President Harry Truman
President Dwight Eisenhower called preventive war “ridiculous”
"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. . . . 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.'"
President Abraham Lincoln
"Traditionally, 'pre-emptive' action refers to times when states react to an imminent threat of attack. For example, when Egyptian and Syrian forces mobilized on Israel's borders in 1967, the 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 nations should have to suffer a certain first strike before it has 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 threat-ening. Preventive 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 a planned military buildup by the United States in the Pacific.....Pearl Harbor has been rightfully recorded in history as an act of dishonorable treachery."
Senator Ted Kennedy
The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.
United Nations Charter
"The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security. That duty falls to me, as Commander-in-Chief, by the oath I have sworn, by the oath I will keep."
President George Walker Bush
Read:
* Seeking Out Monsters: By Committing Himself to Preventive War, George Bush has Overturned Two Centuries of US Thinking on Global Diplomacy
by Arthur Schlesinger
* "Preventive War: A Failed Doctrine", 2004 Editorial in the New York Times
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