Fighting words. When I hear these 2 words I immediately clench my fist.
Further, I'm getting a bit tired of the "Bush Doctrine" of preemption being described as unique in US history. The War of the Revolution, the wars of western expansion, the Mexican American War, The Spanish American War, the action against the Barbary pirates, Woodrow Wilson's little excursion into Mexico, World War I, the intervention in Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, the invasions of Grenada and Haiti, and the actions in Bosnia and Kosovo were all "preemptive," in that they all involved significant American military action against another country without a military act by that country against the United States or one of our treaty allies. It is the doctrine of nonpreemption, which grew out of the carnage of World War I, which is in fact the exception in American history.