"All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the
earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In
this day and time...I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I
wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a
thing."
--President Dwight Eisenhower, 1953,
upon being presented with plans to wage
preventive war to disarm Stalin's Soviet
Union
"Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however
objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means
for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions."
--Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson,
the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg
trials,
in his opening statement to the tribunal
I. The Lost War
In his poem "Fall 1961,"
written when the cold war was at its zenith, Robert Lowell wrote:
All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
This autumn and winter, nuclear danger has returned, in a new
form, accompanied by danger from the junior siblings in the mass destruction
family, chemical and biological weapons. Now it is not a crisis between two
superpowers but the planned war to overthrow the government of Iraq that, like a sentence
of execution that has been passed but must go through its final appeals before
being carried out, we have talked to death. (Has any war been so lengthily
premeditated before it was launched?) Iraq, the United States insists, possesses
some of these weapons. To take them away, the United States will overthrow the
Iraqi government. No circumstance is more likely to provoke Iraq to use any forbidden
weapons it has. In that event, the Bush Administration has repeatedly said, it
will itself consider the use of nuclear weapons. Has there ever been a clearer
or more present danger of the use of weapons of mass destruction?
While we were all talking and the danger was growing, strange to
say, the war was being lost. For wars, let us recall, are not fought for their own sake but to achieve aims. Victory cannot be judged
only by the outcome of battles. In the American Revolutionary War, for example,
Edmund Burke, a leader of England's antiwar movement,
said, "Our victories can only complete our ruin." Almost two
centuries later, in Vietnam, the United States triumphed in almost
every military engagement, yet lost the war. If the aim is lost, the war is
lost, whatever happens on the battlefield. The novelty this time is that the
defeat has preceded the inauguration of hostilities.
The aim of the Iraq war has never been
only to disarm Iraq. George Bush set
forth the full aim of his war policy in unmistakable terms on January 29, 2002, in his first State of the Union address. It was
to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, not only in Iraq but everywhere in the
world, through the use of military force. "We must," he said,
"prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological or
nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world."
He underscored the scope of his ambition by singling out three countries--North Korea, Iran and Iraq--for special mention,
calling them an "axis of evil." Then came
the ultimatum: "The United States of
America will not permit the world's most dangerous
regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." Other
possible war aims--to defeat Al Qaeda, to spread
democracy--came and went in Administration pronouncements, but this one has
remained constant. Stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction is the
reason for war given alike to the Security Council, whose inspectors are now
searching for such weapons in Iraq, and to the American
people, who were advised in the recent State of the Union address to fear
"a day of horror like none we have ever known."
The means whereby the United States would stop the
prohibited acquisitions were first set forth last June 1 in the President's
speech to the graduating class at West Point. The United States would use force, and
use it pre-emptively. "If we wait for threats to
fully materialize, we will have waited too long," he said. For "the only path to safety is the path of action. And
this nation will act." This strategy, too, has remained constant.
The Bush policy of using force to stop the spread of weapons of
mass destruction met its Waterloo last October, when
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs James Kelly was
informed by Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju of North Korea that his country has
a perfect right to possess nuclear weapons. Shortly, Secretary of State Colin
Powell stated, "We have to assume that they might have one or two....
that's what our intelligence community has been saying for some time."
(Doubts, however, remain.) Next, North Korea went on to announce
that it was terminating the Agreed Framework of 1994, under which it had shut
down two reactors that produced plutonium. It ejected the UN inspectors who had
been monitoring the agreement and then announced its withdrawal from the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, under whose terms it was obligated to remain
nuclear-weapon-free. Soon, America stated that North Korea might be moving fuel
rods from existing reactors to its plutonium reprocessing plant, and that it
possessed an untested missile capable of striking the western United States. "We will not
permit..." had been Bush's words, but North Korea went ahead and
apparently produced nuclear weapons anyway. The Administration now discovered
that its policy of pre-emptively using overwhelming
force had no application against a proliferator with
a serious military capability, much less a nuclear power. North Korea's
conventional capacity alone--it has an army of more than a million men and
11,000 artillery pieces capable of striking South Korea's capital,
Seoul--imposed a very high cost; the addition of nuclear arms, in combination
with missiles capable of striking not only South Korea but Japan, made it
obviously prohibitive.
By any measure, totalitarian North Korea's possession of
nuclear weapons is more dangerous than the mere possibility that Iraq is trying to develop
them. The North Korean state, which is hard to distinguish from a cult, is also
more repressive and disciplined than the Iraqi state, and has caused the death
of more of its own people--through starvation. Yet in the weeks that followed
the North Korean disclosure, the Administration, in a radical reversal of the
President's earlier assessments, sought to argue that the opposite was true.
Administration spokespersons soon declared that the North Korean situation was
"not a crisis" and that its policy toward that country was to be one
of "dialogue," leading to "a peaceful multilateral
solution," including the possibility of renewed oil shipments. But if the
acquisition by North Korea of nuclear arms was not a crisis, then there never
had been any need to warn the world of the danger of nuclear proliferation, or
to name an axis of evil, or to deliver an ultimatum to disarm it.
For the North Korean debacle represented not the failure of a good
policy but exposure of the futility of one that was impracticable from the
start. Nuclear proliferation, when considered as the global emergency that it
is, has never been, is not now and never will be stoppable by military force;
on the contrary, force can only exacerbate the problem. In announcing its
policy, the United States appeared to have
forgotten what proliferation is. It is not army divisions or tanks crossing
borders; it is above all technical know-how passing from one mind to another.
