humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Mar 14, 1:07 pm, Gordon Sollars wrote:
> In article ,
> robert_kol...@hotmail.com says...
>
> > Mark Sieving wrote:
>
> > > Notice he was speaking of preventive war, not preemption.
>
> > Pre-emptive and preventative war are the same thing. A attacks B before
> > B can attack A. It is as simple as that. Of course, to justify it one
> > would have to show that B is about to attack A.
>
> No, it's not that simple. When you have "is about", then you have a
> prerequisite for preemption. Bush did not claim that Hussein "is
> about" to attack either the U.S. or our client-state, Israel. The terms
> "preemptive" and "preventative", while perhaps very close in ordinary
> usage, have become terms of art.

Your semantic distinction seems to work on the perceived immediacy
of the threat. So in theory "preventative" is morally wrong because
the threat is vague and perhaps will never metastasize..... whereas
"preemptive" means attack is eminent is so extraordinarily high risk
it may as well be. (sort of like saying the 5th fleet is on it's way
or the attack decision has been made right?)

What I am saying is while this distinction may appear to work on
a philosophical level, in real world practice (unless the missiles are
in the air and just haven't reached their destinations yet or some
other extreme example that never actually occurs)..... there is no
definite evidence to know for certain.. It all boils down to reading
the thoughts of some government leader at a moment in time. As far as
I know there is no definite test to do that.

So what if the Soviet Union and America are engaged in a decades
long rhetoric war saying they'll destroy each other, that they both
provocatively parked a fleet of nuclear subs off each others coast,
and that they both vied for influence in 3rd party nations neither
nation should have been in the first place (via organizations like the
CIA and KGB that I would note both used terrorism to achieve their
ends at times).

If one nation attacks the other first directly.... then that's the
nation that historians will one day say instigated the war. One can
argue it was a "just war" but that is another issue entirely.