[ppi] [ppiindia] Bush's Thousand Days

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/23/AR2006042301014.html?sub=AR

Bush's Thousand Days


By Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Monday, April 24, 2006; Page A17 


The Hundred Days is indelibly associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the 
Thousand Days with John F. Kennedy. But as of this week, a thousand days remain 
of President Bush's last term -- days filled with ominous preparations for and 
dark rumors of a preventive war against Iran.

The issue of preventive war as a presidential prerogative is hardly new. In 
February 1848 Rep. Abraham Lincoln explained his opposition to the Mexican War: 
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it 
necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may 
choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to 
make war at pleasure [emphasis added]. . . . If, today, he should choose to say 
he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading 
us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the 
British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you 
don't.' "

This is precisely how George W. Bush sees his presidential prerogative: Be 
silent; I see it, if you don't . However, both Presidents Harry S. Truman and 
Dwight D. Eisenhower, veterans of the First World War, explicitly ruled out 
preventive war against Joseph Stalin's attempt to dominate Europe. And in the 
Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy, himself a hero of the 
Second World War, rejected the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for 
a preventive strike against the Soviet Union in Cuba.

It was lucky that JFK was determined to get the missiles out peacefully, 
because only decades later did we discover that the Soviet forces in Cuba had 
tactical nuclear weapons and orders to use them to repel a U.S. invasion. This 
would have meant a nuclear exchange. Instead, JFK used his own thousand days to 
give the American University speech, a powerful plea to Americans as well as to 
Russians to reexamine "our own attitude -- as individuals and as a nation -- 
for our attitude is as essential as theirs." This was followed by the limited 
test ban treaty. It was compatible with the George Kennan formula -- 
containment plus deterrence -- that worked effectively to avoid a nuclear clash.

The Cuban missile crisis was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold 
War. It was the most dangerous moment in all human history. Never before had 
two contending powers possessed between them the technical capacity to destroy 
the planet. Had there been exponents of preventive war in the White House, 
there probably would have been nuclear war. It is certain that nuclear weapons 
will be used again. Henry Adams, the most brilliant of American historians, 
wrote during our Civil War, "Some day science shall have the existence of 
mankind in its power, and the human race shall commit suicide by blowing up the 
world."

But our Cold War presidents kept to the Kennan formula of containment plus 
deterrence, and we won the Cold War without escalating it into a nuclear war. 
Enter George W. Bush as the great exponent of preventive war. In 2003, owing to 
the collapse of the Democratic opposition, Bush shifted the base of American 
foreign policy from containment-deterrence to presidential preventive war: Be 
silent; I see it, if you don't. Observers describe Bush as "messianic" in his 
conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed 
in his second inaugural address, "The Almighty has His own purposes."

There stretch ahead for Bush a thousand days of his own. He might use them to 
start the third Bush war: the Afghan war (justified), the Iraq war (based on 
fantasy, deception and self-deception), the Iran war (also fantasy, deception 
and self-deception). There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a 
foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.

Maybe President Bush, who seems a humane man, might be moved by daily sorrows 
of death and destruction to forgo solo preventive war and return to cooperation 
with other countries in the interest of collective security. Abraham Lincoln 
would rejoice.

The writer, a historian, served as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy.


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