It cannot be stopped by B-2 bombers, or even Predator drones. The case of Iraq had indeed always
been an anomaly in the wider picture of nonproliferation. In the 1991 Gulf War,
the US-led coalition waged war to end Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. In the process it
stumbled on Saddam Hussein's program for building weapons of mass destruction,
and made use of the defeat to impose on him the new obligation to end the
program. A war fought for one purpose led to peace terms serving another. It was
a historical chain of events unlikely ever to be repeated, and offered no model
for dealing with proliferation.
|
The Case Against the
War
(page 2 of 7)
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he lesson so far?
Exactly the opposite of the intended one: If you want to avoid "regime
change" by the United States, build a nuclear
arsenal--but be sure to do it quietly and fast. As Mohamed ElBaradei,
the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said, the United States seems to want to
teach the world that "if you really want to defend yourself, develop
nuclear weapons, because then you get negotiations, and not military
action."
Although the third of the "axis" countries presents no
immediate crisis, events there also illustrate the bankruptcy of the Bush
policy. With the help of Russia, Iran is building nuclear
reactors that are widely believed to double as a nuclear weapons program.
American threats against Iraq have failed to
dissuade Iran--or for that matter,
its supplier, Russia--from proceeding.
Just this week, Iran announced that it had
begun to mine uranium on its own soil. Iran's path to acquiring
nuclear arms, should it decide to go ahead, is clear. "Regime change"
by American military action in that half-authoritarian, half-democratic country
is a formula for disaster. Whatever the response of the Iraqi people might be
to an American invasion, there is little question that in Iran hard-liners and
democrats alike would mount bitter, protracted resistance. Nor is there
evidence that democratization in Iraq, even in the unlikely
event that it should succeed, would be a sure path to denuclearization. The
world's first nuclear power, after all, was a democracy, and of nine nuclear
powers now in the world, six--the United States, England, France, India, Israel and Russia--are also
democracies. Iran, within striking
range of Israel, lives in an
increasingly nuclearized neighborhood. In these
circumstances, would the Iranian people be any more likely to rebel against nuclearization than the Indian people did--or more, for
that matter, than the American people have done? And if a democratic Iran obtained the bomb,
would pre-emption or regime change then be an option for the United States?
The collapse of the overall Bush policy has one more element that
may be even more significant than the appearance of North Korea's arsenal or
Iran's apparently unstoppable discreet march to obtaining the bomb. It has
turned out that the supplier of essential information and technology for North Korea's uranium program was
America's faithful ally in
the war on terrorism, Pakistan, which received
missile technology from Korea in return. The
"father" of Pakistan's bomb, Ayub Qadeer Khan, has visited North Korea thirteen times. This
is the same Pakistan whose nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin
Mahood paid a visit to Osama
bin Laden in Afghanistan a few months before September 11, and whose nuclear
establishment even today is riddled with Islamic fundamentalists. The BBC has
reported that the Al Qaeda network succeeded at one
time in building a "dirty bomb" (which may account for Osama bin Laden's claim that he
possesses nuclear weapons), and Pakistan is the likeliest source for the
materials involved, although Russia is also a candidate. Pakistan, in short,
has proved itself to be the world's most dangerous proliferator,
having recently acquired nuclear weapons itself and passed on nuclear
technology to a state and, possibly, to a terrorist group.
Indeed, an objective ranking of nuclear proliferators in order of
menace would place Pakistan (a possessor of the bomb that also purveys the
technology to others) first on the list, North Korea second (it peddles
missiles but not, so far, bomb technology), Iran (a country of growing
political and military power with an active nuclear program) third, and Iraq (a
country of shrinking military power that probably has no nuclear program and is
currently under international sanctions and an unprecedented inspection regime
of indefinite duration) fourth. (Russia, possessor of 150
tons of poorly guarded plutonium, also belongs somewhere on this list.) The
Bush Administration ranks them, of course, in exactly the reverse order,
placing Iraq, which it plans to attack, first, and Pakistan, which it befriends
and coddles, nowhere on the list. It will not be possible, however, to right
this pyramid. The reason it is upside down is that it was unworkable right side
up. Iraq is being attacked not
because it is the worst proliferator but because it
is the weakest.
The reductio ad absurdum
of the failed American war policy was illustrated by a recent column in the Washington
Post by the superhawk Charles Krauthammer.
Krauthammer wants nothing to do with soft measures; yet he, too, can see that
the cost of using force against North Korea would be prohibitive:
"Militarily, we are not even in position to bluff." He rightly
understands, too, that in the climate created by pending war in Iraq, "dialogue"
is scarcely likely to succeed. He has therefore come up with a new idea. He
identifies China as the solution. China must twist the arm of
its Communist ally North Korea. "If China and South Korea were to cut off North Korea, it could not
survive," he observes. But to make China do so, the United States must twist China's arm. How? By encouraging Japan to
build nuclear weapons. For "if our nightmare is a nuclear North Korea, China's is a nuclear Japan." It irks
Krauthammer that the United States alone has to face up
to the North Korean threat. Why shouldn't China shoulder some of the
burden? He wants to "share the nightmares." Indeed. He wants to stop
nuclear proliferation with more nuclear proliferation. Here the nuclear age
comes full circle. The only nation ever to use the bomb is to push the nation
on which it dropped it to build the bomb and threaten others.
