Cartoon Bullseyes
Former Clintonites Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry made a big splash today with their article advocating a preemptive strike against the site of North Korea’s “reported” planned Taepodong-2 missile test. It’s a textbook example of Democrats sounding “tough” and incoherent at the same time. It’s bottomlessly stupid as advice, but the ways in which it’s as bad as the current administration and not quite as bad make interesting fodder for analysis.
First, the incoherence: As James Joyner notes, Carter and Perry criticise the Bush Administration for promulgating a doctrine of “preemption,” then turn around and advocate – preemption!
Second, an apology/bleg: I was convinced some famous politician or general had said something likening starting a war to “opening a door” where you don’t know what’s on the other side. All Google found for me was this surprisingly measured and entirely prescient column by Margaret Atwood from the beginnning of the Iraq invasion. Atwood was one of those leftists capable of understanding what I’ve called “the essential conservatism of the planet,” and her comparison of the coming Iraq occupation to Napoleon’s Spanish adventures was inspired. A happy find, but not what I was looking for.
The reason I bring this up is that Carter and Perry are just amazingly awesomely sure how everyone with an interest in the Korea venture will react, from our enemy to its neighbors:
When they learn of it, our South Korean allies will surely not support this ultimatum — indeed they will vigorously oppose it. The United States should accordingly make clear to the North that the South will play no role in the attack, which can be carried out entirely with U.S. forces and without use of South Korean territory. South Korea has worked hard to counter North Korea’s 50-year menacing of its own country, through both military defense and negotiations, and the United States has stood with the South throughout. South Koreans should understand that U.S. territory is now also being threatened, and we must respond. Japan is likely to welcome the action but will also not lend open support or assistance. China and Russia will be shocked that North Korea’s recklessness and the failure of the six-party talks have brought things to such a pass, but they will not defend North Korea.
They know! They just know! China and Russia will this and won’t that. South Korea will bitch, but we’ll just tell them this is their way of paying up for all that free defense all those years, and they’ll, in the immortal words of Washington Nationals reliever Joey Eischen, “suck on it and like it.” It will! Because they know! As to North Korea itself:
North Korea could respond to U.S. resolve by taking the drastic step of threatening all-out war on the Korean Peninsula. But it is unlikely to act on that threat. Why attack South Korea, which has been working to improve North-South relations (sometimes at odds with the United States) and which was openly opposing the U.S. action? An invasion of South Korea would bring about the certain end of Kim Jong Il’s regime within a few bloody weeks of war, as surely he knows.
Surely! He knows! Carter and Perry know he knows!Perhaps he knows they know he knows!
There is nothing whatsoever uncertain about this war business. I personally believe that a swift strike through the Low Countries will knock France out of action so I can concentrate my forces against the Czar. I believe that once I get my army across this creek near Manassas Junction secession will crumble; you will probably want to come out and watch. I’m damned certain that the way to preserve the Hapsburg Empire is to show the freaking Serbs we won’t put up with their terrorist monkey business. I think I should be able to conquer Canada in a few months. I think that the time to grab the Fao Penninsula is now, while Iran is distracted and weak. And I know, just know, that there’s no history of ethnic strife in Iraq like there is in the Balkans.
But even I don’t know as much as Carter and Perry. They are as clearsighted as they are toughminded.
Along the way, they have forgotten one or two little things. First, that enemies will respond in the ways that make the most sense to them, not the ways that make the most sense to you – certainly not the ways that are most convenient to you. Second, that as Thucydides suggested and interdimensional traveler Victor Davis Hanson has reminded us, nations go to war out of “fear, honor and interest.” Carter and Perry propose the US act out of fear without imagining that this will compel North Korea to react out of honor. Nor will a US attack on North Korea excite the fear, honor and interest of the “shocked” Russians and Chinese into any kind of countermoves that would be worse strategically for the United States than the marginal danger posed by North Korean missiles that “may” be able to hit “parts of” the United States.
Most importantly, they’ve forgotten – we’ve forgotten, as a nation – that war is extraordinary. Attacking another nation is not a casual instrument of policy. It is a grave matter. You can see this memory lapse even in James Joyner’s entry: he doesn’t really think that North Korea will just up and fire a missile at some US city. He worries about “blackmail [which] would hover over our relations with the Koreas and the region generally.”
