Quote:
Originally Posted by Boxcar Overkill
The central question is, "what do we do about the latent threat,?" The one that's not on our door today, but that we know is being plotted and planned against us. What do we do when we know people have the intent, but not yet the means, to attack the U.S.
Prior to 9/11, our answer was to hope we can stop an attack while it's occurring. We knew OBL and company were out there, and they had a string of mostly failed attempts that made their intent clear. Yet we didn't take aggressive action to stop the threat, (which the country wouldn't have supported even if Clinton would have tried.)
That's what caused the Iraq invasion. The sanctions were unraveling, and without sanctions Saddam would have been free to resume his WMD program, which was still in place even if no full scale WMD's were actively being made. So we were determined not to make the same mistakes with Saddam that we did with OBL. We were now going to use pre-emptive force to stop a latent threat.
(The reason we couldn't do that to N. Korea is because they have ability to destroy an unfortunately positioned Seoul, South Korea within an hour of hostilities via long range rocket assisted artillery attacks.)
Now I think our foreign policy is in a bit of disarray. It's not clear what Obama's policies are, for future threats like Iran. But I think he is a traditional conservative in military use.
The Tea Party people aren't neo-conservatives in this respect. They are more interested in fiscal discipline, which is incongruent with elective wars. Liberals and Tea partiers have a common interest in cutting the defense budget, (although liberals want to spend the money in other ways, while Tea partyers just want to reduce the size of government and reduce the debt.)
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There has been a latent threat to the United States every single day of its existence, but the question isn't not whether we respond or not to a threat, but how we respond.
Iraq was invaded preemptively to thwart what they might do, or wanted to do, or could potentially do, and it was sold as an imminent threat. Iraq was made easier because of verbal statements by a variety of not so bright dictators and Baghdad Bob type figures along with some rather dubious ex-pats with an obvious ax to grind.
Using this premise of potential threat as being imminent danger, we could literally apply this to ANYONE, any country, anywhere and collect bits and pieces of information like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon... I heard it from my uncles next door neighbors second cousin who knew the cleaning lady that worked in the lab where she overheard a guy say he wished he could blow up Washington.
The only possible place that preemptive attacks to thwart war might work is against standing armies of nation states, but employed against the tactic of terrorism and against non-state or non-geographically bound groups is fantasy.
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