Is it right to pre-emptively strike a foe who may or may not become a threat to you? It's a question of reactive force versus proactive force and that issue has been dealt with in comics for a while now. Is it right to act "before it's too late" even if there is only a chance that any phyiscal danger will actually coming to bear? If so, when do you draw the line? One might suggest if the other person is planning on developing weapons to attack while another person might say that simply harboring people who plan on attacking us is enough.
In Justice League: New World Order, the team struggles with the Hyperclan, a proactive team who looks to solve the world's problems with a series of quickfixes. These solutions solve the problems but with little thought to the ramifications. For instance, the Hyperclan can turn the Sahara into a garden paradise but the problem remains that the climate simply cannot survive there. As with this action, all the solutions are proved in the end to be so short sighted that they have no permanence.
Stormwatch deals with the same issue, particularly with the introduction of the High, who wants to bring peace to the world. However, his view of the world is far too naive for him to be successful. The trend continues and expands when the series switched over to the Authority, since the very protagonists of that book are proactive heroes. There is even a scene in the Authority where they overthrow an abusive Asian dictator (certainly this reminds you of our own situation in the Middle East). Indeed, the situation is strikingly similar, here is a despot who abuses his own people so a group disposes of him and offers sanctuary to his citizens. Yet the citizens are no better off with their conquering heroes than they were with the dictator because despite best intentions. Once you interfere with something all you do is create more chaos, at least initially and the less forethought put into a matter, the worse that chaos will be. In the case of the rescued peasants, they end up dying and being dumped in the interdimensional barrier known as the Bleed.
Proactive, or pre-emptive strikes end up being merely a stop-gap solution as our involvement in Iraq shows. When you fix a situation with force, all you end up doing is replacing one problem with another and the more effort you put into the more the situation requires of you. As Oliver Cromwell said, "a man who owns everything by force, owns nothing at all." Or for a more comic related quote, although a more chilling one, turn to Magog in Kingdom Come: "They chose me. They chose the ma who would kill over the man who wouldn't... and now they're dead."
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