The Gertrude Bell Jar

Blogger Fisks Self

We’re rapidly approaching that point in the election season where I feel like I’ve heard each side’s dumb-dumb talking points so often that characters in my dreams are going to start reciting them at each other any night now, but I thought these essays were pretty interesting: Michael Totten (a pro-war liberal blogger who is currently undecided about how to vote this year) has published his Hawkish Case for John Kerry, and his Liberal Case for Bush.

My question for the Kerry argument: But what if Kerry never does change his mind about this stuff? What happens then? And for the Bush argument: But how can Bush really carry out this particular (or any) foreign policy agenda for four more years, given points raised about his diminishing effectiveness in the Kerry essay.

M. said:I think Totten's essays both make really good points. (And clearly the solution is to dump both candidates and start fresh. :-) ) In the end, I think George Bush is more likely to reacquire political capital than Kerry is to become a willing interventionist, but I do wish I thought it were possible to lose Bush himself while keeping (or better yet, strengthening) the foreign policy elements of his that I support. I think his polarizing nature is going to make things harder for a long while, and carries the risk of a full reverse-course when the Presidency changes hands (be that in 2005, 2009, or later-- as we've discussed, this is a long-term strategy. Could we have effectively fought the Cold War if the Republicans had maintained their pre-WWII isolationism, I wonder?)

But I think Totten's characterization of Kerry as basically reactive is correct, and when Totten talks about this changing it's the same sort of whistling in the dark that Andrew Sullivan has made into an art form. Kerry will respond to attacks (I'd guess more in the Clinton style of air strikes and missiles than even an Afghanistan-style campaign, though I suppose he could surprise me). But I don't think we can look to him for any sort of large-scale strategy, which hands over the initiative to our opponents for four to eight years at least. And I believe him when he says he'll bring our troops home from Iraq ASAP, with consequences that will haunt us and bolster our opponents for a generation at least.

DC said.: wow, you're not kidding in calling this guy pro-war. his case in each direction consists entirely of reasons to believe one candidate might be more willing or able than the other to spontaneously invade foreign nations. i guess it's a broader single-issue to vote on than others...

I replied: His question is definitely, why should someone who supports Dubya's general understanding of and approach to the war on terrorism vote for either one of these guys? (Kerry having the vision problem, Dubya having the execution and competence problem). The correct answer is not actually self-evident.

DC replied: i'm not entirely convinced that your understanding of and desired approach to the war on terrorism, say, as you've outlined in your posts, is the same as dubya's. but i think i understand more or less what you're getting at.

it may well be, though-- and he rather argues-- that neither candidate can or will wholeheartedly pursue an agenda of "making the world safe for democracy". in which case, i guess you have to figure out which candidate's half-measures will work better...

T. responded: For sure. Although in California, my presidential vote doesn't really matter, it's an interesting case. If you're evaluating the choice entirely based on the war on terrorism, then the answer is not self-evident. However, for me, when you look at domestic issues (particularly judicial appointments and the regressive tax policy the Bush administration has been hinting about) Kerry becomes the right choice.

All in all, the pro-Kerry article definitely helps to allay my fears WRT Kerry on the war on terrorism.

Another interesting issue is congresional control. On many issues, gridlock in Washington would probably be best. Since the dems can't take the house and the senate is a toss-up, a Kerry presidency would work nicely in that respect. However, I don't know if the war on terror is something that benefits from gridlock. Even if it isn't, will the downsides of another 4 years of republican control exceed the upsides of a (somewhat) unified front on the war on terror? I don't know. The best outcome would probably be a Bush presidency and Democratic control of the house and senate, but that just won't happen this year. (Damn gerrymandering).

A. said: i didn't think his kerry case was very strong... it mostly amounted to the argument that handing responsibility for the WOT over to the administration's carping critics would serve a big steaming mug of STFU to the no blood for oil crowd.

