“Calling al Qaeda ‘a new kind of enemy’ [at a speech at West Point on June 1, 2002], President Bush argued that, after 9/11, America could no longer wait for a foreign threat to fully reveal itself. Instead it would act preemptively to ‘confront the worst threats before they emerge.’ This new commitment was contradictory to America’s tradition of resorting to military action only as a last resort in response to a clear and present danger and represented the most radical departure yet in U.S. history from the framers’ reluctance toward foreign entanglement.”
– Eugene Jarecki, The American Way of War, Page 226