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Vice President Dick Cheney, the prophet of pre-emption, has become the most influential American strategist since George F. Kennan, the father of the doctrine of containment.
Kennan's doctrine, laid out in a 1947 magazine article and adopted by the Truman administration, prevailed for a half century and won the Cold War. Cheney's ideas, contained laid out in a still-classified Pentagon paper from 1992, have just been endorsed as official policy by President Bush and will guide America's role in the world for at least part of the 21st Century.
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The new American doctrine was issued Sept. 20 by the White House. It is a 31-page document titled The National Security Strategy.
Its main points are:
- That America's military might remain "beyond challenge," presumably forever, so overwhelming that no nation, friend or foe, has any "hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States."
- Deterrence and containment, the keys to the previous strategy, are out. "Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work," it says. "Some enemies cannot be deterred."
- Pre-emptive war--a first-strike policy of hitting anyone who might be thinking of hitting us--is in. The new key is "anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. . . . The U.S. will, if necessary, act preemptively."
- Current international law approves pre-emptive attacks "on the existence of an imminent threat." But sometimes threats will be more vague, so "we must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries."
- Our Cold War enemies were hostile but rational and not suicidal. The new doctrine demonizes America's new enemies as "more willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their people" and says they "reject basic human values."
- Alliances and international organizations have their uses, but the new emphasis is on more temporary "coalitions," presumably similar to the grouping of Central Asian states now helping the U.S. in Afghanistan.
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There is a link to the actually strategy document in pdf form: Go here for actual pdf file
Ya'll can read this and draw your own conclusions now.