Shooting First (Part I, LA Times - Wingnut PNAC take first)

By Gary Schmitt, Gary Schmitt is executive director of the Project for the New American Century.


WASHINGTON — With the failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and the continuing difficulties in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, it's reasonable to ask: Has a death blow been delivered to the idea of military preemption and, more broadly, to the idea of preventive wars? Has our experience in Iraq effectively removed from play a policy option that many here and abroad believed was the cornerstone of the Bush administration's new strategic doctrine?

For the foreseeable future, the Iraq war and its aftermath cannot help but put a hitch in the step of any president contemplating similar action. People can continue to debate whether the administration exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq's weapons programs, but there is no question that U.S. intelligence did not have a good enough handle on what was going on in Iraq. When the director of the Central Intelligence Agency next tells a president that the case regarding a country's suspected weapons programs is a "slam-dunk," one can assume that that assessment will be greeted with far more skepticism.


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-schmitt30may30,1,3702554.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

I find it hard to believe that any CIA Director would be so naive otherwise.

Gary Schmitt tries to sound like an outside analyst regarding the strategy of preemptive war, when in fact his organization and its adherents in the Bush administration are the most culpable for the corruption and politicization of intelligence that resulted in the debacle of Iraq.

Then he goes on to assert that preemption will remain a viable and necessary option against countries such as Iran or North Korea!

The fact is, until organizations like PNAC are totally removed from positions of influence in our government, the same corruption, politicization, and ideologically-spawned ulterior motives will render preemptive war an option that the American people must under no circumsatnces support.

In fact, I am unlikely to trust the rationale behind any preemptive war -- no matter who is president -- because it is more likely to serve the interests of the military/industrial/corporate power structure rather than the legitimate security of the American people.