As a recommendation for policy, Krauthammer's suggestion is Strangelovian, but if it were considered as a prediction it
would be sound. Nuclear armament by North Korea really will tempt
neighboring nations--not only Japan but South Korea and Taiwan--to acquire nuclear
weapons. (Japan has an abundant
supply of plutonium and all the other technology necessary, and both South Korea and Taiwan have had nuclear
programs but were persuaded by the United States to drop them.) In a
little-noticed comment, Japan's foreign minister
has already stated that the nuclearization of North Korea would justify a
pre-emptive strike against it by Japan. Thus has the Bush
plan to stop proliferation already become a powerful force promoting it. The policy of pre-emptive war has led to pre-emptive
defeat.
General
Groves Redux
Radical
as the Bush Administration policy is, the idea behind it is not new. Two months
after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gen. Leslie Groves, the Pentagon
overseer of the Manhattan Project, expressed his views on controlling nuclear
proliferation. He said:
If we were truly realistic instead of idealistic, as we
appear to be [sic], we would not permit any foreign power with which we
are not firmly allied, and in which we do not have absolute confidence, to make
or possess atomic weapons. If such a country started to make atomic weapons we
would destroy its capacity to make them before it has progressed far enough to
threaten us.
The
proposal was never seriously considered by President Truman and, until now, has
been rejected by every subsequent President. Eisenhower's views of preventive
war are given in the epigraph at the beginning of this article. In 1961, during
the Berlin crisis, a few of Kennedy's advisers made the surprising
discovery that Russia's nuclear forces were far weaker
and more vulnerable than anyone had thought. They proposed a preventive strike.
Ted Sorensen, the chief White House counsel and speechwriter, was told of the
plan. He shouted, "You're crazy! We shouldn't let guys like you around
here." It never came to the attention of the President.
How
has it happened that President Bush has revived and implemented this
long-buried, long-rejected idea? We know the answer. The portal was September
11. The theme of the "war on terror" was from the start to strike
pre-emptively with military force. Piece by piece, a
bridge from the aim of catching Osama bin Laden to
the aim of stopping proliferation on a global basis was built. First came the
idea of holding whole regimes accountable in the war on terror; then the idea
of "regime change" (beginning with Afghanistan), then pre-emption, then the
broader claim of American global dominance. Gradually, the most important issue
of the age--the rising danger from weapons of mass destruction--was subsumed as
a sort of codicil to the war on terror. When the process was finished, the
result was the Groves plan writ large--a reckless and impracticable idea when
it was conceived, when only one hostile nuclear power (the Soviet Union) was in
prospect, and a worse one today in our world of nine nuclear powers (if you
count North Korea) and many scores of nuclear-capable ones.
The
Administration now hints, however, that although its overall nonproliferation
policy might be in trouble, the forcible disarmament of Iraq still makes sense on its own terms.
Bush now claims that "different threats require different
strategies"--apparently forgetting that the Iraq policy was announced with great
fanfare in the context of a global policy of preserving the world from weapons
of mass destruction. The mainstream argument, shared by many doubters as well
as supporters of the war, is that if Iraq is shown to possess weapons of
mass destruction, its regime must be attacked and destroyed. Thus the only
question is whether Iraq has the weapons. A team of
"realist" analysts, organized by Stephen Walt of Harvard's John F.
Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer of
the University of Chicago, have given a convincing
response: They are prepared to live with a nuclear-armed Iraq. "The United States can contain a nuclear Iraq," they write. They argue
that Hussein belongs, like his idol Stalin, in the class of rational monsters.
The idea that he is not deterrable is "almost
certainly wrong." He wants power; he knows that to engage again in
aggression is to insure his overthrow and likely his personal extinction. The
record of his wars--against Iran, against Kuwait--shows him to be brutal but
calculating. He is 65 years old. Time will solve the problem, as it did with
the Soviet
Union.
What
is of most desperately immediate concern, however, is that America's pre-emptive war will lead
directly to the use of the weapons whose mere possession the war is supposed to
prevent. In the debate over the inspections now going on in Iraq, it sometimes seems to be
forgotten that Iraq either does possess
weapons of mass destruction (as Colin Powell has just asserted at the UN) or does
not possess them, and that each alternative has consequences that go far
beyond the decision whether or not to go to war. If Iraq does not have these weapons, then
the war will be an unnecessary, wholly avoidable slaughter. If Iraq does have the weapons, then there
is a likelihood that it will use them. Why else would
Saddam Hussein, having created them, bring on the destruction of his regime and
his personal extinction by hiding them from the UN inspectors? And if in fact
he does use them, then the United States, as it has made clear, will
consider using nuclear weapons in retaliation. Powell has asserted that Saddam
has recently given his forces fresh orders to use chemical weapons. Against whom? In what circumstances?
Is it possible that this outcome--a Hitlerian
finale--is what Hussein seeks? Could it be his plan, if cornered, to provoke
the United States into the first use of nuclear
weapons since Nagasaki?
We
cannot know, but we do know that White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has
stated that if Iraq uses weapons of mass destruction against American troops
"the United States will use whatever means necessary to protect us and the
world from a holocaust"--"whatever means" being diplomatese for nuclear attack. The Washington Times
has revealed that National Security Presidential Directive 17, issued secretly
on September 14 of last year, says in plain English what Card expressed
obliquely. It reads, "The United States will continue to make clear that
it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force--including potentially
nuclear weapons--to the use of [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends
and allies." Israel has also used diplomatese
to make known its readiness to retaliate with nuclear weapons if attacked by Iraq. Condoleezza Rice has threatened
the Iraqi people with genocide: If Iraq uses weapons of mass destruction,
she says, it knows it will bring "national obliteration." (Threats of
genocide are flying thick and fast around the world these days. In January,
Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes threatened
that if Pakistan launched a nuclear attack on India--as Pakistan's President Pervez
Musharraf has threatened to do if India invades Pakistan--then "there will be no Pakistan left when we have
responded.") William Arkin writes in the Los
Angeles Times that the United States is "drafting contingency
plans for the use of nuclear weapons." STRATCOM--the successor to the
Strategic Air Command--has been ordered to consider ways in which nuclear
weapons can be used pre-emptively, either to destroy
underground facilities or to respond to the use or threats of use of weapons of
mass destruction against the United States or its forces.
