The Case Against the War
by Jonathan Schell
"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 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.
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