Digby's skepticism about preventive wars is warranted, I think. The point isn't that you can't imagine a legitimate conflict that could be called "preventive." But to have such a doctrine simply floating around creates an easy and empty container for shoddily-justified wars of any type. It's almost tautological. If the President says it's official US policy that we'll eventually go to war with a nation, then goes to war to head off that eventuality, he just "prevented" his own war. That's just "going to war."
Indeed, I think it's worth saying that even if Iraq had WMDs, our invasion wouldn't have been a justifiable preventive war. An armed Hussein posed no direct threat to us, and there was no reason to believe war with Iraq was an inevitable feature of the future. It always appeared to me that the only serious rationales for the Iraq War were humanitarian concerns or future regional stability. The actual war has been a clear humanitarian disaster and substantially destabilizing to the region. Worse, if it had been sold on either ground, the American people never would've gone. So what you had, in fact, was a war sold on lies, shrouded in a meaningless, empty doctrine that allowed every critic and commentator to construct their own rationale and ignore the administration's shifting and mendacious explanations.