Oil and
Democracy
Other
critics of the war have concluded from the disparity in America's treatment of Iraq and North Korea that the Administration's aim is
not to deal with weapons of mass destruction at all but to seize Iraq's oil, which amounts to some 10
percent of the world's known reserves. The very fact that the Bush
Administration refuses even to discuss the oil question (the war "has
nothing to do with oil," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
has said) suggests that the influence of oil is moving powerfully in the
background. One is tempted to respond to Rumsfeld
that if the Administration is not thinking about the consequences of a war for
the global oil regime, it is culpably neglecting the security interests of the United States. However, there is in fact no
contradiction between the goals of disarming Iraq and seizing its oil. Both fit
neatly into the larger scheme of American global dominance.
Still
other critics place the emphasis not on oil but on political reform of Iraq and even the entire Middle East. Thomas Friedman of the New
York Times is prepared to support Hussein's overthrow, but only if we
"do it right"--which is to say that we devote the "time and
effort" to creating "a self-sustaining, progressive, accountable Arab
government" in Iraq. And this delightful government
(can we have one at home, too, please?), in turn, must become "a
progressive model for the whole region." "Our kids" can grow up
in "a safer world" only "if we help put Iraq on a more progressive path and
stimulate some real change in an Arab world that is badly in need of
reform." Fouad Ajami,
of Johns Hopkins University, likewise wants the United States to get over its "dread of
nation-building" and spearhead "a reformist project that seeks to
modernize and transform the Arab landscape," now mired in
"retrogression and political decay." Michael Ignatieff,
director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, is
also of the "do it right" school. His starting point, however, is the
need to disarm Iraq. In his essay in the New York
Times Magazine "The American Empire: The Burden," he begins by
noting that if Saddam Hussein is permitted to have weapons of mass destruction,
he will have a "capacity to intimidate and deter others, including the United States." Being deterred in a region
of interest is evidently unacceptable for an imperial power, and forces it to
remove the offending regime. Yet if the regime is to be removed, a larger
imperial agenda becomes inescapable. By this reasoning Ignatieff
arrives at the same destination as Friedman and Ajami:
The United States must mount "an imperial operation that would commit a
reluctant republic to become the guarantor of peace, stability, democratization
and oil supplies in a combustible region of Islamic peoples stretching from
Egypt to Afghanistan." We arrive at a new formula that has no precedent
for dealing with nuclear danger: nonproliferation by forced democratization. Ignatieff acknowledges that a republic that turns into an
empire risks "endangering its identity as a free people"--thus
menacing democracy at home by trying to force it on others abroad.
Nevertheless, he wants the United States to take on "the burden of
empire."
The
Bush Administration, however, has given little encouragement to the evangelists
of armed democratization. Notoriously, it has kept silent regarding its plans
for postwar Iraq and its neighbors. But if its
actions in the "war on terror" are any guide, democracy will not be
required of Washington's imperial dependencies. The Bush
Administration has been perfectly happy, for example, to extend its cooperation
to such allies as totalitarian Turkmenistan and authoritarian Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan--not to speak of such
longstanding autocratic allies of the United States as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The United States has in fact never insisted on
democracy as a condition for good relations with other countries. Its practice
during the cold war probably offers as accurate a guide to the future as any.
The United States was pleased to have democratic allies, including most of the
countries of Europe, but was also ready when needed to install or prop up such
brutal, repressive regimes as (to mention only a few) that of Reza Pahlavi in Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq (until he invaded
Kuwait), Mobutu Sese Seko
in Zaire (now Congo), Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Park
Chung Hee in South Korea, a succession of civilian
and military dictators in South Vietnam, Lon Nol in
Cambodia, Suharto in Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos in
the Philippines, the colonels' junta in Greece, Francisco Franco in Spain and a
long list of military dictators in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay,
Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.
The
Administration has in any case made its broader conception of democracy clear
in its actions both at home and abroad. In this conception, the Administration
decides and others are permitted to express their agreement. (Or else they
become, as the President has said threateningly to the UN,
"irrelevant"--although it's hard to imagine what it means to say that
the assembled representatives of the peoples of the earth are irrelevant. Irrelevant to what?) Just as the Administration welcomed a
Congressional expression of support for the Bush war policy but denied it the
power to stop the war if that were to be its choice, and just as the
Administration "welcomes" a vote for war in NATO and the UN but
denies either NATO or the UN the right to prevent unilateral American action,
so we can expect that the people of Iraq or any other country the United States
might "democratize" would be "free" to support but not to
oppose American policy. (Imagine, for example, that the people of Iraq were to vote, as so many other
free peoples, including the American people, have done before them, to build
nuclear arsenals--perhaps on the ground that their enemy Israel already has them and Iran was building them. Would the Bush
Administration accept their decision?)
