the problem with preemptive wars is that you can’t know.

Exactly.

And Israel’s wasn’t preemptive…they knew that those nations were going to attack them.

But they hadn’t attacked them. It could have been one big bluff. Like Saddam’s deliberate posturing and planting of evidence that he had WMD.

In toady’s world our enemies do not fuel-up jet fighters on the tarmac, or blockade ports of entry with naval vessels, or amass thousands of troops at the border, and yet our enemies today are just as dangerous, if not more so. Therefore, we must rely on intelligence gathering which is always flimsy and roughshod in the context of any conflict. It sucks, but thats the reality.

Sorry, but “What if ” and “Woulda shoulda coulda” are only used by people trying to justify current policies built on incredibly specious arguments.

No, you are wrong. They are also used by people who have been victimized by egregious actions from evil men, such as the Jews who suffered through the holocaust and Americans who were traumatized by 9/11. What if we acted sooner? – they say. We shoulda done this, we coulda done that and we might have stopped the 9/11 terror plot or prevented the Holocaust. It is perfectly legitimate, and necessary to ask these questions in order that we learn from history.

In today’s world of terrorism, it has become all the more tempting to offer concessions, or to hold negotiations without pre-conditions, because warfare is conducted through guile and deniability, and terrorist-supporting regimes on the surface can present themselves as being innocuous, nonthreatening, or “containable”- or even victims of western aggression.

There are significant voices advocating appeasement all over the world and in the United states, and whether Obama interprets himself to be included in that group by President Bush, it doesn’t make the speech any less relevant. The Obama campaign’s waffling on their positions regarding Iran makes me believe the House aides have a point.

Justin, how do you know this was a swipe at Obama, and not at someone like Jimmy Carter, whose recent trip to meet with Hamas made huge headlines throughout Israel?

I cited why in the story. It’s at the very end.

Jimmy, the problem with preemptive wars is that you can’t know. And Israel’s wasn’t preemptive…they knew that those nations were going to attack them. Our evidence, on the other hand, was cherry picked and

Sorry, but “What if ” and “Woulda shoulda coulda” are only used by people trying to justify current policies built on incredibly specious arguments. Also, there’s such a thing as learning from history, and likening this situation to the Nazis is a lousy comparison at the very best. At worst, it’s a suggestion that Obama and his fellow Democrats would let tens of millions of Jews die because they’d rather talk than fight. That’s nonsense.

Because fighting pre-emptive wars and spending hundreds of billions of dollars has worked out so well and made us so much safer…

Imagine if we fought a pre-emptive war against the Taliban, or the Nazis for that matter. Think of how many billions of dollars and human lives we would have saved. Blanket statements about pre-emtive wars are naive. If Israel didn’t fight a pre-emtive war in 1967 there would have been another holocaust. You have to pick your battles wisely and hind-sight is 20/20. If we had fought a pre-emptive war with the Taliban before 2001, all the Bush-haters would have said the same things they do now about Iraq.