Nuking Mecca

reposted from donaldsensing.com; links were good at that time

The calculus of revenge: if the terrorists surpass 9/11, how should we respond?

Dean Esmay was not the first to suggest American strike catastrophically against the Arab world in revenge for another 9/11-type, or worse, attack against America. But Dean’s proposal is probably the bluntest I’ve seen:

U.S. Sister City Program
It works like this: You bomb one of our cities and we unleash 10,000 times the explosives on our "sister city" as a response.

Sister Cities:

New York City - Mecca
Washington D.C. - Medina
Los Angeles - Riyadh
Chicago - Damascus
San Francisco - Tehran
Seattle - Tripoli

And so on... You get the idea.

I simply do not understand why this seems acceptable to some people. It is a shockingly immoral proposal. I have been blogging since March 2002, and I have consistently pointed out that the purpose of war is never war itself. That is, simply inflicting destruction upon the enemy or the enemy’s people is never a just end in war.

Some may respond that I invoke just conduct of war only upon our own side, that the Islamists reject our Just War model and feel no compunction or moral restraint in the wholesale slaughter of American noncombatants.

Their objections are correct. We are self-restrained, our enemy is not. That’s what makes them terrorists. But we are not to become terrorists in response.

(I recognize that Islam is uniquely vulnerable to the kinds of attacks Dean proposes. Unlike Christianity (or Judaism, too), Islam is a religion of place. One of the five fundamental duties of all Muslims is to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once. If Mecca was atomically removed from the earth, would it even be possible to be a faithful Muslim? Perhaps Muslims would adapt in the same way the Jews adapted to the multiple destructions of their Temple in Jerusalem.)

Nonetheless, with the domestic threat alert is at its highest since May. Sober warnings have come from the mouth of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that al Qaeda is " ‘anticipating near-term attacks that they believe will either rival or exceed’ the events of Sept. 11."

So let us accept Dean’s first premise, that an American city might suffer a catastrophic strike by al Qaeda that would kill many, many thousands of citizens. Imagine an atomic truck bomb in an American metropolis. Imagine 30,0000 dead and 60,000 injured, or more.

What should America do in response?

I reject a nuclear response that seeks simply to lash out at presumed enemies and make Arabs suffer for suffering’s sake. Killing just to kill would not be warranted even under such grievous circumstances.

Such an attack must evoke a severe American response, but the first question is whether al Qaeda’s attack would mean that we should change our basic strategic aims , the foundation upon which everything else depends:

... to inculcate far-reaching reforms within Arab societies themselves that will depress the causes of radical, violent Islamism. This task shall take a generation, at least; President Bush has said on multiple occasions that the fight against terror will occupy more presidencies than his own.

I say that a K-strike against America would make this objective more urgent, not negate it ("K-strike" being shorthand for "catastrophic strike," borrowing from old military abbreviations).

Therefore, the American response to such an attack must do two things:

1. Dramatically reduce, hopefully eliminate, the possibility of such an attack being repeated,
2. At least not harm the furtherance of the basic American strategic goal in the Middle East.

Therefore, there are two levels of responses that should follow immediately, political and military.

Politically, the president must seek an actual declaration of war against Iran and North Korea. It is hardly credible that an atomic attack could take place on American soil without the actual support of either or both countries. They are members of the original Axis of Evil for good reasons. Some persons may wish to add Syria to the list, but I say they can wait.

The Congress must immediately authorize the expansion of our armed forces to a level sufficient to conduct full-tempo, overwhelmingly powerful campaigns in three theaters (the Middle East, the west Pacific and one for reserve and contingency).

The American ambassador to NATO should inform the alliance that the United States is invoking all the combined-defense provisions of the alliance. America should make it plain that NATO’s failure fully to join offensive actions against the enemy states, including the deployment of combat troops and materiel, will lead to America’s withdrawal from the alliance and the formation of other security measures with other countries.

The Saudi royal family should be told in certain terms that the US will no longer tolerate the hatred and venom their society spews against America. They face a choice: the Wahabbis must be tamed and the Saudis must ally with America in deed, not just in word, or the United States will list Saudi Arabia for regime change by military force.

Every Arab in America who is not a legal permanent resident should be deported. Every Saudi-sponsored school in America should be closed. Persons of other nationalities should be deported as necessary according to the DOHS’s threat profile.

Militarily, all of Iran’s nuclear facilities must be destroyed without delay. Once Congress declares war against Iran (and it will so declare) the country must be invaded, defeated and occupied as soon as force buildup permits. Action against Iran would invoke no other nation’s meaningful opposition and Iran cannot project power effectively outside its borders. Between Iran and North Korea, Iran is the "low hanging fruit" that should be plucked first. Strategic action against its military and its leadership should begin immediately.

