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Originally Posted by politicophile
Hasty generalization: you are drawing a universal conclusion from a single instance. In this case, you argue that the doctrine of preemption is a bad one because, according to some standards and not others, it failed in Iraq. At the very least, you would need to have more examples of preemptive wars failing before discounting the concept itself.
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1) You ignored half my point. Were you planning on responding to that, or are you acknowledging that I am correct about it?
2) If I burn my hand on a hot stove, I do not need to do it again and again in order to conclude that putting my hand on hot stoves is not a good idea. You are suggesting that until I burn both hands multiple times I have no evidence that putting my hand on the hot stove will hurt.
The world does not work the way you seem to want it to. If I propose a course of action in a business, and it loses my company a million dollars, they are not likely to tell me "what a GREAT idea you had!!! Let's do that one again and again!"
Yet you seem to think that even though this pre-emptive strike idea has led directly to the deaths of Americans, and has led directly to America being in more danger, and has led directly to the OPPOSITE of what Bush claims to want (reduction in terrorists), it's still a good idea and we need to do it over and over before we decide maybe it's not so hot.
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I'll add that I think preemption is not only wise, but necessary. In an age where catastrophic damage can be wrecked upon the United States by any number of countries or terrorist organizations, having an itchy trigger-finger is a small price to pay. If a few "innocent" despotic, sadistic, dispicable dictators get the axe as a result, I won't have any trouble sleeping at night.
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A fine sentiment, but your ideas are allowing far too much freedom for the president. A pre-emptive strike is fine as long as you KNOW you're about to get hit. If someone's standing in front of me with his fist cocked and he's shouting that he's gonna kill me, I'm justfied in pre-emptively knocking his block off.
But if a big guy is sitting in a chair across the room reading a novel, I'm not justified in thinking "Gosh, that guy's muscles are huge! If he puts that book down and gets up outa that chair and walks across the room and hits me it's really gonna hurt. I think I'll just pull my gun and blow his brains out pre-emptively to be sure that can't happen."
You're advocating allowing the president to do just that with countries. "Gee they have a few weapons and I guess if they get mad enough they could shoot a few Americans. Let's get 'em!" It's what happened in Iraq. It's what will happen again if we allow this asinine policy to continue.
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Rude, derogatory, and completely unnecessary. If you are able to marshall the facts to your side, there is no need for this kind of behavior, so knock it off.
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No, accurate. You either failed to read my post entirely, or having read it you failed to comprehend it. And you did it again in your second reply to me. You either completely missed (didn't read) or didn't grasp (failed to comprehend) the part where I talked about giving the president the power to do too much with too little provocation.
The third alternative is that you're being obtuse and conveniently choosing to ignore points which you do not have the ability to refute. I'm assuming that you would not do that based on your past posts, so I stand by my original statement.