But there’s blackmail and there’s blackmail. Real blackmail would be North Korea trying to push us around – demanding we give them food or they nuke us, demanding we subscribe to the Juche Ideal (which would preclude giving them food) or they nuke us, demanding that the Japanese Prime Minister abdicate in favor of one of Kim Jong-Il’s hookers. There’s another kind of “blackmail” that comes up repeatedly in discussions of Iran, North Korea and Iraq, though, which is the “threat” that these nations will be less willing to meet American demands if we’re afraid they can bomb us. That’s not “blackmail” but self-defense. It’s not a threat if you don’t believe the United States must be able to compel any nation on Earth to do its bidding.
Real blackmail is an affirmative action. Real blackmail even tends to justify truly preemptive self-defense. The other kind, “penumbras and emanations blackmail,” doesn’t. It is not normal to attack other nations to prevent marginal erosions of supremacy. It’s also not normal to attack a new nation every couple of years. That we as a nation don’t notice this any more is one of the great dangers we face.
Lastly, a little more on hawkish incoherence, this time at the strategic level. Remember the threat of Iraqi “WMD?” Saddam might give them to terrorists, who might use them on the United States. This is one of the supposed threats of Iranian nuclear weapons too. If you really believe sovereign states would give nuclear weapons to bad-tempered NGOs, and that the bad-tempered NGOs could effectively use them, then you believe that North Korea already has a “blackmail threat” against the United States. Indeed, they have a better one than Iraq or Iran could ever have. Iraq and Iran faced/face reasonable fears that al Qaeda would be just as happy to use a nuclear weapon on them as on the United States. But if you search the speeches of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, I’ll be very surprised if you find calls for Jihad against North Korea. You’ll search the DPRK’s demographics in vain for evidence of a restive Muslim minority. North Korea could cooperate more safely with many Islamist terror groups than most of the most anti-American middle eastern states could. And there’d be the bonus misdirection factor too. Hawks often point out that deterrence is flawed because we’d have a hard time knowing where that exploding shipping container really came from. Opponents of prophylactic war often talk about putting Country X on notice that any nuclear terror attack will be assumed to come from them.
Country X is rarely North Korea. Especially if the explosion can be traced back to Muslim extremists. And of course North Korea has never lacked for terrorist networks of its own.
I don’t see bombing North Korea as reducing its motivation to give nuclear weapons to terrorists. Quite the opposite, because of that “fear, honor and interest” business.
So congratulations, America. You’ve been living with the threat of “nuclear blackmail” by the Democratic People’s Republic of Creepy Street Scenes for a couple of years now. You may recall living with the immensely greater threats of nuclear blackmail by the Soviet Union and the Red China for decades before that. It happens. It happened again. I don’t like it: North Korea’s a creepy place run by a creep. But it’s a real country. The one Carter and Perry et al are discussing, that is so crazy it might nuke the United States without provocation but so sane it won’t retaliate with provocation, is a flimsy construct, thin and schematic as a range target.
See also: Olmsted, who manages to use many many fewer words.
Comment by Rob —
June 22, 2006 @ 10:24 pm
We must remove the North Korean threat because the country is run by a crazy, insecure, meglomaniac dictator! He isn’t rational!
Of course after we attack him, he’ll see things in a completely logical light and won’t lash out blindly because it would be irrational to do so.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
June 22, 2006 @ 11:15 pm
But this makes a certain insane kind of sense. It’s imperial overstretch psychology. You have a country that’s had its self-image become that of undisputed top dog. And when it’s starting to decline, it seems worth doing anything, no matter how stupid or illusionary, to deny that the status is slipping. It’s a hysterical reaction.
Russia may not have been very well served by it, but the rest of the world is lucky that Communist ideology failed before the USSR’s economy failed. Otherwise, it’s bring out the nukes and use them to blackmail the respect that you can no longer earn. If American exceptionalism doesn’t go down the tubes before our empire does, that’s what we’re going to be doing.