We
do not have to wait for war in Iraq, however, to consider the likely
impact of Washington's new policies on democracy's
global fortunes. The question has already arisen in the period of preparation
for war. The Bush Administration has not forced the world to read between the
lines to discover its position. It proposes for the world at large the same
two-tier system that it proposes for the decision to go to war and for the
possession of weapons of mass destruction: It lays claim to absolute military
hegemony over the earth. "America has, and intends to keep,
military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms
races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other
pursuits of peace," the President said in his speech at West Point. The United States alone will be the custodian of
military power; others must turn to humbler pursuits. The sword will rule, and
the United States will hold the sword. As the Yale
historian John Lewis Gaddis has pointed out, the policies of unilateral
pre-emption, overthrow of governments and overall military supremacy form an integral
package (the seizure of Middle Eastern oilfields, though officially denied as a
motive, also fits in). These elements are the foundations of the imperial
system that Ignatieff and others have delineated.
However,
empire is incompatible with democracy, whether at home or abroad. Democracy is
founded on the rule of law, empire on the rule of force. Democracy is a system
of self-determination, empire a system of military conquest. The fault lines
are already clear, and growing wider every day. By every
measure, public opinion in the world--its democratic will--is opposed to
overthrowing the government of Iraq by force. But why, someone might
ask, does this matter? How many divisions do these people have, as Stalin once
asked of the Pope? The answer, to the extent that the world really is
democratic, is: quite a few. In a series of elections--in Germany, in South Korea, in Turkey--an antiwar position helped bring
the winner to power. In divided Korea, American policy may be on its
way to producing an unexpected union of South and
North--against the United States. Each of these setbacks is a
critical defeat for the putative American empire. In January, the prime
ministers of eight countries--Italy, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Poland,
the Czech Republic and Hungary--signed a letter thanking the United States for
its leadership on the Iraq issue; but in every one of those countries a
majority of the public opposed a war without UN approval. The editors of Time's
European edition asked its readers which nation posed the greatest threat to
world peace. Of the 268,000 who responded, 8 percent answered that it was North Korea, 9 percent Iraq and 83 percent said the United States. Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair is
prepared to participate in the war without UN support, but some 70 percent of
his people oppose his position. The government of Australia is sending troops to assist in
the war effort, but 92 percent of the Australian public opposes war
unsanctioned by the UN. Gaddis rightly comments that empires succeed to the
extent that peoples under their rule welcome and share the values of the
imperial power. The above election results and poll figures suggest that no
such approval is so far evident for America's global pretensions. The
American "coalition" for war is an alliance of governments arrayed in
opposition to their own peoples.
In
a defeat parallel to--and greater than--the military defeat before the fact in
the field of proliferation, the American empire is thus suffering deep and
possibly irreversible political losses. Democracy is the right of peoples to
make decisions. Right now, the peoples of the earth are deciding against America's plans for the world. Democracy,
too, has pre-emptive resources, setting up impassable roadblocks at the first
signs of tyranny. The UN Security Council is balking. The United States' most important
alliance--NATO--is cracking. Is the American empire collapsing before it even
quite comes into existence? Such a judgment is premature, but if the mere
approach to war has done the damage we already see to America's reputation and power, we can
only imagine what the consequences of actual war will be.
II.
The Atomic Archipelago
The
Administration has embarked on a nonproliferation policy that has already
proved as self-defeating in its own terms as it is likely to be disastrous for
the United States and the world. Nevertheless, it
would be a fatal mistake for those of us who oppose the war to dismiss the
concerns that the Administration has raised. By insisting that the world
confront the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, President Bush has
raised the right question--or, at any rate, one part of the right question--for
our time, even as he has given a calamitously misguided answer. Even if it were
true--and we won't really know until some equivalent of the Pentagon Papers for
our period is released--that his Administration has been using the threat of
mass destruction as a cover for an oil grab, the issue of proliferation must be
placed at the center of our concerns. For example, even as we argue that
containment of Iraq makes more sense than war, we must be clear-eyed in
acknowledging that Iraq's acquisition of nuclear weapons or other weapons of
mass destruction would be a disaster--just as we must recognize that the nuclearization of South Asia and of North Korea have been
disasters, greatly increasing the likelihood of nuclear war in the near future.
These events, full of peril in themselves, are points on a curve of
proliferation that leads to what can only be described as nuclear anarchy.
For
a global policy that, unlike the Bush policies, actually will stop--and
reverse--proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction is indeed a necessity
for a sane, livable twenty-first century. But if we are to tackle the problem
wisely, we must step back from the current crisis long enough to carefully
analyze the origins and character of the danger. It did not appear on September
11. It appeared, in fact, on July 16, 1945, when the United States detonated the first atomic bomb
near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
What
is proliferation? It is the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a country that
did not have them before. The first act of proliferation was the Manhattan
Project in the United States. (In what follows, I will speak
of nuclear proliferation, but the principles underlying it also underlie the
proliferation of chemical and biological weapons.) Perhaps someone might object
that the arrival of the first individual of a species is not yet
proliferation--a word that suggests the multiplication of an already existing
thing. However, in one critical respect, at least, the development of the bomb
by the United States still fits the definition. The
record shows that President Franklin Roosevelt decided to build the bomb because
he feared that Hitler would get it first, with decisive consequences in the
forthcoming war. In October 1939, when the businessman Alexander Sachs brought
Roosevelt a letter from Albert Einstein warning that an atomic bomb was
possible and that Germany might acquire one, Roosevelt commented, "Alex,
what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up." As we know
now, Hitler did have an atomic project, but it never came close to producing a
bomb. But as with so many matters in nuclear strategy, appearances were more
important than the realities (which were then unknowable to the United States). Before there was the bomb,
there was the fear of the bomb. Hitler's phantom arsenal inspired the real
American one. And so even before nuclear weapons existed, they were
proliferating. This sequence is important because it reveals a basic rule that
has driven nuclear proliferation ever since: Nations acquire nuclear arsenals
above all because they fear the nuclear arsenals of others.
