Preemption – a bipartisan affair

Doug Bandow writes:

I don’t think it is Clinton bashing to point out that President Clinton side-stepped the UN because he knew he could not win Security Council approval. I opposed both the Kosovo and Iraq wars, but in my view at least the latter arguably involved fundamental U.S. security interests, and could be solved by no one else. Kosovo was a tragic civil war, not unlike dozens elsewhere around the globe, but Milosevic was a bit player with no capacity to harm America. And the Europeans were capable of acting if they desired to do so. So the argument for acting without international sanction there was far weaker than in Iraq. (Of course, the ultimate consequences of the Iraq war are proving to be far more deleterious.)

Moreover, I believe that Kosovo was more important than Iraq in encouraging countries like India, Iran, and North Korea to develop or expand nuclear arsenals. It was Kosovo that dramatically demonstrated there were two categories of countries: those which bomb and those which get bombed. If you wanted to get into the first category, developing nukes was your best strategy. The Bush administration’s attack on Iraq has reinforced this lesson for any state that might have missed it the first time around.

A lot of the criticisms of the Bush administration have focused on the “neocons” or “the Christian Right” or some other nefarious cabal that has allegedly “hijacked” U.S. foreign policy and altered it in some fundamental or radical sense. However, it was Madeline Albright, recall, who referred to the U.S. as the world’s “indispensable nation” and asked Colin Powell “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” And any Democrat who is likely to be nominated in 2008 will almost certainly be from the “hawkish” wing of the party (this most certainly includes Sen. Clinton, who has long favored the judicious use of the cluster bomb).