghan war (justified), the Iraq war (based on fantasy, deception and self-deception), the Iran war (also fantasy, deception and self-deception). There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.”
