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!)