Gahhhhh!! Could Bush Be Doing A Really Good Job???!

by tristero

I just about had an aneurysm when I read this:

…eyebrows popped up last week when none other than Richard Perle , former Reagan assistant secretary of defense, former Bush brain-truster on the Defense Policy Board, and a key promoter of the war to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, blistered the administration as “dysfunctional…” [italics in original]

Oh. My. God. Do you realize what this means? Richard Perle, who has been right about exactly nothing in his long career, whose grasp on reality is so thin he thinks the UN is on the banks of the Hudson River, Richard Perle believes the present administration is doing a lousy job. And, gasp! there is only one conceivable conclusion to draw from this:

George Bush, we hardly know ye. You must be doing one heckuva job.

I staggered back from my computer, my entire world overturned. If Richard fucking Perle thinks the Bushites are incompetent, my God, have I been wrong about the Bush administration all these years? Could it be that no one could have prevented 9/11? Could the Bush/Iraq war actually be a great idea? Could the situation there actually be going “remarkably well,” as Cheney recently said? No. Wait. I can’t believe it. Well, shoot me in the face, but it’s inescapable. Perle’s angry, fearful criticism of the Bushites can only mean that – no, it can’t be, but logically it follows – Dick Cheney is as sane as you and I.*

Clearly, I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

But then, I read a little further:

…eyebrows popped up last week when none other than Richard Perle , former Reagan assistant secretary of defense, former Bush brain-truster on the Defense Policy Board, and a key promoter of the war to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, blistered the administration as “dysfunctional” when it comes to stopping someone from bringing “a nuclear weapon or even nuclear material into the United States…

“If [the Bush administration] can’t get itself together to organize a serious program for finding nuclear material on its way to the United States, then it ought to be replaced by an administration that can.”

But President Bush , Perle emphasized, is not to blame for this sorry state of affairs. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that if one could . . . put this proposition to the president, he would first be shocked to learn that we don’t have the capability. Secondly, [he] would immediately order that we develop it.” [italics in original]

Oh, thank God, thank Flying Spaghetti Monster, may offerings be proferred to the Cathode, the Anode, and the Holy Grid. Nothing to worry about. Perle’s still nuts, it’s just that the mad dog that is his paranoia is chasing its tail. And Bush is still the worst president. Ever.

Y’see, the Bush administration is dysfunctional to Perle because it isn’t totally freaked out, in a George C. Scott Strangelovian way about, get this, “finding nuclear material on its way to the United States.”

Man, dig it! The assumption implied by Perle’s deliberate grammatical choices is that there actually is terrorist nuclear material on its way here. Right now. Hiding in the Evian you now are allowed to carry on flights again.

Think about it. If Claude Rains in Notorious can stash uranium in wine botttles, why NOT plutonium in designer water bottles?

I feel, I smell the terror. Today, sez Perle, the nuclear material is on its way. Tomorrow, it arrives and gets unloaded by some of Ann Coulter’s foul-smelling men. And on Saturday, the bomb…no, THE Bomb…is gonna blast us all…you, too, Missouri…to hell and beyond. Impeach Bush now!

Okay, a reality check. Experts know a few things about the threat of terrorist nuclear explosions. First and foremost, certain terrorists, including the bin Laden gang, have sought nuclear explosives for years. This is serious shit and you damn well better believe it we should it be very concerned. Especially with lunatics like AQ Khan still on the loose…oh, excuse me, he’s under house arrest, I forgot. That’s stopping him.

But I digress, so before going further, let’s get this upfront and clear as a bell. No one seriously disagrees with the fact that nuclear arms in the hands of terrorists is an alarming proposition. Nor does anyone seriously disagree that security for nukes, especially in Russia, has been atrocious, alarmingly so. Nor does anyone disagree that more can and should be done to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on nukes.

The real question, the only question, is this: How likely is the threat of nuclear terrorism in 2006, and for the next four or five years? The answer seems to be, “very, very unlikely.”

Note: I am not saying the imminent threat of a nuclear explosion is very, very unlikely. Bush, after all, still is president, and I am convinced he wants to be the first since Truman to Push The Button, probably on Iran. And there are some other nuts in the world who also have nukes.

But nuclear terrorism, perpetrated by a McVeigh clone or al Qaeda? I can’t see it in the near future for many reasons. Let’s look at a few.

Indeed althought there have been efforts to obtian them, terrorists have, by all accounts failed to get usable “nuclear materials,” meaning stuff that goes bang, like plutonium. How have they failed? They’ve been played for suckers, for one thing. Like a 15 year old dork from the suburbs of New Jersey,* bin Laden thought he was copping the finest Mexican but ended up with oregano and toasted bananna peels.

And there are many good reasons why no one. at least no state, would be willing to sell nukes to terrorists. Do I have to spell them out? The moment they are traced back to the state – and they will be traced back, even given the poor accounting of nuclear stockpiles in Russia – that state has less than 48 hours of existence left. And that’s for starters.

What about non-state actors? Well, there are a lot of obstacles to that happening, too, when you think about it. First of all, y’gotta steal some bang-bang that’s been refined, processed, and ready to rock. Y’gotta know where it is. Now, it’s not that difficult to find that out, I’m sure, but what is difficult, especially if you have the kind of education even a Muhammad Atta had – and most rank and file terrorists don’t – is knowing what to look for, knowing how to steal it, how to store it, and how to transport it. And that’s over and above the ordinary risks a normal thief would have to go through, like the fact that the Man is after you, and unscrupulous competitors want to know where you stashed the goods so they can rip you off.