I replied: But it's more than that, isn't it? We learned in the Clinton era that most Democrats simply lose interest in critiquing the administration on almost any issue once their man is in the office (and vice versa of course). Note the 8-year disappearance of homelessness as an urgent social issue in public discourse, or the massive indifference to the war in Kosovo. A Kerry victory would almost certainly put an end to the drumbeat of paranoia and defeatism that has dominated the left side of the aisle for the last three years, or at least relegate it to the fringe where it belongs. This would have to be a good thing. Sustaining a war against an existential threat like terrorism and Islamism is very much a matter of focus and and will.

I also think his point about Dubya's crying WMD wolf problem complicating our ability to preempt threats in the future was pretty valid. I think it is probably true that Kerry would have a great deal more credibility both at home and abroad in identifying and dealing with emerging threats than Dubya would be in a second term.

But these are only an advantages if Kerry is committed to using them, and I don't see a lot of evidence that he is. Instead, for example, one of his arguments seems to be that the mistake (or lie) about WMD in Iraq would not have resulted in war if the US had been more bound by world opinion in 2003. (Or, depending on context, Kerry alternately tries to imply that the US could have conducted diplomacy at the UN in such a way as to result in a "yes" vote on a war resolution at the UN Security Council and French, German, and Russian troops and financial assistance in the war.) But his response is not to promise to reform and improve the CIA and other intelligence agencies so that we don't have to act on sketchy information again, or to promise to always be completely truthful about presenting intelligence estimates to the public. Instead, he seems to be arguing that the US should always conduct foreign policy as if threats are imaginary, or as if the President is lying. (Because the fact of the matter is, if WMD had been found, they together with the information about Iraqi bribes to the officials of foreign governments who opposed the war would have totally validated the President's approach at the UN.)

And Kerry’s foreign policy statements at the first debate were just one completely asinine thing after another. He either doesn't know what he's talking about, or sees foreign policy as just another political issue to score points off the President about. (His completely incoherent "opposite day" approach in the discussion of Iraq/North Korea/Iran was particularly revealing, I thought). Neither possiblity is reassuring.

Foreign Policy Blather Correction!

In a discussion on a friend's journal, I made a comment about the outcome of Dubya’s UN diplomacy that I think has now been proven wrong. I said:

As an aside, I find the attribution of some Security Council’s members’ opposition to the Iraq war to Dubya’s bad manners rather trivializing as well. It seems to me that holdout states, particularly France and Russia, had very clear national interests at stake in avoiding the war. We won’t really know for sure until everyone’s written their memoirs, but it could well be that France, Russia, and Germany had no intention of ever publicly signing off on it under any possible diplomatic circumstances. If that was the case, then Dubya erred primarily in going to the UN at all. Instead, after quietly sounding these states about their likely commitments, he could have gone ahead with the war without ever forcing them to publicly oppose us in the UN arena. Without that embarrassing meltdown, opposing states may have been more inclined to have provided assistance in at least ameliorating the outcome of a war they had not supported, during the brief feel-good moment after Firdas Square. My own reading of the UN debacle was that Dubya went through the process as a method of providing political cover for Tony Blair, in the belief (correct in my opinion) that Britain was our most materially valuable potential ally. I agree that it would have been much better to have had more international support for the occupation phase of the war, but I have no idea how both goals could have been realized at once.

However, since that moment just after the capture of Baghdad, it has become quite clear that the cost of Coalition membership is rather high. France, Germany, and Russia can expect some percentage of any soldiers they send to die in Iraq, and some number of their own citizens to die at home in punitive Islamist terrorist strikes. I can’t think of a single reason why they should volunteer for these costs when they know that a much wealthier and militarily strong nation is already stuck with the bill. If either [Sandy] Berger or Kerry can think of one, apart from "we’re nicer," I’d love to hear it.

But today, I came across this news story (via Totten) about French and German intentions with respect to Iraq. The relevant quotes:

French and German government officials say they will not significantly increase military assistance in Iraq even if John Kerry, the Democratic presidential challenger, is elected on November 2...

