Madam, - It is disappointing to read an eminent scholar making such a disingenuous assault as Robert Kagan makes on Senator John Kerry (Opinion, August 4th). Mr Kagan must be aware of a strong tradition that the United States never fires the first shot in a war, and goes to war only after it or its allies have been attacked, and then only after agonising over the alternatives. That is distinct from various "police actions", such as sending Marines to trouble spots in the Caribbean which the US has been doing for many years.
Consider two wars mentioned by Mr Kagan - the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Mexican War (1896). Even Mr Kagan must know that the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana preceded the war with Spain. The administration of James Polk claimed that the Mexican War was occasioned by Mexican troops attacking American soldiers on US soil, even though a certain Congressman Abraham Lincoln publicly called that claim into question.
Lyndon B. Johnson went to great lengths to secure the Tonkin Gulf resolution after North Vietnamese gunboats allegedly fired on an American destroyer. In Korea, the invading North Korean armies attacked US forces. Even after Pearl Harbour, President Roosevelt sought (and got) a declaration of war against Japan alone, leaving it to Hitler to declare war on the US. The first Gulf War arose from the obliteration of a key ally of the United States, and a real threat to another. The recent Afghan War arose directly from 9/11.
There is plentiful evidence to show that, even when the claims were dubious, every administration that has gone to war has deemed it essential to demonstrate that something more than just "US interests" was at stake and that no alternative to war existed. President George W. Bush's duplicitous warnings about weapons of mass destruction, and his enunciation of a new doctrine of "preventive war", represent a sad departure from a policy that was admirable at its best.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration dismissed the option of a surprise attack on Cuba as unworthy of the US. Robert Kennedy wrote afterwards: "We spent more time on the moral question during the first five days than any other single matter." That was in the finest tradition of American statesmanship, something to which John Kerry promises to return. - Yours etc.
TOBY JOYCE, Balreask Manor, Navan, Co Meath.