But
fear--soon properly renamed terror in the context of nuclear strategy--is of
course also the essence of the prime strategic doctrine of the nuclear age,
deterrence, which establishes a balance of terror. Threats of the destruction
of nations--of genocide--have always been the coinage of this realm. From the
beginning of the nuclear age--indeed, even before the beginning, when the
atomic bomb was only a gleam in Roosevelt's eye--deterrence and proliferation have in fact been
inextricable. Just as the United States made the bomb because it feared
Hitler would get it, the Soviet Union built the bomb because the United States already had it. Stalin's
instructions to his scientists shortly after Hiroshima were, "A single demand of
you, comrades: Provide us with atomic weapons in the shortest possible time.
You know that Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The
equilibrium has been destroyed. Provide the bomb--it will remove a great danger
from us." England and France, like the United States, were responding to the Soviet
threat; China was responding to the threat from
all of the above; India was responding to China; Pakistan was responding to India; and North Korea (with Pakistan's help) was responding to the United States. Nations proliferate in order to
deter. We can state: Deterrence equals proliferation, for deterrence both
causes proliferation and is the fruit of it. This has been the lesson, indeed,
that the United States has taught the world in every
major statement, tactic, strategy and action it has taken in the nuclear age.
And the world--if it even needed the lesson--has learned well. It is therefore
hardly surprising that the call to nonproliferation falls on deaf ears when it
is preached by possessors--all of whom were of course proliferators at one time
or another.
The
sources of nuclear danger, present and future, are perhaps best visualized as a
coral reef that is constantly growing in all directions under the sea and then,
here and there, breaks the surface to form islands, which we can collectively
call the atomic archipelago. The islands of the archipelago may seem to be
independent of one another, but anyone who looks below the surface will find
that they are closely connected. The atomic archipelago indeed has strong
similarities to its namesake, the gulag archipelago. Once established, both
feed on themselves, expanding from within by their own energy and momentum.
Both are founded upon a capacity to kill millions of people. Both act on the
world around them by radiating terror.
India and the Bomb: The Proliferator's
View
India's path to nuclear armament,
recounted in George Perkovich's masterful, definitive
India's Nuclear Bomb, offers essential lessons in the steps by which the
archipelago has grown and is likely to grow in the future. India has maintained a nuclear program
almost since its independence, in 1947. Although supposedly built for peaceful
uses, the program was actually, if mostly secretly, designed to keep the
weapons option open. But it was not until shortly after China tested a bomb in 1964 that India embarked on a concerted nuclear
weapons program, which bore fruit in 1974, when India tested a bomb for
"peaceful" purposes. Yet India still held back from introducing
nuclear weapons into its military forces. Meanwhile, Pakistan, helped by China, was working hard to obtain the
bomb. In May of 1998, India conducted five nuclear tests. Pakistan responded with at least five, and both nations promptly declared themselves nuclear
powers and soon were engaged in a major nuclear confrontation over the disputed
territory of Kashmir.
Indian
Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh has explained the
reasons for India's decision in an article in Foreign
Affairs. India looked out upon the world and saw
what he calls a "nuclear paradigm" in operation. He liked what he
saw. He writes, "Why admonish India after the fact for not falling in
line behind a new international agenda of discriminatory nonproliferation
pursued largely due to the internal agendas or political debates of the nuclear
club? If deterrence works in the West--as it so obviously appears to, since
Western nations insist on continuing to possess nuclear weapons--by what
reasoning will it not work in India?" To deprive India of these benefits would be
"nuclear apartheid"--a continuation of the imperialism that had been
overthrown in the titanic anticolonial struggles of
the twentieth century. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, under which 183
nations have agreed to forgo nuclear arms, and five who have them (the United
States, England, France, Russia and China) have agreed to reduce theirs until
they are gone, had many successes, but in India's backyard, where China had
nuclear arms and Pakistan was developing them, nuclear danger was growing. Some
have charged that the Indian government conducted the 1998 tests for political
rather than strategic reasons--that is, out of a desire for pure
"prestige," not strategic necessity. But the two explanations are in
fact complementary. It is only because the public, which observes that all the
great powers possess nuclear arsenals, agrees that they are a strategic
necessity that it finds them prestigious and politically rewards governments
that acquire them. Prestige is merely the political face of the general
consensus, ingrained in strategy, that countries lacking nuclear weapons are
helpless--"eunuchs," as one Indian politician said--in a
nuclear-armed world.
Curiously,
the unlimited extension in 1995 of the NPT, to which India was not a signatory, pushed India to act. From Singh's point of
view, the extension made the nuclear double standard it embodied permanent.
"What India did in May [1998] was to assert
that it is impossible to have two standards for national security--one based on
nuclear deterrence and the other outside of it." If the world was to be
divided into two classes of countries, India preferred to be in the first
class.
