I've often written that the US should pull all it's troops from everywhere and let the rest of the world fight it out amongst themselves.

There was no fighting in Iraq. That was the upside of having Saddam Hussein acting as the rough man on the wall with a gun. There wasn't even any fighting between Iran and Iraq. They had knocked the fight out of each other. You can actually go on vacation in Kosovo or Bosnia.

http://wikitravel.org/en/Kosovo

The fall of the Soviet Union has not lead to a more peaceful world. Seven years of your errors are as dangerous as the alternative you suggest. If there are only two options in your foreign policy portfolio, "full tilt boogie" or "sitting on your bayonet" you might as well cash it in. Your days with a seat at the grown-ups table are over.

THE BEST DEFENSE

The problem with Bush’s “preemptive” war doctrine.

Neta C. Crawford

In December 1837 British military forces based in Canada learned that a private American ship, the Caroline, was ferrying arms, recruits, and supplies from Buffalo, New York, to a group of anti-British rebels on Navy Island on the Canadian side of the border. On the night of December 29, British and Canadian forces together set out to the island to destroy the ship. They did not find the Caroline berthed there, but they tracked it down in United States waters. While most of the crew slept, the troops boarded the ship, attacked the crew and passengers, and set it on fire. They then towed and released the Caroline into the current headed toward Niagara Falls, where it broke up and sank. Most on board escaped, but one man was apparently executed and several others remained unaccounted for and presumed dead.

In a letter to Secretary of State Daniel Webster, British ambassador Henry Fox defended the incursion into U.S. territory and raid on the Caroline. British forces were simply acting in self-defense, he said, and protecting themselves against “unprovoked attack”1 with preemptive force. In his eloquent reply to Fox, Webster rejected the British argument and articulated a set of demanding criteria for acting with a “necessity of self-defense”—in particular for a legitimate use of preemptive force. Preemption, Webster said, is justified only in response to an imminent threat; moreover, the force must be necessary for self-defense and can be deployed only after nonlethal measures and attempts to dissuade the adversary from acting had failed. Furthermore, a preemptive attack must be limited to dealing with the immediate threat and must discriminate between armed and unarmed, innocent and guilty. The British attack on the Caroline failed miserably by these standards:

It will be for that Government [the British] to show a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation. It will be for it to show, also, that the local authorities of Canada,—even supposing the necessity of the moment authorized them to enter the territories of the United States at all,—did nothing unreasonable or excessive; since the act, justified by the necessity of self-defense, must be limited by that necessity, and kept clearly within it. It must be shown that admonition or remonstrance to the persons on board the “Caroline” was impracticable, or would have been unavailing; it must be shown that daylight could not be waited for; that there could be no attempt at discrimination between the innocent and the guilty; that it would not have been enough to seize and detain the vessel; but that there was a necessity, present and inevitable, for attacking her in the darkness of night, while moored to the shore, and while unarmed men were asleep on board, killing some and wound[ing] others, and then drawing her into the current above the cataract, setting her on fire, and, careless to know whether there might not be in her the innocent with the guilty, or the living with the dead, committing her to a fate which fills the imagination with horror. A necessity for all this the government of the United States cannot believe to have existed.

Webster concluded that “if such things [as the attack on the Caroline] be allowed to occur, they must lead to bloody and exasperated war.”

* * *

In September 2002 the Bush administration announced a fundamental shift in the official American “national security strategy.” The new strategy relies heavily on the preemptive use of force, and in defending it National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice referred to Daniel Webster’s “famous defense of anticipatory self-defense.”3 But Rice missed Webster’s point. Webster sought precisely to limit the resort to preemption, even in the name of self-defense. Preemption, after all, initiates violent conflict, so it must meet demanding strictures. By drawing a sharp line between legitimate preemption and illegitimate aggression Webster sought to avoid “bloody and exasperated war.”

New World, New Doctrine?

The new Bush security strategy contrasts sharply with the official Cold War strategy of deterrence. The old idea was to protect the country by telling opponents—particularly the Soviet Union—that any attack would be met with devastating retaliation, and by building military forces sufficient to make the threat of retaliation credible. The new strategy is not so much to deter threats as to preempt them, to nip them in the bud, to “act against such emerging threats [from “our enemies”] before they are fully formed.” “Our best defense,” in short, “is a good offense.” But the new doctrine goes well beyond what might be considered justified preemption; rather, it is a preventive offensive war strategy.

This shift in strategy emerged soon after September 11. In October 2001...

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.1/crawford.html

I've noticed these threads tend to go off topic after about 200 comments (or, sometimes just 2).

Anyway, I thought since the discussion was presently centered on wars of aggression, you might like to read a recent interview with Chomsky on the Iraq occupation.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/53257/

Glenn being on the road has led to a sort of "topical anarchy".

OTOH, "The Republican Party is the party of Bush" can only be self-evident to the readers here, even Shooter. Thanks, Shooter, for not attempting to argue the point.

(knocks on wood)