"Thank God that Menachem Begin overrode his own intelligence agency, which worried that the attack would affect the peace process with Egypt, and ordered the reactor destroyed. Otherwise Iraq would have gained nuclear weapons in the 1980's, it might now have a province called Kuwait and a chunk of Iran, and the region might have suffered nuclear devastation. So pre-emption sometimes works, and even doves tend to favor cross-border intervention to prevent genocide in the Rwandas of the world."
An intelligent analysis, right? Would you believe it comes from the New York Times' Nic Kristoff?
Don't get your hopes up, though, because Nic doesn't think this example applies to any other situation:
The lesson of Osirak is very limited — that in extreme cases it is justifiable for a country to make a pre-emptive pinpoint strike to prevent an unpredictable enemy from gaining weapons of mass destruction that would be used against it. That's a reasonable approach toward Iraq if Saddam Hussein refuses to cooperate and if we have intelligence about what sites are worth striking.Because that has worked so well over the last decade.
...one can accept that pre-emption is sometimes necessary, yet still prefer to rely not on an invasion of Iraq but instead on a less risky combination of containment, pinpoint bombing and assassination.
<< Home