October 12, 2002 journal, pre-emptive or preventive action against Iraq is our strategy.

To quote a liberal Democrat in an opinion on the presidential congressional war debate.

"On September 20th, the administration unveiled its new national security strategy. This document addresses the new realities of our age, particularly the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorist networks armed with the agenda of fanatics. The strategy claims that these new threats are so novel and so dangerous that we should "not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting pre-emptively". But in the same discussion over the past few months about Iraq, the administration, often uses the terms "pre-emptive" and “preventive" interchangeably. In realm of international relations, these two terms have long had a very different meanings. Traditionally, “pre-empted" action refers to times when States react to an imminent threat of attack. For example, when Egypt and Syria forces mobilized on Israel's borders in 1967, this threat was obvious and immediate, and Israel felt justified in pre-emptively attacking those forces. The global community is generally tolerant of such actions, since no nation should have to suffer a certain first strike before it as the legitimacy to respond. By contrast, "preventive" military action refers to strikes that target a country before it has developed a capability that could someday become threatening. Preventing attacks have generally been condemned. For example, the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was regarded as a preventive strike by Japan, because the Japanese were seeking to block the planned military buildup by the United States in the Pacific. The coldly premeditated nature of preventive attacks and preventive wars makes them anathema to well established international principles against aggression. Pearl Harbor has been rightfully recorded in history as an act of dishonorable treachery. Historically, the United States has condemned the idea of preventing war, because it violates basic international rules against aggression. But at times in our history, preventive war has been seriously advocated by policy option. In the early days of the Cold War, some U.S. military and civilian experts advocated a preventive war against the Soviet Union. They propose a devastating first track to prevent the Soviet Union from developing a threatening nuclear capacity. At the time they said the uniquely destructive power of nuclear weapons require us to rethink traditional international rules. The first round of that debate ended in 1950 when President Truman ruled out a preventive strike, stating that such actions were not consistent with our American tradition. He said, "you don't 'prevent' anything by war ...except peace". Instead of a surprise first strike, the nation dedicated itself to the strategy of deterrence and containment, which successfully kept the peace during the long and frequently difficult years of the Cold war. Arguments for preventive war resurfaced again when the Eisenhower administration took power in 1953, but President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles soon decided firmly against it. President Eisenhower emphasized that even if we were to win such a war, we will face the vast burdens of occupation and reconstruction that would come with it. The argument that the United States should take preventive military action, in the absence of an imminent attack, resurfaced in 1962, when we learned that the Soviet Union would soon have the ability to launch missiles from Cuba against our country. Many military officers urged President Kennedy to approve a preventive attack to destroy this capability before it became operational. Robert Kennedy, like Harry Truman, felt that this kind of first strike was not consistent with American values. He said that a proposed surprise first strike against Cuba