In fact, high-ranking German officials are privately concerned at the prospect of Mr Kerry becoming president, arguing it would not change US demands but make it more difficult to reject them.

So maybe the UN debacle was a favor rather than an embarrassment to European hold-out states after all, functioning as a sort of face-saving cover for their attention to their own interests in Iraq--chiefly (but not limited to) economic interests, chiefly (but not limited to) oil.

Which suggests a missed opportunity for a catchy protest slogan:

NO BUSH HATING FOR OIL

Oh, I amuse myself.

Update: A friend commented that the attitude of France and Germany on Iraq seems to be: "You broke it, you fix it." Mr. Bell Jar said, "That's pretty rich, coming from France and Germany."

Democracy Update

Some interesting reports on the Iraqi National Council elections (to form an interim National Council until general elections projected for January 2005) from Zeyad (who incidentally is pretty sanguine about both Sistani and stability in the Hawza) and Ali.

Why was it important for the National Council elections not to fail? UN Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi had wanted to delay them until all groups (mostly Islamist groups and the Sadrists, although SCIRI is in), had agreed to participate instead of boycotting them, in order to enhance the perceived legitimacy of the interim National Council. And indeed it doesn't sound like anybody's happy with the number of Coalition-approved "list" members who made it onto the council. However it may have been better to have gone forward than not, if the outcome of Brahimi’s similar approach in Afghanistan is any guide. (Very long quote behind the cut since the Atlantic has suddenly gone entirely subscriber only, the chumpskies. I should point out that the author of this article, Laura Secor (writing probably in June), was arguing that Afghanistan had been an important learning experience for Brahimi and he would naturally be doing much better in Iraq):

Brahimi—whose official title is special adviser to the Secretary-General on the political situation in Iraq—is an odd match for the Bush Administration's Wilsonian project in Iraq. He does not see it as his business to engineer new democracies, or to impose outside visions on reluctant societies. On the contrary, he is a tough-minded realist who respects and understands power; his approach in similarly vexed situations has been to figure out which players are in charge on the ground and how to meet their minimum requirements. In Afghanistan, for instance, where he successfully negotiated a peace among competing armed factions after the U.S. invasion in 2001, Brahimi earned the enmity of human-rights advocates by allowing murderous warlords not merely to escape justice but to become officials of the new government. Assuring peace and stability, Brahimi explained, was a higher priority than realizing justice—and the surest way to restore peace quickly was to make the warlords stakeholders in the new government.

At the Afghan negotiations he chaired in Bonn, beginning in November of 2001, Brahimi worked out the following arrangement: an interim government would convene an emergency loya jirga seven months later, in order to select the government that would lead Afghanistan for two years after that. The loya jirga, organized by a commission of Afghans under UN supervision, has proved to be one of the most controversial undertakings of the seventy-year-old Brahimi's long career. Nader Nadery, an Afghan who worked as a human-rights activist during the Taliban era, served on the commission. He recalls that the Afghans drew up stringent guidelines excluding anyone who was known to be a human-rights violator from the loya jirga. "But Mr. Brahimi and the interim government were insisting that we invite the warlords," Nadery recalls. "He was pushing the commission to violate its own rules and procedures."

Whether the warlords were brought in on Brahimi's initiative or the Pentagon's is disputed. But Brahimi defended the idea in conversations at the time and in interviews afterward. He explained to the Afghans that if the warlords were not invited, they wouldn't accept the decisions of the loya jirga. He pointed out that the warlords, who had been armed and supported by the United States in the war against the Taliban, already controlled much of Afghanistan's territory; they could not be wished away. Four months later, in an interview conducted by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Brahimi said that although civil leaders claimed to be more representative of the Afghan people than the warlords were, they had no particular basis for asserting this. "Yeah, they are nice people; they want the good of their country; but to say that they are representative—how?" he asked. "You can't compare whether the others are more representative or not."

