9/11: Sullivan--The Real Parallel

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THE REAL PARALLEL: Tony Blair knocks it out of the park at the Trades Union Congress. Here's an argument that strikes me as a critical one in the debate over pre-emption:

Suppose I had come last year on the same day as this year - September 10. Suppose I had said to you: there is a terrorist network called al-Qaida. It operates out of Afghanistan. It has carried out several attacks and we believe it is planning more. It has been condemned by the UN in the strongest terms. Unless it is stopped, the threat will grow. And so I want to take action to prevent that. Your response and probably that of most people would have been very similar to the response of some of you yesterday on Iraq. There would have been few takers for dealing with it and probably none for taking military action of any description.

Read the entire speech. But it seems to me that this early question posed by Blair must surely be asked of Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Raines, Sontag and many others opposed to war in Iraq. If you had been given evidence of al Qaeda's capabilities and intent to kill Americans prior to September 11, would you have gone into Afghanistan to prevent it? The answer seems to me a pretty clear one: almost all the critics of pre-emption would have refused to go into Afghanistan to prevent 9/11. Their policy is this: we have to wait to get devastated before we act. My policy is: once is enough. The advocates of inaction - or, worse, the appearance of action - seem to me to be essentially bargaining away the lives of American citizens to protect their anachronistic notion of an international order. No president of the United States can do that while performing his constitutional duty to protect us from a foreign menace. Thank God.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2002


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