preventive vs. preemptive

from Arthur Schlesinger and The Guardian:

"The second Iraq war fits into Bush the Younger's strategy of "pre-emption". There is deliberate confusion here. Preventive war has a bad reputation in Washington. It is not only due to imperial Japan's preventive strike at the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, but Presidents Truman and Eisenhower explicitly rejected preventive war, and those recommending preventive war against the Soviet Union were generally derided as loonies.

So the Bush administration replaced "preventive" by "pre-emptive". The distinction between "pre-emptive" and "preventive" is worth preserving - it is the distinction between legality and illegality. "Pre-emptive" war refers to a direct, immediate, specific threat that must be met at once. In the words of a department of defence manual, "an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent". "Preventive" war refers to potential, future and, therefore, speculative attacks.

"Daniel Webster wrote a very famous defence of anticipatory self-defence," Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, informed the press. Dr Rice, the former provost of Stanford, does not know her American history. According to Secretary of State Webster's "famous" 1841 statement, a pre-emptive reaction could be justified only on very narrow grounds - if the prospective attack showed "a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation". This was manifestly not the case with Iraq. It was not a pre-emptive war. It was a preventive war."

for whole story, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,133040700.html