If you haven't yet, you really should read "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win ", by Norman Podhoretz.

Earlier articles in the series can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Pillar 3 of the Bush Doctrine deals with the right to act preemptively to perceived threats. Podhoretz makes the case that the attacks on 9/11 came "out of the blue" - albeit that some willful ignorance was engaged in, since we refused to recognize the patterns of terrorist activity against the US over the past 30 years. We should have seen it coming, but nobody did. Or, in the words of the 9/11 commission, "the 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise."

Even if anyone had seen such a thing coming in the abstract sense, it is hard to believe anything could or would have been done about the 9/11 attacks. For 30 years we have given terrorists the impression that we are a "paper tiger" by our limp responses to their attacks on us. The vile partisanship our country is engulfed in would also have made any response difficult. As Podhoretz notes:

Slightly contradicting itself, the commission said that "the 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise." Maybe so; and yet there was no one, either in government or out, to whom they did not come as a surprise, either in general or in the particular form they took. The commission also spoke of a "failure of imagination." Maybe so again; and yet the word "failure" seems inappropriate, implying as it does that success was possible. Surely a failure so widespread deserves to be considered inevitable.

To the New York Times, however, the failure was not at all inevitable. In a front-page editorial disguised as a "report," the Times credited the commission's final report with finding that "an attack described as unimaginable had in fact been imagined, repeatedly." But not a shred of the documentary evidence cited by the Times for this categorical statement actually predicted that al Qaeda would hijack commercial airliners and crash them into buildings in New York and Washington. Moreover, all of the evidence, such as it was, came from the 1990's. Nevertheless, the Times "report" contrived to convey the impression that in the fall of 2000 the Bush administration-then not yet in office-had received fair warning of an imminent attack. To bolster this impression, the Times went on to quote from a briefing given to Bush a month before 9/11. But the document in question was vague about details, and in any case was only one of many intelligence briefings with no special claim to credibility over conflicting assessments.

Thus the Bush administration, which had just been excoriated in hearings held by the Senate Intelligence Committee for having invaded Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence, was now excoriated by some of the 9/11 commissioners for not having acted on the basis of even sketchier intelligence to head off 9/11 itself. This contradiction elicited a mordant comment from Charles Hill, a former government official who had been a regular "consumer" of intelligence:

Intelligence collection and analysis is a very imperfect business. Refusal to face this reality has produced the almost laughable contradiction of the Senate Intelligence Committee criticizing the Bush administration for acting on third-rate intelligence, even as the 9/11 commission criticizes it for not acting on third-rate intelligence.

President Bush in setting forth Pillar 3, asserts that we will act preemptively to prevent being victimized again the way we were on 9/11. Rather than wait for an attack to be carried out, or even for a threat to be imminent, we will take action, through various means up to and including military action, against those who harbor, financially support, or sponsor terrorists. Going on the attack instead of remaining in a vulnerable defensive position, taking the fight to then enemy, is the way to deter future attacks. Anything less would leave us vulnerable, as we were on 9/11.

Iraq sponsored terrorism abroad, sought and was believed to possess weapons of mass destruction, allowed terrorists to train within its borders, and was linked to al-Queda. Attacking them was the natural result of Pillar 3. It has already paid dividends, as seen in Libya by its abandonment of its nuclear weapons program. North Korea's agreement to multi-lateral negotiations over its nuclear program came shortly after the fall of Iraq as well. Hamas threatened to attack US interests after one of its leaders was killed by Israel - that threat was withdrawn quite hastily. We haven't been attacked here again since 9/11.

The doctrine of preemption is having the desired effect. We are safer with a viable threat of preemption than we were when it was safe to view us as a "paper tiger."