Again, for the less than fleet of mind, I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m saying that given what we publicly know about who is doing terrorism today – and I stress the “today” – it’s just not that easy to get their hands on the Big Bang. It just doesn’t seem that likely.

But let’s say they did. Let’s say that somewhere between bin Laden’s hideout and Cheney’s undisclosed location is a large stash of nasty stuff in the hands of nasty people. Remember, now. No current state, that’s right: no current state would be suicidal enough to sell a working bomb, or the makings of one, to terrorists. What that means is that you need people – plural – very conversant with Western physics to build the contraption. Sure, a pretty smart Princeton undergrad, say, can figure out how to design a nuke. But design AND build it? In complete isolation? Without reliable access to specialized supplies and test equipment?

Doesn’t sound that doable to me. But, let’s keep playing the game. They’ve built the bomb. Well, they can’t really test it, y’know. Come to think of it, how they gonna store and maintain the thing? Y’can’t just stuff it in the back of a cave wrapped in a nice rug and trust that two guys with a working knowledge of an ak-47 and a childhood education consisting of memorizing Qu’ranic suras are gonna know how to care and feed a nuclear bomb, for crissakes. That takes expertise which present-day terrorists don’t have. Remember: 9/11 was box cutters. Spain was cellphone detonation. London was timers. These are a far cry, technologically, from a nuclear warhead and don’t forget, Ramzi Yousef was captured because of an explosive accident. The bastards in al Qaeda may be among the worst people alive in the world, but they aren’t rocket scientists. Or nuclear.

And that brings up Perle’s bete noire. How do you transport a nuke? I have no idea, but I’m willing to bet that you don’t simply pack it up in a fedex shipping carton surrounded by a lot of old wadded newspaper and expect it to arrive in one piece at a pier on the Hudson River, next to the UN (to lapse into Perle’s geographical illiteracy). And even if it did arrive, it has to be picked up, at least partially assembled, then tested, deployed, and detonated. And I strongly suspect that arming and firing a nuclear weapon, even a small one, is a lot more elaborate than twirling your moustaches, shouting “I’m king of the world!” and pushing a big red button.

Could a terrorist nuclear explosion happen in the US in the next four years? Yes, it could. Is it very likely? I can’t see how anyone can say that with a straight face.

Should the US take the threat of future nuclear terrorism seriously and institute serious efforts to prevent it?

Of course we should. And you know what would be the most effective way to prevent a nuclear terrorist act in the next ten years, other than more effective port screenings, and the like? Elect American leaders who understand that it is sheer insanity to invade other countries unilaterally, to prop up corrupt oligarchs like the Saudis, and behave as if the United States is the Roman Empire Reloaded. Why is all this crazy? Because the US today is not only breeding more terrorists in Iraq, it is breeding more sophisticated ones.

With every death caused by an American, or blamed on an American, virulent, highly personal hatred of America and Americans spreads. And don’t kid yourself. “They” may already hate us, but atrocities like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo make it quite clear that the present US government has demonstrated that anti-Americanism is infinitely expandable.

I’m not naive. The US will never be the city on a hill. I’m not talking Cumbaya. I’m talking commonsense. If you were bin Laden, and you wished to expand the pool of potential violent opponents of the US, if you wanted to recruit among the best and the brightest, those that could build and deploy an atomic bomb, what could you possibly do better than what the US is already doing in Iraq? In Afghanistan? In Israel/Palestine? And so many other places?

Perle, of course, is totally paranoid, in a Bircher kind of a way. But paranoids have a creepy habit of generating self-fulfilling prophecies. The longer the US continues to privilege the paranoids like Perle, by demanding an “end to evil” and trying to rule the world by hard force, the sooner Perle will be right.

And believe me, you don’t want to live in a world where a man like Richard Perle is right. A Hobbesian world would be paradise by comparison.

Special Note: Obviously, this is all my speculation, but it is something I looked into at one point in some detail. I believe if you search my blog, you will find links to articles and books that make the following points: present-day terrorists are not that well-educated in Western science, especially physics, terrorists generally prefer low-tech strategies to high-tech ones, and the barriers – financial, intellectual, strategical, and practical – to the successful deployment of a nuclear weapon, even the lower tech so-called “dirty” bomb, are formidable. If people are interested, I’ll try to scare up new links, but there are experts who have publicly said as much as I’ve said: Nuclear terrorism is a serious threat, but it is unlikely, at present to be an imminent one. That does not mean the US should do nothing. But there are far more imminent dangerous threats that the US faces, and Perle is wildly wrong to get so hysterical. As usual.

*Of course, I’m aware of the fallacy of the ad hominem here. Geez, not only on the internets does no one know if you’re a dog, but no one has any sense that you may not be a dog.

**I have the right to say this. I grew up in suburban New Jersey so I know whereof I speak, although I can honestly claim that I never bought bananna peels thinking they were something more potent. Whether I’m saying I never tried, or did but never got burned, I’ll leave for your fevered speculation.