That costly and protracted wars with high levels of casualties tend to destablize all states involved, heightening social contradictions & bringing down some regimes, is a matter of historical knowledge (Cf. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War), independent of our ethical preferences. How you make use of such historical knowledge politically is up to you. BTW, there is another possibility that I have not mentioned in my post that you condemn:
***** Nuclear Safety
by MATT BIVENS
What happens if a suicide bomber drives a jumbo jet into one of America's 103 nuclear power reactors? What happens if a fire fed by thousands of tons of jet fuel roars through a reactor complex--or, worse, through the enormous and barely-protected containment pools of spent nuclear fuel found at every such plant?
These questions are even more obvious and urgent than they may seem at first glance. Russian television reported on Wednesday: "Our [Russian] security services are warning the United States that what happened on Tuesday is just the beginning, and that the next target of the terrorists will be an American nuclear facility." [See www.nci.org.] Meanwhile, eight years ago, in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, the terrorists themselves wrote to the New York Times to warn that nuclear attack would follow.
That letter, judged authentic by federal authorities, talked of "150 suicide soldiers" who would hit "nuclear targets." As if to drive home the point, those same terrorists had trained beforehand at a camp in Pennsylvania thirty miles from Three Mile Island. US law enforcement had them under surveillance at least a month before they struck--and at one point observed them conducting a mock assault on an electric power substation. That very same weekend, a man later judged to be mentally unwell drove his station wagon through the security barriers at Three Mile Island and parked next to a supposedly secured building. [See www.tmia.com.]
There are nuclear power plants outside many urban areas. There's Indian Point on the Hudson River, some twenty-five miles northwest of New York City; Limerick Plant some twenty miles outside of Philadelphia; Calvert Cliffs, forty-five miles from the nation's capital; and a handful of nuclear plants ringing Chicago, from Dresden to Braidwood. A terrorist strike at any such plant could not bring about a nuclear explosion--but there are a number of scenarios that would spread deadly radiation clouds across, in the NRC's famous phrase, an area the size of Pennsylvania. On top of the tens of thousands of eventual radiation-driven deaths, there is the mass panic such an attack might cause. And if we can clean up and rebuild after the World Trade Center bombing, a radiological attack would force us to write off huge swathes of land as national sacrifice areas.
So given the extraordinary events of this week, we're taking extraordinary measures to protect our nuclear plants, right?
Well, in France, the defense minister has stationed troops around nuclear power plants... But in America, not much is being done....
<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=bivens_wtc_20010916> *****
As soon as the bombings of the WTC happened, Mark D. Stansbery and I sent out a call for an anti-war meeting to local activists and activist e-lists. Harvey Wasserman e-mailed us back mentioning this very possibility.
In short, while crises in the past have tended to create political openings both for the left and the right, it is also possible that today's crisis may bring everyone to utter ruin.
Now, what are you doing in your town in response to the impending war? I'd like info.
Yoshie