In the event, the warlords not only attended the loya jirga but occupied front-row seats and left the proceedings in possession of important government ministries. It was a turning point for the new Afghanistan and, Brahimi's critics say, a tantalizing opportunity wasted. Although few experts believe the warlords could have been excluded from the political process, most of those with whom I spoke thought that Brahimi, the United States, and the United Nations actually strengthened the warlords at a moment when they could have been weakened. Vikram Parekh, a Kabul-based researcher for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, faults Brahimi for taking too little input from his own more experienced staff members, who might have told him that some of the warlords were "paper tigers," far from invincible. Nader Nadery recalls attending the pre-loya jirga election in Mazar-e-Sharif, where a handful of regional delegates were to be elected by secret ballot from among caucuses of about sixty local notables. One of the warlords, the notoriously brutal and much feared General Abdul Rashid Dostum, stood as a candidate. For the first time his lock on power was not assured. "When they were counting votes, I saw that his hands were shaking," Nadery told me. "He was very disturbed. He was concerned if he failed, if he lost, what will happen." He didn't lose—a fact Nadery attributes to the conspicuous presence of Dostum's thugs; but even more disappointing to his opponents was the legitimacy conferred on people like Dostum by an international community that saw them not as fading figures from Afghanistan's ugly past but as crucial interlocutors in determining its future. "General Dostum left the loya jirga tent a different person," Nadery claims. "A few days ago his hands were shaking. Now he left the tent the same person he was in 1992. He'd been honored by the international community and the government."

The trouble with Brahimi's approach was that stability and justice were never actually separable. Unsurprisingly, the warlords run their ministries as patronage rackets. Their political and economic entrenchment in power, along with their failure to disarm, has made it very hard for the central government to impose the rule of law more broadly on the country. Though overshadowed by the dramatic news of insurgency and prisoner abuse in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has been steadily deteriorating.

Indeed, toward the end of his tenure as head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, Brahimi seems to have realized that he could not guarantee long-term security there if key ministers in the Afghan government were criminals beyond the reach of the law. "As time wore on in his last year," one diplomatic source told me, "he realized that the continued role of the warlords would bring disaster to Afghanistan. He began to care much more about human rights. It was an evolution in his thinking. He began to realize that unless one had some kind of constitution and disarmament and rule of law, the process would not end up well." Shortly before he left Afghanistan, in January of this year, Brahimi delivered a rousing speech to this effect at the constitutional loya jirga.

I honestly don’t know what the ideal approach would be, but it’s clear that Shia groups are extremely suspicious of the UN approach, perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, the support it seems to enjoy with the Sunni Arab establishment.

Civilization and Its Enemies/Lee Harris

Civilization and Its Enemies: the Next Stage of History by Lee Harris.

This book is mostly an elaboration of several essays the author has published in response to 9/11, including one on the fantasy ideology of Islamic terrorism and another on the "world-historical gamble" involved in the Bush doctrine. His approach to world politics is a very stripped-down sort of Hobbesian one (though references to Hegel are more numerous), that yields some provocative conclusions to say the least. I really felt my ignorance of world history reading this book, being largely unable to test his theories against examples he did not select himself, so I'm hoping some of my history buff friends will want to borrow this and tell me what they think. The book has had for me this oddly compelling quality of causing me to look at everything I've encountered since on the news and whatnot through its lens, but I don't know if that's because it's just so true, or because I don't usually have a grand theory of world events on hand to play with.

Quote of the Day

From Fatema Mernissi, Islam and Democracy : Fear of the Modern World:

When we speak about the conflict between Islam and democracy, we are in fact talking about an eminently legal conflict. If the basic reference for Islam is the Koran, for democracy it is effectively the United Nations Charter, which is above all a superlaw.

