Name: Anonymous 2007-08-19 3:11 ID:Y1beAczx
Wolfowitz is a long-term advocate of "preemption"––a military policy to strike first to eliminate presumed threats, according to Seymour Hersh: "The Pentagon's conservative and highly assertive civilian leadership, assembled by Wolfowitz, gained extraordinary influence, especially after September 11th. These civilians were the most vigorous advocates for taking action against Saddam Hussein and for the use of pre-emptive military action to combat terrorism."[51]
Wolfowitz explained his position in a 2002 interview with Robert Collier, of the San Francisco Chronicle, stating: "I think the premise of a policy has to be we can't afford to wait for proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That is a way in which any number of terrorist regimes have, over the last 20 years, gotten away with doing things that I think encourage more behavior of that kind."[50] He added, apparently as clarification: "you can't wait until you have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that somebody did something in the past, you know that people are planning to do something against you in the future and that they're developing incredibly destructive weapons to do it with and that's not tolerable."[50]
As Hersh explains: "Pre-emption would emerge as the overriding idea behind the Administration’s foreign policy."[51] According to Kampfner, who discusses Wolfowitz in relation to the "The alliance of Blairites and Bushites" in his article "The British Neoconservatives", published in The New Statesman on May 12, 2003, less than a fortnight after the end of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the British government's own policy of "Liberal interventionism", an "originally leftish view of military action[,] found a harder edge and a willing match in the primacy and pre-emption doctrine of the Bush administration and its leading thinker, Paul Wolfowitz. Both groups have united around their abhorrence of the centre-right and centre-left mainstream of the early 1990s - the likes of John Major, Douglas Hurd and the early Bill Clinton - citing inaction over Bosnia as their main crime."[67]
Hersh, Kampfner, and others have argued that the policy of pre-emption (and the United States's subsequent conduct of the Iraq War) contradict treaty requirements found in the United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a signatory, as it is to the Geneva Conventions. Article 51 of the Charter, for example, refers a member state's "individual" and "collective" right to engage in "self-defense" in response to an "armed attack" against it; while offering a basis for the attacks against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan by the United States and its coalition allies after the September 11, 2001 attacks, critics of the Bush administration argue that it does not provide a similar basis for such "pre-emptive" attacks as the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.[68]
Wolfowitz explained his position in a 2002 interview with Robert Collier, of the San Francisco Chronicle, stating: "I think the premise of a policy has to be we can't afford to wait for proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That is a way in which any number of terrorist regimes have, over the last 20 years, gotten away with doing things that I think encourage more behavior of that kind."[50] He added, apparently as clarification: "you can't wait until you have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that somebody did something in the past, you know that people are planning to do something against you in the future and that they're developing incredibly destructive weapons to do it with and that's not tolerable."[50]
As Hersh explains: "Pre-emption would emerge as the overriding idea behind the Administration’s foreign policy."[51] According to Kampfner, who discusses Wolfowitz in relation to the "The alliance of Blairites and Bushites" in his article "The British Neoconservatives", published in The New Statesman on May 12, 2003, less than a fortnight after the end of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the British government's own policy of "Liberal interventionism", an "originally leftish view of military action[,] found a harder edge and a willing match in the primacy and pre-emption doctrine of the Bush administration and its leading thinker, Paul Wolfowitz. Both groups have united around their abhorrence of the centre-right and centre-left mainstream of the early 1990s - the likes of John Major, Douglas Hurd and the early Bill Clinton - citing inaction over Bosnia as their main crime."[67]
Hersh, Kampfner, and others have argued that the policy of pre-emption (and the United States's subsequent conduct of the Iraq War) contradict treaty requirements found in the United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a signatory, as it is to the Geneva Conventions. Article 51 of the Charter, for example, refers a member state's "individual" and "collective" right to engage in "self-defense" in response to an "armed attack" against it; while offering a basis for the attacks against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan by the United States and its coalition allies after the September 11, 2001 attacks, critics of the Bush administration argue that it does not provide a similar basis for such "pre-emptive" attacks as the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.[68]