Professor Becker’s first post is online and here’s the last graf:

Moreover, the degree of certainty required before preventive actions are justified has been considerably reduced below what it was in the past because the destructive power of weaponry has enormously increased. Perhaps most worrisome, the power of weapons continues to grow, and to become more easily accessible. Critics of preventive wars and other preventive actions against rogue states and terrorist groups ignore these major changes in weaponry and their availability. Democratic governments have to recognize that they no longer have the luxury of waiting to respond until they are attacked.

I agree with everything he says in this paragraph. I’m not as crazy about the earlier analogy with criminal behavior, mostly because I think it’s too limiting. This would no doubt set off his commenters that thought attacking Iraq for speculative reasons was a mistake, but I think it’s true. The state has a much higher burden of proof in moving against (potential) criminals than it does in dealing with other states. One reason is that states deal with one another via both war and diplomacy. Hopefully not in that order, but it’s in the nature of sovereignty.

Another commenter brought up an intriguing [update: I rarely re-read posts, but if this post hadn't been up for a few hours already I would edit it and use the word inane, not intriguing] point about box cutters: more people have been killed in the U.S. by terrorists with box cutters than by nuclear weapons. Why aren’t we attacking nations that manufacture box cutters? The commenter misses the whole point of any notion of preventive war: we don’t want to be attacked with nuclear weapons in the first place. September 11th was simply a wake-up call to something that had been building since the Iranian hostage crisis, and it took a disaster to get us out of our slumber. I don’t want to have to wait for yet another disaster to wake us again. There’s an argument to be made against preventive war, but that ain’t it.

As for the title of the post? One of the commenters mentioned that we are creating additional terrorists by attacking Iraq. This is almost certainly true. The questions is, I suppose, are we arresting / killing them faster than we create them? Are we being made less safe for having gone into Iraq? I don’t know, but there’s an upper bound on the number of new terrorists—really, pent up terrorism is more accurate—and I would like to think we’re getting rid of them faster than they’re being created.