Not to long ago, our servant, President Bush, started heralding a new doctrine of “strike first” or “pre-emption.” This doctrine stated that we, the United Stated, could just go out and strike first without warning, any enemy that we are threatened by or that could harbor any type of terrorist attack. This is a huge difference in the doctrine of deterrence, or letting our military muscle act as a warning to possible attackers, and if they still choose to attack us, we strike back, showing just how strong that our military and will power is. This doctrine has been in practice for a very long time, because of one thing, its success. The Soviet Union did not wage a direct battle with the United States, or vice versa, because the two super powers knew that one could bring an intolerable amount of damage to the other. Even so, we have plans to attack Saddam because of his lack of cooperation of any type. This new doctrine is believed to be allowed in international law, for reasons of self-defense, but even so, NATO isn’t too fond of America’s new doctrine because of its offensive outlook. One major fear is that if we as America decide to practice a new doctrine of “strike first,” we will allow other such actions around the globe, such as China deciding to attack Taiwan. This is seen as an outrage in the international community (Summarized from an article from The Baltimore Sun).

As this summary surely states, there is a huge change in policy going on in America today. We have always had the ability to strike first in a confrontation, but we have usually decided to use deterrence and see what that brings forth. Usually this brings forth peace, even though there may be some anger. Even so, we have slapped some forces as a punishment before; Iraq is one of these forces. Whenever Saddam refused to let UN inspectors in, we would threaten and sometimes attack his military, but this, we must remember, came from Saddam invading Kuwait. Therefore if Bush decides to attack Iraq, we are just trying to keep Saddam true to his words. In this case, Saddam attacked first, then we decided to take action, and that action is still coming forth, therefore we have an example of deterrence.

Our actions with Saddam, when compared to the new doctrine, are truly well in the limits of deterrence, which is much different than Bush’s new doctrine. President Bush wishes to just go out and attack any force that he sees as being a threat, while contacting no allies. This means that if the President decided that a threatening force was positioned on the Korean border, he could launch an attack there, whenever, however, and still be within his doctrine. This type of global patrolling is not a sturdy or safe doctrine. This type of policing could anger many of our allied and spell out World War III very quick. We have had a doctrine of deterrence, but if we were threatened we have always taken strong political and economical actions before we ever considered a military attack. Of course, if we ever found the plans of an attack upon our nation, we would try our hardest in all ways possible to foil our enemies’ attacks, but that doesn’t mean that we went out and attacked anyone that we thought could organize an attack on us. We have plenty of ways to detect a possible attack, and we have become decent at predicting when these attacks may happen, and that is what we should be focusing on. If we prevent these attacks, we don’t have to run around waging war on every bully on the face of the Earth. These are some troublesome times, but we mustn’t get carried away. Deterrence will work if we place time and effort in prevention. We are not the rulers of the world. We have a fragile network of allies and we cannot afford to loose them. Deterrence, my fellow Americans, is the way to a peaceful future, not striking first.

Check out the full article below. This is the article that I got my info from and it was written by: Sun staff writer Tom Bowman