Of course pre-emption is a completely discredited concept to address terrorism after seeing a potent homegrown insurgency emerge in Iraq which allied with Al Qaeda foreign fighters: Bush dramatically empowered Al Qaeda's ranks, which fits right in with Cheney's arming of Al Qaeda characters and religious nuts in the first Afghan War. Pre-emption has also been discredited historically by essayists such as Maggie Ledford from
National Catholic Reporter although the catastrophic results are evident to us all without brilliant essayists to point that out.
Sandra Day O'Connor, when she bravely denounced Bush policies as headed towards "dictatorship," inevitably knows and knew of the tyrannical history of pre-emption.
Since Bush uses brainwashed religious Republicans to propagate his dictatorial political tactics, let's support O'Connor's assertion of Bush's dictatorship tactics with Ledford's 2004 essay on Bush and his similarity to tactics used by other infamous dictators such as Frederick the Great and Hitler:
The fatal legend of preemptive war
By MAGGIE LEDFORD LAWSON
The Bush Doctrine, offered by neoconservatives in the White House as a unique response to a world changed by Sept. 11, is anything but new. Much of the ideology behind current American foreign policy parallels a belief system that took root in Prussia under Frederick the Great and bore poisonous fruit in the Nazi era. The notion that preemptive war is a legitimate tool of foreign policy, sold to the American public by the Bush White House, became increasingly popular in Germany in the period leading up to the Second World War. Likewise, the idea of exceptionalism, entitling the U.S. government to force its views on others because the American way of life is best, parallels a commonly held German belief in that nation's cultural superiority. The similarity to Germany goes even to the language and tactics the White House has used to convert the American people to its cause.
A real danger of a preemptive strategy is that it seemingly can succeed at first.
In fact, Germany's journey to the Third Reich started in triumph.
Seems Rove has been reading Mein Kampf:
Hitler spelled out his strategy in Mein Kampf, a book deserving notoriety not only for its racist diatribes but also for its cynical rules for manipulating the public. Among other things, Hitler advises his supporters to repeat slogans over and over "until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by that slogan."
As to Bush's re-release of his Hitleresque National Security Strategy, Lawson's critique applies today the same as it did in 2002:
The Bush Doctrine, spelled out in the National Security Strategy released by the White House Sept. 17, 2002, and in administration speeches and statements, also has attracted little attention. It should be taken seriously. The similarities to the ideas that took hold in Germany and culminated in World War II suggest the dangers in the policy pursued by the White House. Of course, history never repeats itself exactly, and many circumstances may arise to avert the United States from continuing down the road that Germany followed in the 20th century.
Still, to a researcher of German history, these parallels are worrisome. For all its talk about American values, the Bush Doctrine actually repudiates those values.
Preemptive war is at the center of the ideology, but the Bush White House goes beyond that, claiming that the United States has the duty, indeed the moral obligation, to violate the rights of sovereign nations and to change their rulers as the American government sees fit. The aim is to shape the world in America's image.
The administration justifies its departure from the accepted standards of international behavior by claiming the Sept. 11 attack forever changed the rules by which nations live. However, the leading idea in the Bush Doctrine wasn't developed in response to 9/11.
Already in 1992, in the waning days of the presidency of the elder George Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, then undersecretary for policy at the Pentagon, endorsed preemptive war as a way of dealing with weapons of mass destruction. His proposal, which appeared in internal guidelines prepared for the Department of Defense, caused a furor after it was leaked to the press, and subsequently was omitted in the final document.
Neoconservatives continued to be backbenched during the Clinton administration, but once George W. Bush was elected they rapidly gained influence. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld are particularly sympathetic to neoconservative ideology. Neoconservatives holding key posts in the administration include Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of defense; Pentagon adviser Richard Perle; Eliott Abrams, who is in charge of Middle Eastern policy at the National Security Council; Adam Shulsky of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans; and John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control. Neoconservative outsiders with close ties to the administration include writers William Kristol and Robert Kagan.
Much of the inspiration for neoconservatism comes from Leo Strauss, a Jew who fled Germany during the Hitler years and eventually held a professorial post at the University of Chicago, where he became something of a cult figure. While claiming he believed in liberal democracy, Strauss actually advocated a strong nationalistic state with order maintained, if necessary, by force. It is as though Strauss had unconsciously come to believe in the fascistic methods of those from whom he had fled.
Wolfowitz and Shulsky studied under Strauss, and many other neoconservatives say he had a profound influence on their thinking.
Insert Iran into this snippet and you get Iraq all over again except magnified tenfold or more:
Having more or less dealt with Afghanistan, Bush focused on Iraq(n). Like Frederick the Great, Bush lacked a compelling reason for a preemptive attack, so he trumped one up. Saddam Hussein (The Iranian theocracy), undeniably an evil man (group), was promoted to the role of leading global villain. The president repeatedly linked the Iraqi (Iranian) dictator (Ayatollah) and al-Qaeda, even though there was no evidence of collaboration between the two. Bush declared that the Iraqi (Iranian) regime was an immediate threat to the United States.
(My parenthesis.)
Read the whole article, linked above.