All theory may be in favor of Alan Dershowitz’s notion of a preventive state, but all experience is against it. It presumes a level of government knowledge or truthfulness about future risks or harms that all experience discredits.
The Dershowitz theory, outlined in his new book “The Preventive State,” is simple. Forward-looking government policies or actions should be informed by balancing the risks of harm from false positives against the risk of harm from false negatives. Consider preemptive wars. They are professedly based on hunches that the enemy will attack, occupy or conquer at some future time unless the enemy is obliterated.
Preemptive wars risk false positives. It may lead to gratuitous wars because the enemy would not have attacked even if not obliterated. It also risks false negatives. Preemptive wars may be foregone by understating the risk of an enemy attack that occurs. Dershowitz argues that the risk of harm from false positives should be balanced against the risk of harm from false negatives in deciding whether to initiate preemptive warfare. He assumes the balancing would be a simple and speedy AI calculation.
The Dershowitz theory does not compute because the government invariably manipulates projections about future harm for ulterior partisan or personal motives. Manipulation is shielded from public or congressional scrutiny by routine bogus claims of executive privilege or state secrets. Truth surfaces, if at all, decades later, when secrets may be declassified too late to redress the stupendous harm in the interim.
National security lies are the norm, not the exception. President Harry Truman dismissed the Korean War as a “police action” but argued the war was necessary to deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe. The Korean War risked a nuclear attack on China, urged by General Douglas MacArthur. There is no evidence that the Soviet Union planned an invasion of Western Europe.
The Vietnam War was fueled by the government’s fanciful “domino theory” that if Vietnam fell into the communist sphere, then communism would spread worldwide to crush Western civilization, and lies about a second torpedo attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Pentagon Papers revealed serial government lies about the progress of the Vietnam War. It endured not because it was winnable but because President Lyndon B. Johnson was politically adamant about not losing a war on his watch like President Truman’s alleged loss of China, which was politically crippling.
“I am not going to lose Vietnam,” President Johnson told the ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., two days after assuming office. “I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”
The Vietnam War was lost after squandering more than $1 trillion in current dollars, and suffering more than 55,000 American military deaths, millions of Vietnamese casualties, the My Lai massacre, napalm girl and countless other atrocities. The world did not fall to communism. Indeed, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Vietnam is now a semi-ally of the United States against China.
It would seem the Dershowitz thesis would clearly have militated against the Vietnam War. But not so fast. Advocates can postulate that, absent the resolve of the United States to fight in Vietnam, even in a losing cause, the Soviet Union and China would have been emboldened to invade and conquer America, Western Europe and Japan, writing an epitaph for freedom. Such fevered speculation cannot be disproved like a mathematical theorem.
Abraham Lincoln exposed the uselessness of the Dershowitz theory to check gratuitous, calamitous, preemptive wars in a letter to law partner William H. Herndon explaining his opposition to the Mexican-American War born of President James K. Polk’s lies:
“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us;’ but he will say to you, ‘Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.'”
The Dershowitz theory of preventive harm presumes intellectual integrity in the corridors of powers that has long passed from the scene — assuming it ever existed. It is divorced from the lamp of experience. In politics, everything is subordinated to power. Truth is a handicap. Remember President Donald Trump to Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 1, 2021: “You’re too honest.” Mr. Trump is in the White House. Mr. Pence is nowhere.
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.