Comment by Leonard —
June 22, 2006 @ 11:24 pm
There are two hits on the web attributing to Hitler a quote which may be this: ”Waging war is like opening a door into a darkened room. One never knows what is hidden in the darkness.”
Poor attestation, but maybe it will jog a memory.
Comment by Jennifer —
June 22, 2006 @ 11:31 pm
â€Waging war is like opening a door into a darkened room. One never knows what is hidden in the darkness.â€
And if you shoot into the dark without knowing damned well what you’re shooting at, you run the risk of making a very bad mistake.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 22, 2006 @ 11:46 pm
That’s right. What if it’s a pony in there? Now you shot the pony!
Comment by Jon H —
June 23, 2006 @ 12:42 am
”It’s a textbook example of Democrats sounding “tough†and incoherent at the same time.”
Except… isn’t Perry a Republican?
He worked in the Clinton administration, but as I recall he was the token bipartisan Republican cabinet appointee.
Comment by Wild Pegasus —
June 23, 2006 @ 2:00 am
Jim, they don’t have to know. They are in power, and they create reality themselves! We in the reality-based community don’t get it. We probably hate America, too.
- Josh
Comment by Pithlord —
June 23, 2006 @ 2:19 am
Sorry to play the pedant, but by the time there was a Maginot line, there weren’t any more Czars.
Comment by Ray —
June 23, 2006 @ 3:16 am
Damn, someone beat me to the sick, twisted victim rhetoric.
Comment by Clark —
June 23, 2006 @ 7:21 am
Pithford, Germany did indeed attack France via Belgium and Luxembourg in 1914 so that they could take out France before Russia could mobilize and advance on Germany.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 23, 2006 @ 8:00 am
Pithlord’s sick, twisted victim point, I think, is that the attack happened in 1914, but the Maginot line itself didn’t exist until after the Great War, a deranged Bush-hating claim that turns out to be factually correct. I fixed the body text.
Comment by Ray —
June 23, 2006 @ 9:19 am
Extra irony, if you want it – the Schlieffen plan for taking Paris quickly, before Russia had time to become a problem, apparently couldn’t work, even on paper (according to Victor Keegan’s history). It was incredibly detailed, describing exactly how fast troops could move, what trains were avalable and their precise schedules, which roads they’d take and the capacity of those roads, etc, etc, all worked out in fine detail so the German command would know how much force they could apply at any point/time of the invasion. All extremely well-worked out, until the final advance on Paris at which point 20,000 men were going to teleport from the rear to the front ranks.
Much like the extra US forces that are available for this strike on Korea.
Comment by BruceR —
June 23, 2006 @ 9:23 am
Victor Keegan?
Comment by BruceR —
June 23, 2006 @ 9:24 am
Pithford?
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 23, 2006 @ 9:25 am
Victor Pithford!
Comment by BruceR —
June 23, 2006 @ 9:26 am
Even worse, Jim, what if it’s a pony loaded with sixteen year-old mustard gas? What then, huh? Huh?
It’s always fun and games until someone loses a gas pony.
Comment by Kevin J. Maroney —
June 23, 2006 @ 9:35 am
You know, if I were al-Qaida, I would be working every angle I have ever angled to try to destroy the North Korean missle in an untracable way. Nothing would be better for my cause than giving Lil’ Kim an honor-slap that can only be assauged by actually attacking the US.
Comment by Nell —
June 23, 2006 @ 9:41 am
Perry’s part of Wesley Clark’s campaign, so if he used to be a Republican, he’s not now. Of course, the country’s full of people in that transitional stage. {wink} Took Clark right off my 2008 short list when I learned that, I can tell you.
This whole thing is like having your foreign policy run by Wile E. Coyote.
Comment by Ray —
June 23, 2006 @ 9:47 am
John Keegan. I got confused because he used to write for Victor!
Comment by Nell —
June 23, 2006 @ 9:49 am
Oh, and thanks so much for pointer to the Atwood piece. Why ”surprisingly measured”, though?
I hadn’t read anything but her fiction until that. Now I’m wondering if she’s had a regular opinion column all these years…
Comment by Hesiod —
June 23, 2006 @ 11:12 am
I have abone tom pick with the use of the term ”blackmail” to describe what is actually ”extortion.”
