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I love this math stuff.
The Russian and Chinese leadership didn't have to read the Rand report to know their strength lay in making sure US experts understood one fact. Killing Russians and Chinese was futile. There simply was no upper limit to Russian or Chinese casualties. This blunt fact had already been demonstrated in the concrete instance by the Germans and Japanese, who were by then key partners in the US alliance.
Enter Vietnam. The Vietnamese illustrated the same lesson to the US. No amount of acceptable force carried out over whatever amount of time, was ever going to be sufficient. The Vietnamese had to prove to the US, once again that there was no upper limit.
There is a similar calculus at work today. How far is too far? Afghanistan, okay. Iraq, not so okay. How about adding Syria, Iran, or North Korea to the load? That begins to move into the unacceptable range, and the Bush administration knows it. At some point, which has to be in this early range of unacceptable, the US will find itself climbing a curve of resistance that threatens to become asymptotic.
That climb has just started in Iraq. It is still an open question whether or not the US can succeed in gaining control and putting a happy face on the atrocity, and get out, before the resistance curve gets any steeper.
At the cynical end of the spectrum is the idea that this war is being fought in the Middle East, where presumably life is cheap.
That has certain advantages for the Empire, and some serious disadvantages. The advantage is that it is usually `they' who die in large numbers, innocent, guilty, or otherwise. The looming disadvantage should sound familiar to the cold warriors of yesteryear.
That bad news is, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how many of them die, because there is no upper limit to what is unacceptable. And that is the ultimate message in the strategic lexicon of radical Islam.
While I admit this is a very good article (thanks to Ted Winslow), I disagree with Justin when he writes,
``It is much more to the point in understanding where the neocons are coming from to think about the history of US nuclear strategy than meditations on Strauss.''
Consider this from the same article,
``Wolfowitz and Wohlstetter belong to that section of the American right wing that stands in opposition to the realism of Henry Kissinger. Unlike Kissinger, they see the export of American values as the main prop and justification for an American global mission.''
Regardless of the death calculus of imperial domination under the technical rubric of deterrence and non-proliferation, it is important to understand the purpose, the mission justification of such policies. As the article notes of Wohlstetter, `power has a higher purpose.' It is understanding this purpose that makes it worth understanding Strauss. And at the core of that understanding is a redefinition of `right', `values', and `America'. Virtually no liberal intellectual educated in the enlightenment tradition of rights, and conversant in history would consider these re-definitions to be either enlightened or American.
For Strauss, Right means a natural right to exercise power, and not what we assume, which is the right to be free from such exercises by governments. The definition of values, are not those of the modest and simple living communities of colonial America, but rather the military virtues of ancient Sparta, Rome, and the princes of the Italian city states.
In historical terms these re-definitions in political philosophy represents what could be seen as the transition from republic to empire. The reason is the ideas Strauss wrote about were created and promulgated in historical contexts when such transitions were underway.
His own seminal period in Weimar was governed by a related dynamic, the dissolution of a republic and the re-establishment of a military empire. In rhetorical terms Strauss's studies followed such transitions from the rights of athenians, to the Right of Athens, the rights of romans, and the Right of Rome.
We can now add, from the rights of americans, to the Right of America.
Chuck Grimes