As
Singh's account makes clear, India was inspired to act not merely by
the hypocrisy of great powers delivering sermons on the virtues of nuclear
disarmament while sitting atop mountains of nuclear arms--galling as that might
be. He believed that India, with nuclear-armed China and nuclearizing
Pakistan for neighbors, was living in an
increasingly "dangerous neighborhood." The most powerful tie that
paradoxically binds proliferator to deterrer in their minuet of genocidal hostility is not mere
imitation but the compulsion to respond to the nuclear terror projected by
others. The preacher against lust who turns out to take prostitutes to a motel
after the sermon sets a bad example but does not compel his parishioners to
follow suit. The preacher against nuclear weapons in a nation whose silos are
packed with them does, however, compel other nations to follow his example, for
his nuclear terror reaches and crosses their borders. The United States
terrorizes Russia (and vice versa); both terrorize China; China terrorizes
India; the United States terrorizes North Korea; North Korea terrorizes Japan;
and so forth, forming a web of terror whose further extensions (Israel
terrorizes...Iran? Egypt? Syria? Libya?) will
be the avenues of future proliferation. It is thanks to this web that every
nuclear arsenal in the world is tied, directly or indirectly, to every other,
rendering any partial approach to the problem extremely difficult, if not
impossible.
The
devotion of nations to their nuclear arsenals has only been strengthened by the
hegemonic ambition of the United States. Hitherto, the nuclear double
standard lacked a context--it was a sort of anomaly of the international order,
a seeming leftover from the cold war, perhaps soon to be liquidated. America's imperial ambition gives it a
context. In a multilateral, democratic vision of international affairs, it is
impossible to explain why one small group of nations should be entitled to
protect itself with weapons of mass destruction while all others must do
without them. But in an imperial order, the reason is perfectly obvious. If the
imperium is to pacify the world, it must possess
overwhelming force, the currency of imperial power. Equally obviously, the
nations to be pacified must not. Double standards--regarding not only nuclear
weapons but conventional weapons, economic advantage, use of natural
resources--are indeed the very stuff of which empires are made. For empire is
to the world what dictatorship is to a country. That's why the suppression of
proliferation--a new imperial vocation--must be the first order of business for
a nation aspiring to this exalted role.
India's Bomb: The Possessor's View
It's
equally enlightening to look at India's proliferation from the point of
view of a nuclear possessor, the United States. Nuclear arsenals are endowed
with a magical quality. As soon as a nation obtains one it becomes invisible to
the possessor. Nuclear danger then seems to emanate only from proliferation--that
is, from newcomers to the nuclear club, while the dangers that emanate from
one's own arsenal disappear from sight. Gen. Tommy Franks,
designated as commander of the Iraq war, recently commented,
"The sight of the first mushroom cloud on one of the major population
centers on this planet is something that most nations on this planet are
willing to go a long ways out of the way to prevent." His forgetfulness of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki might seem nothing more than a
slip of the tongue if it did not represent a pervasive and deeply ingrained
attitude in the United States. Another revealing incident was
Secretary of State Powell's comment that North Korea, by seeking nuclear weapons, was
arming itself with "fool's gold." But the military establishment that
Powell once led is of course stuffed to bursting with this fool's gold. Another
example of the same habit of mind (I have chosen American examples, but the
blindness afflicts all nuclear powers) was provided by some comments of
President Bill Clinton shortly after India's tests of 1998. He said,
"To think that you have to manifest your greatness by behavior that
recalls the very worst events of the twentieth century on the edge of the
twenty-first century, when everybody else is trying to leave the nuclear age
behind, is just wrong. And they [the Indians] clearly don't need it to maintain
their security." Wise words, but ones contradicted by more than a
half-century of the nuclear policies, including the current ones, of the nation
he led.
The
reactions of some of America's most prominent thinkers on the
nuclear question to India's proliferation were also
instructive. Almost immediately, their belief in the virtues of nuclear arms
began to surface through the antiproliferation
rhetoric. Henry Kissinger, for instance, judiciously mocked Clinton's "unique insight into the
nature of greatness in the twenty-first century...the dubious proposition that
all other nations are trying to leave the nuclear world behind," and
"the completely unsupported proposition that countries with threatening
nuclear neighbors do not need nuclear weapons to assure their security."
Kissinger, more consistent than Clinton, found India's and Pakistan's tests "equally
reasonable." He thought Washington's best course was to help its new
nuclear-armed friends achieve "stable mutual deterrence," and
"give stabilizing reassurances about their conventional security."
Kissinger even saw a silver lining for American interests in the hope that
nuclear-armed India would help the United States "contain China" (the
very China to which Krauthammer now turns to disarm North Korea). It was
Kissinger's view, not Clinton's, that soon prevailed. America's own love affair with the bomb
asserted itself. At first, the United States imposed sanctions on both
countries, but soon they were lifted. In December of 2000 President Clinton
paid the first visit by an American President to India since 1978, confirming that
becoming a nuclear power was indeed the path to international prestige. The United States now has growing programs of
military cooperation with both countries.
Kissinger
merely adjusted to the irreversible fait accompli of South Asian
proliferation, as a realist should. He saw the tension between America's love of its own nuclear bombs
and its hatred of others', and understood the problems this might cause for America's own arsenal. Could
nonproliferation get out of control? Might it reach America's shores? "The
administration is right to resist nuclear proliferation," he wrote,
"but it must not, in the process, disarm the country
psychologically."
III.
