Preemptive Strike Out

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/03/16/BL2006031600946.html
Preemptive Strike Out

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, March 16, 2006; 1:03 PM

This morning's news that President Bush is reasserting his doctrine of preemptive war is a bit of a surprise because, well, I think most people thought the Bush Doctrine was dead.



The idea that the American public or the international community would tolerate such behavior once again seems highly unlikely at this point in time. The American people, for one, won't be keen on putting troops in harm's way again on spec anytime soon.

Winning support for the application of a doctrine of preemption requires enormous credibility. It requires public trust in intelligence and motives. And that trust isn't there.

The rearranging of the intelligence community's deck-chairs has not resulted in any great surge of confidence in the nation's intelligence gathering or, more importantly, any assurance that policymakers will not abuse that intelligence.

In fact, the more we know about the run-up to war in Iraq, the more evidence there is that the doctrine of preemption (and the cherry-picking and manipulation of intelligence used to make the case for it) was just a pretext for an invasion that Bush and his top aides had already decided on for other reasons.

Mission to Mars (just kidding) Keep coming back.

The Japanese were just onto the Bush Doctrine a little early.