IN A WMD ERA, PRE-EMPTION MAY BE OUR ONLY REALISTIC OPTION
IN A WMD ERA, PRE-EMPTION MAY BE
OUR ONLY REALISTIC OPTION
By
Ken Eliasberg
After clearing the WMD hurdle—at least to my satisfaction, as well I believe, to the satisfaction of any objective, sentient human being—the next obstacle that the defeatocrats put in the path of toppling Iraq is that of pre- emption, i.e. it is unseemly for the United States to strike before it is struck. In a nuclear age this line of reasoning is not merely illogical, it is dangerous, at best, and could be fatal. Several years ago—after 9/11, but before we had moved on Iraq—I wrote a column on the virtues of pre-emption for the paper for which I was then writing. I include portions thereof in this column for they are no less relevant today. This column, entitled There’s Nothing Wrong with a Preemptive Strike Against Iraq, was published on October, 20 2002:
“In my last column I took the position that a war was postponable, but not avoidable, and, accordingly, delay does not advance our cause. I also noted that many of the forces aligned against war were not opposed to it a mere four years ago, suggesting that their opposition may be more political than credible. The anti-war forces make much of the fact that we have never fired the first shot.
Some of these conclude that to act pre-emptively would be a breach of some sort of overriding protocol because we have never done so before. So what? It’s as if they see some sort of moral estoppel operative here. They continue that this would make Bush