Thanks, Richard, for your comments and concerns. I just added my name to a
growing worldwide petition to protest the war, and some of you will receive
it (or already have). When you do, please sign it and pass it along.
This crisis is so multifaceted that there is no single center to it, but the
facet that disturbs me the greatest transcends the specifics of this
impending war: It's the radical policy of pre-emptive strike that has been
adopted by this Administration. Even at the height of the Cold War, when
analysts determined that the US could and should pre-emptively strike the
USSR--and this destroy its nuclear capability--the idea was soundly rejected
by both Republican and Democrat Administrations (specifically, Eisenhower
and Kennedy) as simply crazy. (This was more or less the word uttered in the
West Wing at the time.) With the newly unleashed and unprecedented
pre-emptive policy about to get its first test, the actual results will not
be the defeat of Saddam Hussein, but the ancillary pre-emptive strikes by
other regimes against their perceived enemies. Once the logic of this policy
has not only been put into action, but proven victorious, it will only
encourage India, Pakistan, perhaps even China, and possibly other
non-nuclearized countries to lash out. The troubling point of all of this is
that they would feel justified, emboldened by US action. War is proving once
again to be the failure of diplomacy (can there be a clearer example of that
principle in our lifetimes?), but it is also nothing more or less than the
unleashing of unintended consequences. The unintended consequences of the
Wolfowitz el al. doctrine (devised, it should be underscored, long before
9/11) may be the real definition of ``shock and awe.''
Robert Koehler
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