Blackmail is — ”You do this, Or I will reveal somethig about YOU that you don’t want revealed and cause you problems.”
Extortion is: ”You do this my way, or I will physically harm you, your oved ones or your property.”
To wit, Saddam could ”blackmail” the US (in particular people like Don Rumsfeld) by threatening to reval the secret side deals they cut with a previous Republican administration that gave him the OK to gas the kurds in the 1980’s, so long as he was beating Iran’s brains in.
Which might explain, come to think of it, why we invaded.
Comment by IOZ —
June 23, 2006 @ 11:47 am
I read that crazy article, and I thought, ”Isn’t that a little like puncturing a tire to prevent them from developing the wheel?”
I mean, unless you’re the United States playing Duck Hunt with all the alacrity of a blind quadriplegic, by which I mean, unless you’re the United States ”testing” its ”anti-missle” ”shield,” then the worldwide announcement of such-and-such test/launch/what-have-you would seem to indicate a basic mastery of the underlying technology.
Personally, I think we oughta launch some cruise missiles at their luggage stores to prevent the development of suitcase bombs.
Comment by BruceR —
June 23, 2006 @ 12:11 pm
Nell, re Atwood:
Don’t mistake one on-point (if rather obvious) historical analogy for a cogent world view. You’ll be wasting your time looking.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
June 23, 2006 @ 12:12 pm
Most importantly, they’ve forgotten – we’ve forgotten, as a nation – that war is extraordinary.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Nothing else to say. Just thank you.
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
June 23, 2006 @ 12:30 pm
Read thru 24 comments to find #24 was the one I wanted to make.
Despite a fondness for the position you call ”opponents of prophylactic war”, your post made me sit back and think about the problem. I can’t say that about many other blogs. Which is why UO stays at the top of my reading list.
There is nothing whatsoever uncertain about this war business. – the normal position of those who’ve never been on a battlefield nor studied history beyond the classroom.
Comment by patience —
June 23, 2006 @ 1:09 pm
Posted on Olmstead also:
Carter and Perry are not stupid people. So have they lost their minds? No. They know exactly the foolish potential consequences of what they wrote. They also know that the Cheney administration will not listen to anyone about anything. So therefore the ”advocacy” is not really aimed at the administration. What they are doing is co-opting the debate while flexing their rhetoric muscles for future non-Cheney administration positions. They are also highlighting the abject failures of the Cheney adminstration’s policies, which have let things get to the point where ”experts” can now talk about pre-emption.
Building a missle is a very complex task. There are many ways to prevent a missle from working, as evidenced by our many NASA disasters. There is more to this position than the position. Registering the revulsion of Andrew and others is a prime reason for getting the discussion started.
Ironically this ”advocacy” acts effectively as a Stephen Colbert-type irony shield against the policy it supposedly advances.
Will this level of analysis be presented to the viewers of Fox News? No. But what it has done is open discussion among the people who understand these things and have power to do something about it on the world stage. The Cheney administration is at a historic level of weakness, and firm action can possibly at this time force sane changes of both personal and policy, or at the minimum help to build fences high enough around Team Cheney that they will not be able to operate in the NK arena.
And it looks like this op-ed has successfully begun activities toward this goal as Chris Nelson’s thursday night report has indicated.
Comment by Nell —
June 23, 2006 @ 2:34 pm
@BruceR: So, I take it Atwood has frequently written opinion pieces? Has she had a regular column at The Age or in a Canadian paper? I’m interested in seeing for myself, and reaching my own conclusions.
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June 23, 2006 @ 9:22 pm
[...] e “It’s always fun and games until someone loses a gas pony.” BruceR, below. Posted by Jim Henley @ 9:22 pm, Filed under: Main [...]
Comment by abb1 —
June 24, 2006 @ 1:02 pm
Building a missle is a very complex task.
.
Building a missile is a very complex task? Come on, missile is just a rocket; building a missile is a very simple task. Anyone can build a rocket, I think even I did when I was a kid.
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Great post, by the way.