Reason, schmeason, proof, no proof. Isn't it kind of a given that the majority of the American public, after wavering mightily for several months about the way Iraq is being handled, and in many cases starting to question support of going in there at all,

are going to think now:

National Guard overseas = less "national security."

(Just the same as how they could buy some sort of connection between Saddam left unfinished = more power to Islamic terrorists. That was all about showing that America was not a wimp like Osama said, and wouldn't just put up with anything. That's obviously not working out, we're looking pretty wimpy.)

It's the appearance, not the reality. And security for civilization is kind of like that sometimes, as in "broken windows" crime prevention theory. The psychology of "feeling protected" hangs heavy with these questions?

"This does strike me as a pretty darn good argument against undertaking large-scale Guard deployments for the purposes of preventative war (which I'm against as a general matter for other reasons)"

Really?  You're against preventative war as a general matter?

If Hussein had actually been developing nuclear weapons and had actually been collaborating with Al-Qaida, you'd be against preventative war as a general matter?

Just because the Iraq war was conducted on the basis of fraudulent information doesn't mean the entire concept of preventative war is invalid in the face of a threat of global terrorism armed with WMD's.

During the Vietnam War the Guard was never deployed, and people who lived through that era know that the Guards were thought of as draft-dodgers at the time. ("NG means No Good and Not Going", my NG friend was told during his basic training, and that was fine with him).

That makes quite a lot of sense if you think of the NG as a reserve force for national emergencies, military and otherwise, rather than as a military force to be used as needed.

Rumsfeld's conversion of the Guard into a primary military resource is equivalent to the kind of creative accounting where financial reserves are transferred to operating funds. Rumsfeld is the Bush administration's military bean-counter, and his career bears an eerie resemblance to the Vietnam War's MacNamara. Both are very bright, quick, sharp-tongued, and arrogant, which means that they can / could win policy debates even when wrong.

P.S. I wonder whether terrorists could have blown up the levees at all. Levees are mostly  enormous piles of dirt and rock with concrete facing, IIRC, and the power needed to damage them is enormous. The power of a hurricane is much greater than that of any weapon, even a nuclear weapon. (This came up awhile back when someone suggested dispersing hurricanes with nuclear weapons; someone calulated, and a 50-megaton bomb is piddy compared to a hurricane.)

Yeah, and what if he had ties to the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, what then, huh?

This whole idea is a silly, moronic, fantasy for a culture that has killed it's brain with TV plots.

No state on the planet is going to give a terrorist a nuclear weapon.  That state would cease to exist very shortly, thereafter.  Period.  Everyone knows it.

This problem has nothing to do with states and it makes the Cold War dinosaurs and their decendants freak out. 

Ed, if and when a terrorist sets off a nuclear bomb, the instruction manual will have been printed in Pakistan....

I think everybody is missing the point here.  The National Guard should be deployed overseas only in emergencies.  Doing anything else weakens our Homeland Security, and is also going to destroy the National Guard.  (At this point, why would anybody rational want to enroll in the Guard rather than the Army, given that you'll end up in the same place either way, and you'll have worse equipment and benefits in the Guard?).  You could make an argument that Iraq was an emergency when we first went in, but this argument doesn't hold water now.  The government should have been building up the Army since 9/11, and the Pentagon has completely missed that boat.   

Well, I did use the word "bright".

Wouldn't that be a pre-emptive war?

If Hussein had actually been developing nuclear weapons and had actually been collaborating with Al-Qaida, you'd be against preventative war as a general matter?

If that was true, you had evidence, wouldn't that cease to be pre-emptive and become self-defense?

If I see you on the street, and I think you have a gun and will kill me, and I kill you first, that's pre-emptive.

If I see you on the street, and you take out a gun but I draw mine faster, that's self-defense.

Even if this pre-emptive war thing was a good idea (which it is not), unfortunately, the Bush Administration has lost the respect we need to make the case for this in the future.

Who will believe us next time?

We can't even use the word "pre-emptive" without putting the word "unilateral" in front of it.

I think we need to talk about our definitions. I believe historians use "preventive war" to talk about an attack against a country that is perceived as a threat sometime in the future. I believe the Japanese tried to justify the attack on Pearl Harbor this way. I think a "pre-emptive war" is a war that is undertaken because you believe an attack is coming almost immediately. Bush con job involved blending the two together. PS Now, Colin Powell feels really bad about his UN speech. Thanks, Colin I'm sure that makes all the relatives of the unnecessary dead feel great. Maybe next time you'll check things out more thoroughly so you can know what millions of people around the world who marched on February 15th, 2003 in protest knew - the intelligence was being twisted to fit the invasion plan.

"Maybe I'm wrong, but I see pre-emptive and self-defense as mutually exclusive."

I would suggest that you, along with many other folks on the left, are now defining pre-emptive war to mean the Iraq war, rather than the actual meaning of the phrase.

Or put another way, you are defining a pre-emptive war that you could support as somehow no longer being a pre-emptive war.

Just because the Bush administration has had multiple bad ideas for preventative wars doesn't mean the basic concept is always invalid.

"I would counter that this idea is known as the "Bush Doctrine," which by definition means it's invalid. The validity train for Bush left a while ago."

Back to the politics/policy divide.

I took issue with Matthew saying he was opposed to pre-emptive wars as a general principle, because I thought he was talking about policy.

On policy grounds, 90% of the Bush speech you linked to is pretty inoffensive.  A Democratic administration would change the emphasis on certain stuff, but it wouldn't be dramatically different.

On policy grounds, just because Bush delivered the speech does not, by definition mean it's invalid.

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Basically, I think we're in some kind of agreement about what the right to self-defense means in an era of terrorism and WMD's.

And I'd continue to suggest that your problem with the phrase "pre-emptive war" does not come from the meaning of that phrase, but instead comes from the connotations put on that phrase by the current administration.

In any case, we're deep into a thicket of semantics that I don't have much interest in further trying to untangle.