The majority of Muslim states have signed this covenant, and thus find themselves ruled by two contradictory laws. One law gives citizens freedom of thought, while the shari’a, in its official interpretation based on ta’a (obedience), condemns it. Most Muslims, who are familiar with the Koran from very early in life, have never had occasion to read the United Nations Charter or to become acquainted with its key concepts. For many people, the charter is like the Haguza monster of my childhood: you hear about it, but no one has ever yet seen it. It has come onto our shores mysteriously folded away in the attache cases of diplomats and, like a harem courtesan, has never succeeded in getting out. With age and confinement is has become, like Haguza, the more terrifying because of its invisibility.

Apocalypse Very Soon!

I'm posting below my detailed ravings about the approach of Armaggedon, written on just before the beginning of the Iraq War. I never posted it because I never finished it, so it just kind of stops in the middle of the first part. I thought about going through and trying to make it sound less hysterical, but why? Really, the panic is half the fun. I don't know how I came to have such an apocalyptic mindset. I would blame it on growing up next door to Strategic Air Command HQ during the Cold War, but other native Omahans of about my age don't seem to go around expecting the world to end just about any minute. Maybe it was because my dad worked there. One day he brought home a box of used computer punchcards when they updated their system, for us to use for drawing and scratch paper, and I'd think "I wonder if I'm holding the very code for the end of the world right between my own thumb and forefinger!"

Btw, I mention my professor by name in the college anecdote below not because he's famous or anything, but because some of my readers went to the same college, and might know him (it's much funnier if you do).

Apocalypse according to me, March 16 2003:

When I was in college, I took a political science course in which one of the assigned texts was John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration. The fatwa enjoining the murder of Salmon Rushdie for heresies against Islam had lately been issued. To begin discussion of the text, our professor, Nathan Tarkov, asked us to imagine that we were standing alone on a rooftop with a radical Muslim would-be assassin, who at that moment was pointing a sniper rifle at Rushdie, visible in the window of a building across the way. How would we dissuade the assassin from committing his intended murder? The students answered with this and that argument from the Letter; Tarkov swatted each one down easily from within the logic of Islamic "fundamentalism." A friend’s boyfriend, who was in the class and who I happened to know was a Marine reservist, arrived late; I overheard his seatmate explaining the discussion topic to him in a whisper. He then raised his hand and asked "What kind of weapon do I have, and what are my orders?"

This was an anecdote in search of meaning up until just lately, which must be why I’ve never told it before. The class found the Marine’s question terribly funny (even Tarkov blinked; his point had been to argue that the philosophical arguments for the separation of church and state can find no purchase in a society which is not already evolving in that direction); first because the idea of actually interceding by force had not so much as crossed our ivory tower hive mind, and second, because, in the larger sense, it was a deeply stupid answer. You can’t kill all the potentially fatwa-following radical Muslims in the world.

Except that you can, mostly. This is the problem.

Is That a Nuke in Your Suitcase, or are You Just Trying to Get Me to Turn That Great Big Sandbox Over There Into a Really, Really Large Sheet of Glass?

I’m not going to rehearse the explanations for why inspections and sanctions will never succeed in disarming Saddam or prevent him from developing the nuclear capacity he evidently seeks; 12 years of history with his regime, together with our exciting new problem with North Korea, make it, to me at least, obvious that all progress toward disarmament will stop the instant we stand down, even if it appears to continue for a very long while. The salient question is, can we live with that?

It turns out, the only thing more terrifying than having two massive nuclear arsenals with the combined capacity to destroy the world a dozen times over pointing directly at each other, in constant readiness to launch on a computer trigger, is having a lot of countries with some nukes and nobody really effectively MADing anybody anymore. Proposals to create some kind of anti-ballistic shield to defend us from "rogue" nukes were floated even before the end of the Cold War, but opposed, and justly so, because such a shield would have the effect of enabling the U.S. to engage in tactical nuclear strikes without MAD consequences, i.e., at all. Yes, Star Wars and Brilliant Pebbles got funding, and Dubya’s version, whatever he’s calling it, will too; the point is no reputable scientist with a sliver of career ambition has been willing to work on such a program, so the Defense Department is left with those researchers who aren’t good enough to find funding for any other project. Hence, no results so far. On the principle of a thousand monkeys typing out Shakespeare after a thousand years, there might be something eventually, but it will take a long time. The point is, we don’t have it now, and a shield would never defend us from a suitcase bomb anyway. Refer to the Drug War to learn how good we are at keeping illicit materials that can fit into a suitcase out of our country.