North Korea is a very difficult problem and will still be one even if America suffers a K-strike. Any move by the US against North Korea would invite massive retaliation by North Korea against South Korea, and possibly a strike against Japan.

Furthermore, the US armed forces are magnitudes too small to tackle both Iran and North Korea at the same time. I consider Iran the more urgent task. So the North Korean theater must be a holding action.

If finessed properly, American measures against North Korea, short of actual combat, could even receive Chinese acquiescence, perhaps even actual support. While I think the destruction of North Korean nuclear facilities would be best, that may not be possible in the near term because of the relative paucity of American power in the region.

But the fact that we will not be able to do everything there does not mean we should do nothing. At the minimum we should blockade North Korean ports. We could announce that any expansion or mobilization of North Korean forces will lead to American attack to destroy them. Direct psyops against both the North Korean military and people should be used until forces in the region are sufficient to force North Korean submission.

Pakistan is another very difficult problem. It’s entirely credible that an atomic terrorist strike against America could have Pakistani support, just not that of the Musharraf government. The Pakistani government is more like a system of baronies than a strong, federal system we have. There are Islamist sympathizers within the government and society who are motivated to aid al Qaeda and may well do so despite Musharraf’s dicta against it.

So I don’t have much useful to say about what to do if a K-strike becomes known to have received support from Pakistani elements. If we bomb its nuclear facilities, Musharraf will fall and be replaced by a virulent anti-American. So my "what to do" page is pretty blank for Pakistan, if its radical Islamists are found to be complicit in the K-strike.

There are a lot of other measures the US could and should take if we are attacked by an attack of 9/11's destruction or worse. But draining the swamp that breeds Islamist alligators will remain the foremost goal, even as we intensify efforts to kill the alligators.

Update: Michael Williams has posted that Mutual Assured Destruction is moral and he wonders whether I even understand it, which I found rather amusing since I was trained as nuclear target analyst at the height of the Cold War.

For anyone who thinks that a nuclear attack by the US, even in response to one against us by terrorists, could possibly be sane, much less proper, I tell you bluntly: you aren't thinking at all and I am profoundly grateful you aren't setting national defense policy.

Do you think that nuking any Arab city would make al Qaeda stop attacking us with every destructive means at their disposal? How many millions of innocents are you prepared to immolate before you try something else? Except then there will be nothing else to try.

NO ONE anywhere in the world would take our side on this. No one would rationalize the destruction of a third-world city and its people as their getting just desserts. There is no act we could take that would isolate us more, enrage the entire world at us more, make more uncountable new enemies, and convince billions of ordinary people around the world, not just Muslims, that America must be destroyed.

I add that Michael, like me, professes Christian faith and I have to wonder whether he has considered how America's use of nukes against an Arab city would harm the cause of Christ in the world. Far from convincing the Muslims that their faith is bankrupt, it would cause untold millions of people in the second and third world to abandon the Church altogether. Christians in the third world, already uinder severe persecution in many places, would suffer immensely and the Church would be outlawed in places it is now gaining converts.

People need to take off their blinders and try to think strategically. A nuclear response by us would completely destroy countless innocent lives - or do you actually condemn all Muslims, of any age or disposition? Do you really?. It would also destroy every alliance we have in the world. NATO would dissolve. The UK would withdraw all support wholly; Blair's government would fall immediately, to be replaced by the most virulent anti-Americans in England. We would lose all basing rights in every country in the world - Japan, Korea, Europe, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, Central Asia, all the rest. Americans across the world, including Europe, would be dragged from their homes or attacked on the streets and killed; scores of our embassies gutted. Muslim populations in Europe and the Americas would riot relentlessly.

Every Iraqi would turn completely against us; our forces there would come under constant attack from everyone, and in Afghanistan also. Pakistan would turn wholly Islamist. The entire Muslim world, not just Arabs, would be convinced that what bin Laden has been claiming is indeed true - that the US wishes either to colonize or destroy Muslim nations and destroy Islam itself. Tens of millions of new fanatics would sign up for al Qaeda's jihad against us.

I can't begin to list the nations that would sever diplomatic relations with us and expel our diplomatic staff, even the UK. All the intelligence relationships with the UK and other European nations - the most valuable we have - painstakingly built up since World War I would be aborted instantly. Same with Asia-Pacific countries. China would begin militarizing faster than ever. Russia would re-target American cities because its people would demand it.

