From Dave Winer:
Presidential candidate Howard Dean gave a talk at Harvard last night. He asked an interesting question. Next year, how will we feel when China invades Taiwan because they think they have weapons of mass destruction? Has the new Bush Doctrine, pre-emptive wars, unleashed a philosophy of world power that we may not be so comfortable with?
Not a happy thought, is it? My guess, if a situation like this were to happen while Bush was in power, would be that we would then start rattling our sabres at China for “invading a soverign nation”. You see, as we’ve amply demonstrated in the past few weeks, when anyone else in the world attacks another country, it’s invasion. When we do it, it’s liberation.
Of course, it’s been pointed out by many people that many of the same arguments used to justify the attack on Iraq could be applied to the U.S. We have a leader in power who was not elected by the popular vote. We have weapons of mass destruction that we’re not willing to destroy. We have chemical weapons (hell, we sold Iraq theirs). We are denying (some of) our citizens their constitutional rights (especially if they’re of middle eastern heritage). So why aren’t we facing U.N. sanctions or a coalition of countries using military force to liberate the American people?
Who knows — maybe we will at some point in the future. As Dean is pointing out, Bush has just made that an acceptable foreign policy for the nations of the world to take.