Preventive war and democracy

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote an Op-Ed piece in Monday's Washington Post, noting the negative implications that a foreign policy based on military preventionism has on a democratic system:

But our Cold War presidents kept to the Kennan formula ofcontainment plus deterrence, and we won the Cold War without escalatingit into a nuclear war. Enter George W. Bush as the great exponent ofpreventive war. In 2003, owing to the collapse of the Democraticopposition, Bush shifted the base of American foreign policy fromcontainment-deterrence to presidential preventive war: Be silent; I see it, if you don't.Observers describe Bush as "messianic" in his conviction that he isfulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his secondinaugural address, "The Almighty has His own purposes."

Therestretch ahead for Bush a thousand days of his own. He might use them tostart the third Bush war: the Afghan war (justified), the Iraq war(based on fantasy, deception and self-deception), the Iran war (alsofantasy, deception and self-deception). There is no more dangerousthing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidentialpreventive war.

Maybe President Bush, who seems a humane man,might be moved by daily sorrows of death and destruction to forgo solopreventive war and return to cooperation with other countries in theinterest of collective security. Abraham Lincoln would rejoice.

(Read full column here)

The question that I often ask myself from time to time while studying for my history degree at the University of Washington is why do some of our most powerful leaders never seem to learn from history?  Or, quite possibly, maybe a better question to ask is why do they try to defy history?  Over and over again, ever since the beginning of representative democracy, most notably in England and in Germany, a policy of preventionism (definition: one attacking another on the rationale that the other would pose a threat sometime down the road) only increases the mandate of the Executive to a level where normative arguments without reasoning are rhetorically used to quell any opposition.

We are a nation built on democracy.  Representatively speaking, our governmental system is built on both a separation and a balance between three branches of power.  It is difficult to make the case today, as a result of this Administration, that our three branches are holding equal weight.