One Will for One World
War
in Iraq has not yet begun, but its most important lesson, taught also by the
long history of proliferation, including the Indian chapter just discussed, is
already plain: The time is long gone--if it ever existed--when any major
element of the danger of weapons of mass destruction, including above all
nuclear danger, can be addressed realistically without taking into account the
whole dilemma. When we look at the story of proliferation, whether from the
point of view of the haves or the have-nots, what emerges is that for practical
purposes any distinction that once might have existed (and even then only in
appearance, not in reality) between possessors and proliferators has now been
erased. A rose is a rose is a rose, anthrax is anthrax
is anthrax, a thermonuclear weapon is a thermonuclear weapon is a thermonuclear
weapon. The world's prospective nuclear arsenals cannot be dealt with without
attending to its existing ones. As long as some countries insist on having any
of these, others will try to get them. Until this axiom is understood, neither
"dialogue" nor war can succeed. In Perkovich's
words, after immersing himself in the history of India's bomb, "the grandest illusion
of the nuclear age is that a handful of states possessing nuclear weapons can
secure themselves and the world indefinitely against the dangers of nuclear
proliferation without placing a higher priority on simultaneously
striving to eliminate their own nuclear weapons."
The
days of the double standard are over. We cannot preserve it and we should not
want to. The struggle to maintain it by force, anachronistically represented by
Bush's proposed war on Iraq, in which the United States threatens pre-emptive
use of nuclear weapons to stop another country merely from getting them, can
only worsen the global problem it seeks to solve. One way or another, the world
is on its way to a single standard. Only two in the long run are available:
universal permission to possess weapons of mass destruction or their universal
prohibition. The first is a path to global nightmare, the second to safety and
a normal existence. Nations that already possess nuclear weapons must recognize
that nuclear danger begins with them. The shield of invisibility must be
pierced. The web of terror that binds every nuclear arsenal to every other--and
also to every arsenal of chemical or biological weapons--must be acknowledged.
If
pre-emptive military force leads to catastrophe and deterrence is at best a
stopgap, then what is the answer? In 1945, the great Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr said simply, in words whose truth has been
confirmed by fifty-eight years of experience of the nuclear age, "We are
in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war." In a
formulation only slightly more complex than Bohr's, Einstein said in 1947,
"This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outdated
concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense;
there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and
insistence of the peoples of the world." Both men, whose
work in fundamental physics had perhaps done more than that of any other two
scientists to make the bomb possible, favored the abolition of nuclear arms by
binding international agreement. That idea, also favored by many of the
scientists of the Manhattan Project, bore fruit in a plan for the abolition of
nuclear arms and international control of all nuclear technology put forward by
President Truman's representative Bernard Baruch in June 1946. But the time was
not ripe. The cold war was already brewing, and the Soviet Union, determined to build its own
bomb, said no, then put forward a plan that the United States turned down. In 1949 the Soviet Union conducted its first atomic test,
and the nuclear arms race ensued.
For
the short term, the inspections in Iraq should continue. If inspections
fail, then containment will do as a second line of defense. But in the long
term, the true alternative to pre-emptive war against Iraq, war one day against North Korea, war against an unknowable number
of other possible proliferators, is to bring Bohr and Einstein's proposal up to
date. A revival of worldwide disarmament negotiations must be the means, the
abolition of all weapons of mass destruction the end. That idea has long been
in eclipse, and today it lies outside the mainstream of political opinion.
Unfortunately, historical reality is no respecter of conventional wisdom and
often requires it to change course if calamity is to be avoided. But
fortunately it is one element of the genius of democracy--and of US democracy in particular--that
encrusted orthodoxy can be challenged and overthrown by popular pressure. The
movement against the war in Iraq should also become a movement for
something, and that something should be a return to the long-neglected path to
abolition of all weapons of mass destruction. Only by offering a solution to
the problem that the war claims to solve but does not can this war and others
be stopped.
The
passage of time since the failure in 1946 has also provided us with some
advantages. No insuperable ideological division divides the nuclear powers
(with the possible exception, now, of North Korea), as the cold war did. Their
substantial unity and agreement in this area can be imagined. Every other nonnuclear nation but one (the eccentric holdout is Cuba) already has agreed under the
terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to do without nuclear weapons.
Biological and chemical weapons have been banned by international conventions
(although the conventions are weak, as they lack serious inspection and
enforcement provisions).
The
inspected and enforced elimination of weapons of mass destruction is a goal
that in its very nature must take time, and adequate time--perhaps a decade, or
even more--can be allowed. But the decision to embrace the goal should not
wait. It should be seen not as a distant dream that may or may not be realized
once a host of other unlikely prerequisites have been met but as a powerful
instrument to be used immediately to halt all forms of proliferation and
inspire arms reductions in the present. There can be no successful
nonproliferation policy that is not backed by the concerted will of the
international community. As long as the double standard is in effect, that will cannot be created. Do we need more evidence than the
world's disarray today in the face of Iraq's record of proliferation?
Today's world, to paraphrase Lincoln, is a house divided, half
nuclear-armed, half nuclear-weapons-free. A commitment to the elimination of
weapons of mass destruction would heal the world's broken will, and is the only
means available for doing so. Great powers that were getting out of the mass
destruction business would have very short patience with nations, such as Iraq or North Korea, getting into that business. The
Security Council would act as one. The smaller powers that had never made their
pact with the devil in the first place would be at the great powers' side. Any proliferator would face the implacable resolve of all
nations to persuade it or force it to reverse its course.
Let
us try to imagine it: one human species on its one earth exercising one will to
defeat forever a threat to its one collective existence. Could any nation stand
against it? Without this commitment, the international community--if I may
express it thus--is like a nuclear reactor from which the fuel rods have been
withdrawn. Making the commitment would be to insert the rods, to start up the
chain reaction. The chain reaction would be the democratic activity of peoples
demanding action from the governments to secure their survival. True democracy
is indispensable to disarmament, and vice versa. This is the power--not the
power of cruise missiles and B-52s--that can release humanity from its peril.
The price demanded of us for freedom from the danger of weapons of mass
destruction is to relinquish our own.