Well, that's deeply reassuring

Iran-Contra alumnus and Obama co-conspirator Robert Gates:

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Wednesday that the current American administration as well as those that follow it will exercise extreme caution before launching a pre-emptive military strike against an enemy state. [...]

"I think one of the biggest lessons learned in this is, if you are going to contemplate preempting an attack, you had better be very confident of the intelligence that you have," Gates told PBS.

"I think that the lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq] and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence."

So from now on the United States will be "very very cautious" before committing the supreme international crime of initiating aggressive warfare.  I don't know about you, but this really puts my mind at ease.

Comments

[Rosemary Molloy]

What does "pre-emptive" actually mean?

[John Caruso]

It means that if you hadn't attacked, you'd have been attacked. There's at least some legal basis for this, assuming that the threat is real (so for example, Iran could justify preemptive warfare against Israel if they had evidence of an impending attack).

But the term that actually fits what the United States has claimed to be doing is preventive war, which is war that's launched to counter some alleged future threat (in the case of Iraq, one so vague and insubstantial that it doesn't pass the laugh test). And there's no basis for preventive war in international law. So the use of the term "preemptive" is just propaganda that's meant to oversell the danger.

Personally I never bother correcting official misusages of "preemptive war" because I think most people wouldn't notice the difference (and if they did, I think "preventive war" sounds more justifiable—basically I think that on a casual listen the terms sound like their definitions would be reversed).