The point is, we are horribly exposed at the moment. And while we are so exposed, so is most of the rest of the world. Russian nukes are no longer keyed to launch on our launch; the assumption that any launch on our part must be directed at them has evaporated; retaliation is no longer axiomatic for any given U.S. nuclear strike. We could, of course, still expect a massive response if we attacked any country that has its own arsenal with long-range capacity and the ability to detect a launch in their direction. The First World countries are still MAD amongst themselves. But a nuclear strike on any country outside that in-group is absolutely free; MAD then prevents a response from a third party.

Just between us, though it was a horrible, unconscionable tragedy, did the grieving and outcry over 9/11 seem to be a bit, well, much after a while? I turned off the television after a few days; I’ve gone back and looked at various things after and between long periods of time. The constant fixation seemed unhealthy to me: why keep a wound open and bleeding all the time.? After a while, people began to accuse the Bush administration, as well as the American pubic, of being driven by blood-lust, an outsized and unquenchable desire for revenge, in Afghanistan, and now in Iraq. It is seen as appropriate by some to compare the death toll on 9/11 to the civilian casualty rates in Afghanistan; haven’t we had our eye for an eye yet?

The problem with discerning such dark motives unjustly is that it leaves you with nothing more to say when the real thing happens. Bush waited a full six weeks before acting in Afghanistan; extraordinary risks were taken by our soldiers in an effort to minimize civilian casualties; sensitivity to public opinion in the Arab world kept most of our tanks out of the region even as that strategy allowed many of our enemies to escape. With respect to Iraq, violation of a peace treaty has been a causus belli for the resumption of hostilities between warring nations for as long as treaties have existed; Saddam Hussein has been in clear violation of his treaty with us since 1998, which is why the U.S. Congress authorized a regime change in Iraq by force in that year and again in 2002. In addition, every member of the UN Security Council signed Resolution 1441, the plain meaning of which authorizes the use of force if Hussein violated the plain requirements of the resolution, which he has plainly done. We have gathered the support of 18 members of the European Union; we have extended the start date for the war well past the ideal moment in a probably futile attempt to convince the remainder of the Security Council to abide by a resolution they signed only months ago. These are not the actions of a blindly enraged nation. 9/11 persuaded most of us that Clintonian passivity is no longer an option, and that the worst imaginable fears aren’t just for raving lunatics anymore. But we are not, at this moment, completely insane. Yet.

9/11 killed "only" about 3,000 people. A single suitcase nuke detonated in, say, Miami, or Houston, could kill millions. What if that nuke comes from Iraq? What if we don’t know where it came from, but Iraq is still on our suspect list because we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to engage in a conventional war against that country back when? What if we decide to nuke the whole region just to be sure? Who would stop us? Not any member of the UN Security Council, that’s for damn sure. Not us anymore, I’ll wager.

So would John Mearsheimer (a co-founder of the realist school of foreign policy), and he thinks this is so obvious to absolutely everyone that he’s willing to stake a containment policy for Iraq on it. "Containment" of course, is the option preferred by the responsible segment of the antiwar movement. I think it might possibly work, actually; I just don’t understand why anyone thinks it’s "humanitarian."

Containment Equals Peace! Well Just For Us! Well, Mostly!

Lessee: "Containment" of the Soviet Union. Creating the threat of global nuclear annihilation (see above). The Korean War. The Vietnam War. Funding and arms for bloody civil wars in diverse Third World nations. Funding and arms for bloodthirsty dictators in diverse Third World nations. Funding and arms for resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Oops)! A CIA-brokered suppression of a nascent democratic state in favor of yet another bloodthirsty dictator in Iran. (Oops again! See next.)