The world's economy, including America's, would plunge into the deepest depression in history with the consequences too horrific to imagine - social dislocations, fall of governments (their replacements rabidly anti-American), civil wars on every continent except, maybe, North America and Australia.

Not only is MAD today a "strategy" of failure, it would be the means of our self destruction.

Bush Republicanism = Roosevelt Democratism?

It’s not an improvement -why I am not endorsing Bush for 2004

It may come as a shock to some readers to learn that I am not a straight-party voter. I have voted for candidates of both major parties in elections past. There have been quite a few Republican candidates that I voted for only very reluctantly, and only because their opponents were even less tolerable, in my opinion.

I recall that Tip O’Neill, former Dem Speaker of the House, years ago observed that if the Democratic party existed in a parliamentary system it would be five parties, not one. I would guess that today it would be four, at most, because Democratic conservatives are almost all gone. It seems universally acknowledged that the Democratic party has, since Tip’s time, veered sharply leftward. The pseudo-centrism of the Clinton years didn’t sink in. (I say "preudo-centrism" because only a little of his centrist rhetoric actually found its way into public policy.)

But what has happened to the Republican party? If the sorta-centrism of the Clinton years has gone a-glimmering, the Reagan Revolution is dead and buried. The Republican party under G. W. Bush today bears a much greater resemblance to the Democrats under F. D. Roosevelt than it does to any previous Republican administration.

I say this state of affairs is not an improvement not because I excoriate Roosevelt or his administration’s record. Like any other administration, it has its successes and failures; it’s legacy probably springs more from the fact that FDR was elected four times, keeping his programs alive much longer than they might have lived had he stopped at two terms.

Whatever FDR’s faults or virtues, there’s no denying that he was a big-government activist. In fact, "big-government activist" is redundant; by its very nature, big government must be activist, else it would not have become big to begin with.

More than anything else, big-government activism is the New Deal’s legacy, and IMO, has come to define the governing philosophy of both parties today. The rising tide of big government has swamped us, held only temporarily at bay by the levees of the Reagan years. (And not really even then, since non-defense spending rose during the Reagan administration.)

Because the present-day Republicans and Democrats are both big-government activists, they have a foundational philosophy that is the same:

America is a problem to be fixed, and Americans are a people to be managed.

A couple of days ago, Michael Barone wrote,

Many conservatives are complaining that George W. Bush is a big-government conservative--or not a conservative at all. They complain about the Medicare prescription drug law he and the House and Senate Republican leadership pushed through, the first major expansion of Medicare since 1965. They call him a big spender, noting that discretionary spending has been rising more rapidly than under Bill Clinton. They complain that he pushed through the first education bill giving the federal government a role in setting standards. They complain about the farm bill he signed in 2002 and the energy bill he championed this year. ...

Bush has redefined conservatism. It is now not the process of cutting government and devolving powers; it is the process of installing choice and accountability into government even at the cost of allowing it to grow. ...

This is not a good thing, although Barone thinks it is. What Bush has done is fed raw meat into the red maw of big-government activism. Big-government activism is definitionally power hungry. Big-government activism confiscates political power from the people by regulation and taxation; its appetites for both are near unlimited. Yes, I know that Bush pushed through some serious tax cuts, and I wrote on this site that unlike his predecessors, he actually cut, rather than redistributed, the tax burden. But be not deceived: NFL linemen are small when they are babies, and we see today only the infancy of Bush’s brand of big-government activism. Inevitably, its hunger will grow.

A friend of mine emigrated here from Romania after Ceaucescu’s regime fell. He told me the other day that Americans are over-regulated. Think about that; a man coming from a communist country believes that Americans are over-regulated. It chills.

A long time ago Steven Den Beste observed in an essay, "The job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left to themselves, they will regulate everything they can." Celebrated author Robert Heinlein wrote, "In any advanced society, ‘civil servant’ is a euphemism for ‘civil master.’" Both quotes are not exact, but they’re pretty close. And they’re both exactly right. Big government is itself apolitical. It cares not whose party is in power. It simply continues to grow. Its nourishment is that the people’s money. Its excrement is more and more regulations and laws. Like the Terminator, "that’s what it does, that’s all it does."

I do not believe Bush’s domestic policies are in the best interests of our long-term freedom. I do not think that Bush’s domestic legacy will, in the long run, be good for the country.

Hence I cannot urge anyone to vote for Bush in 2004.

Which is not to say that I endorse any of the Democrats running for president; they are more strident big-government activists than Bush, and won’t protect us from terrorism to boot. So I feel caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.