On March 19, 2006, 900 demonstrators converged on Forest Park in St. Louis to make the following statement: “Stop the War-Feed the People.”
The demonstrators set up a cemetery with 2000 tombstones honoring people killed in the Iraq war (each tombstone contained the name of one American and one Iraqi citizen):
This St. Louis demonstration today was part of a series of anti-war demonstrations across the country.
The Iraq debate is now continuing into its fifth or sixth phase: this phase being about declassifying selective information at will. The debate about the interest in the Iraq oil reserves, the vandetta against Saddam, all happenned. The debate that never happenned has to do with the policy of pre-emptive war.
History has long judged wars first by who wins: the winner gets, with other spoils, the right to spin the history. Caesar's Gaulic wars are the classic example. However, since it was discoverred that war is a bad and destructive force, history has begun to seek out the nations or individuals that caused the war. In response, the nations that go to war seek the moral high ground of defensive necessity. The Civil War was called the "War of Northern Agression", despite the first shots being fired by the south, for the obviouse claim to the moral high-ground. Bonaparte, Bismarck, even Hitler sought the same moral cover to protect their aggression.
It is disturbing to this writer that our nation should so easily have fallen for the need for a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Despite the mis-guided build-up of evidence about Iraq's capabilities and intentions, what of that evidence truely justified invasion, even if the claims were true? During the cold war the Soviet Union had a thousand times the fire power specifically pointed at our cities. Some of that capability still remains today. This is not a reason to go to war, but to do all in our power to prevent it.
What would justify a pre-emptive strike? Isreal has been forced to use this regularly as a survival tactic, because it is constantly threatened and frequently the victim of attacks.
I believe that the case must rest on the high degree of the threat, the immediacy of the threat, and likelyhood of the pre-emptive strategy eliminating the threat. None of these standards were met by the intelligence from pre-invasion Iraq. After the 9/11 attacks the case against Talliban Afganistan was considerably stronger.
As we consider Iran as a potential recipient of our pre-emptive policy, this writer believes that we should apply the highest standards of proving this to be a real, immediate, threat which we are capable of eliminating.