"Containment" of Islamic fundamentalism, version 1.0: Funding and arming of a bloodthirsty dictator for the purpose of waging an 8-year border war with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Millions dead, Saddam armed.

You can see how completely and unpredictably the shit piles up with this sort of thing, can’t you? In fact, you could say "containment" is the proximate cause of most if not all of our current ills, and you’d be right. We had no choice with the Soviet Union. If we were to oppose them at all, it had to be that way; it was too powerful a country to confront directly; open war was completely out of the question because of our mutual nuclear arsenals. Some think we needn’t have confronted them at all. The Cold War is powerful object lesson in how "containment" works nonetheless.

"Containment" is a blank check. We cannot compare it with our current options, at least not with respect to humanitarian concerns, because we have absolutely no idea what it will entail in the future. We cannot assume we will somehow behave better tomorrow than we did yesterday. What if we work really, really hard to put only truly good men in the White House? It still will be the same. Jimmy Carter is a very, very good man. He won a Nobel Prize, you know. He also armed Saddam. He also escalated the arms race. "Containment" isn’t "Peace."

Mearsheimer’s "containment" in fact may require a great deal of death indeed to maintain. He assumes that Saddam will never attack us or Israel or Saudi Arabia because Saddam "knows" we would respond with a nuclear assault. Does he? What he knows is that we stopped at his borders, in deference not only to world opinion and UN pressure, but also out of concern for our own troops, and because it turned out we didn’t really care what kind of government he was running in there after all. (Sorry, Kurds. Sorry Karbala.). If we stand down again, it will make two times that we have been too "weak" to use our obviously superior military power. And we will have done so to avoid a war that would have killed many, many fewer people than a nuclear response to any outrage of his would kill (not to mention the death toll from the outrage itself). So say in a few years our worst fears are realized and Saddam finally has his nuclear program up and running; maybe he’ll test us by launching a nuke or possibly some nice bioweapons at, say, Israel. At that point, we will be required, by the containment theory at least, to give a nuclear response. If we don’t, there is no longer any "containment." And so he may do even worse the next time. And then we would probably respond with nukes at last. The death toll is running into tens of millions by now.

Saddam the Rational

Of course it would be getting pretty hot for Saddam at that point too. Mearsheimer argues that Hussein is actually a rational actor who, by his own lights at least, was taking no unreasonable risks in either invading Kuwait or starting a border war with Iran. He could just be misreading Bush right now; it could be an honest mistake that he’s essentially volunteering to lose absolutely everything in preference to abiding by his treaty with us (yet another blow to Mearsheimer’s theory, though, that he’s gambling we won’t do even this much). Maybe so. But nukes are forever; Saddam is not. His sons are reputed to be a psychopaths. Remember that brief, tentative stab of hope everyone felt when Kim Jong Il’s father finally died? Good times. And if it turns out Mearsheimer’s wrong about him, we’ll find out once he gets nukes and a reliable targeting system. Then we can, well, just go on with "containment," because what the hell else can we do at that point? (It’s just so hard to tell for sure. Did you know that Castro wanted Kruschev to launch during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Did you know that Castro’s people thought Saddam was bugshit crazy for refusing to withdraw from Kuwait? Everyone’s got an opinion!)

The Very Big Picture

For those who, like me, found Chirac’s motion in the UN to deny the U.S. & U.K. the power to administer post-war Iraq somewhat surreal, and his subsequent announcement of a move to create a new security arrangement consisting of France, Germany and Belgium suicidal (the idea of withdrawing U.S. troops from Germany and the U.S. from NATO and the UN as a punishment of "old" Europe has been floating around the blogosphere for a while now), here is a rational explanation of Chirac’s policy goals.

