[Oops! That last one squirted. I'm sorry.]
On Sat, 14 Sep 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >Awesome. This excerpt constitutes a 2553-word definition of "hubris."
> >I believe the nation's current state of dementia exceeds that of any
> >other time in US history, which is saying something.
>
> Really? Worse than the Cold War? Worse than when Herman Kahn was
> thinking the unthinkable? Worse than the Reagan years, when they talked
> openly about winnable nuclear wars?
Very good comparison. Equally logical and equally mad.
What strikes me about this reasoning is that it rests on an enormous sleight of hand. The justification for it all is that there might someday be super-terrorists "who have no return address." That supposedly is why deterrence no longer works and sovereignty must be trampled on. But the new system, as laid out here, is entirely conceived of in terms of nation states. As far as terrorism is concerned, it presumes exactly the opposite of the original premise -- that terrorists do have return addresses, and that WMD are impossible to build without the resources of states. But of course if that's true, then the logic of deterrence still holds. And none of the rest of this argument follows.
If on the other hand you took seriously the original premise, that terrorism has no return address, and is important enough to require a change in the basis of international relations, it would clearly have to be a change in the opposite direction, towards great cooperation between states, and greater symbolic and material inclusion of the excluded sectors of the world. Throughout history, fighting terrorists who had a wide network of strong sympathizers has been like fighting guerrilla wars. Success has always involved a political component, an effort at inclusion. Military action without it has always spurred it on.
(Terrorists without a widespread network of sympathizers have been rooted out by police work alone. But obviously such a phenomena would present no epochal threat.)
So a system designed to outrage the national amour-propre of the entire world seems like the worst possible way to stamp out terrorism and a great way to stimulate it. Especially when it is coupled with no pretense of any accompanying material gain for this political concession -- no even empty words about bettering the lot of people in these countries of "conditional soveriegnty" that are meant now to consciously and permanently bend their knee to the United States.
Of course, it is possible to decide, despite that one terrible lucky hit, what European nations decided years ago -- that terrorism really isn't a world changing event, and that the number of people who will die of it annually will be considerably less than die of many other side-effects of modernization. But that leads to the same conclusion as taking terrorism seriously: that is mainly a matter of policing and security and above all cooperation, not only with other nation-states, but also with the communities of people that live within them. Which would indicate an opposite approach designed to make people your friends, not your enemies.
On the other hand, if we see terrorism as an excuse for a system that really is about nation states -- but about making all nation states subordinate to this one, and preemptively crushing rivals or even problems before they can arise -- then it's a diabolically lovely one, since a steady stream of terrorist events, so long as they are sufficiently spaced out, will continually legitimate this endless war, in the same way that the assasination policy in Israel was supported by the terrorist attacks it fostered.
The same reasoning applies to the question of nuclear weapons. If you need nation states to make them (and you do), then the logic of deterrence still holds. And the logic of non-proliferation has not done badly. What you want is to tighten the latter up, not destroy is completely. That would mean strengthening the conventions that police them -- which is exactly the opposite of the neoconservative approach. (Oddly, they believe that technology cannot detect nuclear weapons when wielded by inspectors in the country, but think it can infallibly detect them when wielded by military spy agencies outside the country.)
In addition, after raising the costs of obtaining them, one could lower the payoff of having them by contributing to produce a a world in which countries felt no need for them because they felt under no fear of attack -- a world that has been completely within our grasp since the end of the cold war.
And to this, if one were really serious, could be added increased incentives to countries who had them not to share them. And if we were really serious that proliferation should go no further, we should phase out nuclear power as more dangerous than it's worth. (Outlaw reactors and you've outlawed the making of bomb development. And reactors are very easy to detect.)
The neoimperial approach, on the other hand, which makes every country fear complete overthrow at every moment seems perfectly designed to stimulate all of them to seek nuclear (as well as chemical and biological ones); to use them if they have them; and to disincline enabler countries from cooperating with the US in limiting their spread, since that would mean foregoing income and influence on their part with no offsetting gain, and no prospect except a continual diminishment of influence.
China and Russia are big problems for this scheme. Which, I'm afraid, will soon bring us full circle back to the idea of winnable nuclear wars. If in fact the main people behind this scheme ever left it. Winnable nuclear war was the brainchild of people who chafed against deterrence and wanted somehow to escape from it. This seems like the ultimate flowering of the same impulse.
What, for example, are these neoimperialists thinking of doing to keep Russia from carrying out its recent agreement to build 5 nuclear reactors in Iran, I wonder. Offering it a reasonable place of prominence in a trustably multilateral world?
Michael