There is no justification for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea

Has America learned nothing?

Against a pre-emptive strike.
(Image credit: Brain light / Alamy Stock Photo)

An insane, whiskey-drinking, ruthless but incompetent dictator presiding over a poor country with artificial borders whose wretched, put-upon citizenry worship him and members of his family as part of a grotesque cult of personality is allegedly on the cusp of obtaining nuclear weapons — if he doesn't have them already — and our Republican president, despite the possible shakiness of the intelligence and the immense logistical difficulties involved, to say nothing of the projected costs in blood and treasure, wants us to go to war with him preemptively for the good of this country and the rest of the world.

Some of you, I expect, remember this movie. It was called, rather blandly, "the war in Iraq." It killed more than 4,500 Americans and nearly 200,000 civilians. It cost more than $2 trillion. It was a disaster from start to finish. Entered on the flimsiest of pretexts, with a staggering blitheness unworthy of a 7-year-old Stratego player; conducted with strategic assumptions so totally divorced from either morality or prudence or the history of warfare that you wonder why its architects and boosters are not in prison; lied about; used as a pawn during one election; gaining the White House for a hopeless political naïf who happened to have denounced it during another — it was, simply put, the dumbest thing America has done in at least half a century.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.