Also, here is an interpretation of what the big security picture for the US without the UN might look like, and why. The same author elaborates on his term “fantasy ideology” here; I recognized enough of the far left activists I used to hang with in college, and, indeed, of my former self to find this a rather persuasive portrait of Al Qaeda psychology. As for his main thesis, I just don’t know. This is in some respects the opposite of what I had thought the grand strategy was; i.e., Mr. de Villepin’s dark suspicion that the U.S. had “dreams of remaking the Middle East in its own image of democracy,” to quote the New York Times. Various Arab nations appear to be bargaining already with anticipated U.S. hegemony in the region upon the very assumption that it will create pressure for democracy, but we could all be misreading the tea leaves together. There is yet another possibility that the administration is merely feeling its way with these security issues and has no grand strategy to speak of; certainly the dissension among Bush advisors on this and many other points has been widely reported. I’m feeling very agnostic at the moment.

M. said: I think the fantasy ideology thing is certainly an element of something like the LSD shutdown. But when I was discussing it with L. the day it happened, I opined that another one is a straightforward assertion of power. Actions like that aren't intended to win converts to the cause, they're intended to exhibit the size and power of the movement, to reassure allies that they're not alone and powerless and to intimidate the opposition. Compare Critical Mass, where a bunch of bike riders ride en masse and block motorized traffic-- the name itself points to the idea that their numbers, while small on an absolute scale, are sufficient to force the public to pay attention to them and make policy changes, or else suffer the consequences. (My impression is that it hasn't worked terribly well, but that's partly because people who use bikes as a serious form of transportation really are a tiny minority. If they were a double-digit percentage of the population, that might probably be a different matter.)

I don't think much of those sorts of tactics, since the entire thrust is to hold people of all viewpoints hostage to a comparatively small group of activists. But I'd guess that they can work to some extent, if there's enough overall support for the goal. As much as they may alienate potential supporters, they also create an immediate issue that needs to be addressed, and "give them X if it'll make them go away" isn't an unheard of reaction. (Neither, of course, is "hit them with the tear gas and arrest the ones you catch", though how that's handled can give one side or the other a publicity victory.)

I doubt that it's likely to be productive in this particular case, since it's unlikely that Congress or the administration cares about local traffic problems. (I'd certainly hope that we're not going to start making foreign policy on the basis of traffic jams.) I do think that people are likely to magnify their overall support and the level of impact they're likely to have. But I don't think that it's purely fantasy that drives these sorts of activities-- they can be used to practical effect in some situations, for better or worse.

I replied: FWIW, from what I've managed to gather about radical Islam so far, the 9/11 bombing also may have had a practical purpose, that of making new recruits. A movement that can pull off something like that against the West must have something going for it, right? And if the U.S. really had begun adjusting its foreign policy goals to suit Al-Qaeda as some people urged, for example by immediately pulling our troups out of Saudi Arabia, or simply abandoning Israel, then so much the better for them. However, when you follow the circle around to the agenda that Al-Qaeda is actually recruiting for, it's back to fantasy-land; embedded in the recruiting power of 9/11, if it had any, is the idea that killing the infidel is a good in and of itself.

M. said: Meanwhile, Steven Den Beste suggests another motivation for unpopular protest tactics: they may serve to bind the people involved to one another more tightly by giving them a shared unpleasant experience and alienating them somewhat from the rest of society. He draws parallels to fraternity hazings, military traditions, and distinctive clothing worn by religious minorities:

"[I]f a given group always goes around in public wearing strange robes and with most of their hair shaved and a strange braided pigtail, they tend to get strange looks from others, and quite often are avoided or treated with disdain. In some members this will eventually cause them to give up and leave, but it's more common for them to bond more closely to the group because of this. And disdain is given for disdain received; they hate us because they know we're better than they are ... [E]ven if these demonstrations have had little political effect at all, or outright negative effect, on the public as a whole, it also has the effect of making those in the movement itself particularly dedicated to the cause. There's little practical difference between wearing weird robes and dancing and chanting on a street corner, and having a vomit-in at City Hall."

I replied: I think he's on to something there. On one of the news reports I saw of demonstrations in Daley Plaza last week, an organizer was explaining to Dubya: "You have created a movement that is not going away any time soon!!"