Preventive war

Kevin Drum had a post last night that I've been thinking about, and planning to write about all day, but it seems that Digby beat to it -- or at least to most of it:

Kevin explains further his position on the rightness and wrongness of liberal hawks and doves and makes a lot of sense. But on one point, I have to disagree completely:

I also made a specific comment about preventive war: namely that the failure in Iraq doesn't especially vindicate the argument that preventive war is almost always wrong. It is almost always wrong, and the fact that Iraq was a preventive war was a good reason to oppose it. But the specific quagmire that we find ourselves in now has very little to do with the fact that the Iraq war was preventive.

Preventive war is based on the idea that an enemy (presumably) is preparing to do something that will one day threaten you and it is in your best interest to stop them before they achieve that goal. It requires a kind of intelligence that is so amazingly sensitive and prescient that we can see threats before they even emerge.*

This omniscience was what the Bush administration sold going into Iraq ---- that we knew that Saddam was developing weapons that one day would threaten us. That, needless to say, was not true and we can hope that the Bush Doctrine is dead because of it. (I predict that they will look for a more traditional "provocation" from Iran.)

They had to tie in a future threat of terrorists with nukes to make the emotional and logical leap between 9/11 and invading Iraq. They had known for years that such an event could be a catalyzing event and even said it in their seminal PNAC paper in 2000 called "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century":

"the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."

They had to use the nuke argument and the only way they could do this was by evoking a doctrine of preventive war. They had nothing else to go on.

It's true that on the whole the fact that the occupation has turned into a quagmire of epic proportions is not because of the preventive war doctrine. That cock-up was caused by dozens of bad decisions after the fact. But that argument is the very definition of the incompetence dodge.

There would be no Iraq war if it were not for the Bush Doctrine.

I agree with most of what Digby writes here, but Kevin asked a specific question that Digby only parenthetically addresses. Was Iraq a failure because it was a preventive war or was that simply a coincidence?

I have a feeling it was more than coincidence. Preventive wars are almost by definition usually illegal wars. It's a bit like arresting a person before he's robbed you simply because you suspect he might rob you. We simply don't do that (or didn't before Bush came to power). And, because its clearly illegal -- a violation of a soverign government's soverignty -- both the rest of the world and the people in the country invaded are more likely to reject the invaders than would be the case in a "just" war, whatever that is. I'm not saying any population likes to be invaded, but I'm sure the Germans and Japanese, for example, had a much clearer idea why they were being invaded by the Allied forces than the Iraqis did, and because of that, once they lost militarily, they were probably more receptive to the occupiers. I'm not sure this can be generalized to every situation -- I'm suspect the Romans, for example, won some preventive wars and succeeded -- but I suspect it is harder to win a clearly illegal war (such as Iraq) than a relatively just war.