Belligerati

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February 21, 2004

How did you spend your summer vacation?

I spent all of yesterday in a conference about George Kennan, diplomat, prolific, award winning writer and inventor of the policy of containment of the Soviet Union. A weird thing to take off work to do, but I did see an hour-long speech by Colin Powel, and he was a moving, articulate and pleasant communicator. I had the urge to run out and vote for him on this basis alone. This feeling was most unsettling.

A major topic of the day was Iraq and the importance of stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. A bigwig on stage who was rabidly against Bush's policies and advocated a full withdrawal from Iraq by America, said there was no need to worry about nuclear extortion of the US by an Iraq or a North Korea because we could nuke them back. It worked on the Soviets -- why not on the Bathists?

I did not agree and I told him so after the panel. Two reasons, the leaders of the regimes, megalomaniacal in disposition, grossly misinformed about the world at large by their advisors, more weekly motivated by ideology than the Soviets and caring less about their people, there was good reason to believe that the concept of annihilation inspired less fear for them than it in the Soviets. The second is that nuclear annihilation of a civilian population by the US would not happen. Imagine a circumstance a la sum of all fears, but perpetrated by North Korea instead of White supremacists. A nuclear bob goes off in a shipping container in a major west coast city. A million people die. It is not immediately apparent who did this act, and no one take credit. A week or even a month later the US determines that the North Koreans launched this weapon. Who among us would stand for the annihilation of a million civilian North Koreans in Pyongyang merely as a retaliatory act? I think few people. In this age of precession bombings and surgical strikes, we have lost our appetite for moral and infrastructure crushing civilian destruction. Far worse, that being an act of political vengeance, it would be an act of rage, the punishment of an enslaved and largely innocent populace. They have deep bunkers where they store their nukes and leaders shelter, so maybe we would have to use nuclear weapons against those targets as part of a generally non-nuclear regime change, but against a civilian population center? I view that amoral to a ridiculous extreme.
The North Koreans, knowing this, could extort from us oil, aid and the peace to torment their own people if the went about it carefully. Framing such requests not in the form of "or else" but instead as a seemingly plea to manage a simply incompetent government, it could work. Oh, Kim Chong-il would say, we need money to stop the proliferation (buying those involved), oil, and power for alternative energy generation. Surely we would nuke you if you invaded, be we do not expect that to happen. We merely worry that something could escape beyond our control, and wish to help stop it.

That is my idea, and I am not sure how we stop them when they start to do this.

Posted by OneEyedMan at February 21, 2004 6:39 PM

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