http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030303&s=schell

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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.


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The Case Against the War (page 2 of 7)


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.

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The Case Against the War (page 3 of 7)

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.

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The Case Against the War (page 4 of 7)

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.

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The Case Against the War (page 5 of 7)

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.

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The Case Against the War (page 6 of 7)

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."

---

The Case Against the War (page 7 of 7)

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.