In an effort to ‘retrospectively legitimize’ their own policies, are neoconservatives wrongly comparing the Libya campaign to the Iraq War? Columnist Liuis Bassets of Spain’s El Pais writes that Spain’s former president and Bush ally José María Aznar is wrong – as are the rest of the neocons – to see Obama’s policies as some form of approval.
For Spain’s El Pais, Liuis Bassets writes in part:
The neocons applaud him, the radical left criticizes him – and for strikingly similar reasons. This is a war to topple a tyrant, in which the leading power is using force against a sovereign state – and without paying too much attention to U.N. Security Council support. Not much different than what happened with Saddam Hussein. The neocons feel retrospectively legitimized in their war, and the anti-American sentiments of the radical left have been reinforced. They all believe that Bush would wholeheartedly endorse the speech Obama gave to his fellow citizens to explain the military intervention in Libya.
So claims the most unmistakable neocon voice in Spain, José María Aznar, in a television interview with Pedro José Ramírez: “I think Obama is becoming the most important adherent of the Bush Doctrine. Yesterday he said that a massacre had been prevented with the intervention in Libya. This is called preventative intervention.” Aznar is confusing preventive action and preventive war, which in English are clearly delineated with the words pre-emption and prevention. The first is an action that anticipates and avoids an immediate threat and is a legitimate form of defense. The second is a class of war intended to disarm an enemy that could potentially become a threat: this is a war of aggression – unilateral and without legitimacy or justification.
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