[lit-ideas] Someone who knows what he's talking about

From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:30:43 +0900
From the Washington Post

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.

--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN
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[lit-ideas] Someone who knows what he's talking about

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