Depending On The Breaks

by digby

Newtie’s got a stomach churning op-ed today called “The Only Option Is To Win” in the Washington Post. I would suggest that everyone take him quite seriously. There is a lot of pressure on the right to conform with this line of thinking and these ginned up crises tend to force their acceptance for a long enough time that there’s no turning back. Lest we forget their boy still has his finger on the button:

Holbrooke has set the stage for an important national debate that goes well beyond such awful possibilities as Sept. 11-style airliner plots. It’s a debate about whether we are in danger of losing one or more U.S. cities, whether the world faces the possibility of a second Holocaust should Iran use nuclear or biological weapons against Israel, and whether a nuclear Iran would dominate the Persian Gulf and the world’s energy supplies. This is the most important debate of our time. It rivals both Winston Churchill’s argument in the 1930s over the nature of Hitler and the Nazis and Harry Truman’s argument in the 1940s about the emerging Soviet empire.

Holbrooke indicates that he would take the wrong path on American national security. He asserts that “containing the violence must be Washington’s first priority.”

As a goal this is precisely wrong. Defeating the terrorists and thwarting efforts by Iran and North Korea to gain nuclear and biological weapons must be the first goal of American policy. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if violence is necessary to defeat the terrorists, the Iranians and the North Koreans, then it is regrettably necessary. If they can be disarmed with less violence, then that is desirable. But a nonviolent solution that allows the terrorists to become better trained, better organized, more numerous and better armed is a defeat. A nonviolent solution that leads to North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons threatening us across the planet is a defeat.

This piece is explicitly coming out against any kind of containment. (Naturally, since containment worked in the cold war and is thus discredited as are all things that turn out in retrospect to have been right.) Note also how he says “if they can be disarmed with less violence that would be desirable.” You can almost see the pinched, sour expression on his face. He is subtly backing up his silly WWIII rhetoric by saying we are simultaneously fighting “the terrorists,” Iran and North Korea and there is no way to deal with them but “defeat” them militarily. (I particularly like his cynical use of the term holocaust in this discussion.)

This essay echoes his colleague at the new Committee on a Present Danger, Joe Lieberman who said yesterday:

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.

I can hardly believe he would say this. Aside from the fact that it is deeply offensive to anyone with intellectual integrity it is cheap demagoguery at its most obvious. Let’s get one thing straight. Nazism was a evil as it gets. And there was no more mortal human threat to the planet in world history than the threat of accidental or purposful nuclear war during the cold war. MAD was the ultimate threat — real Armageddon. We have many challenges and threats facing us, not the the least of which is nuclear prolifieration. Yet both Newtie and Joe find it completely acceptable that the military dictatorship and home of hotbed of islamic fundamentalism, Pakistan, and its arch rival India among a host of other countries have such weapons.

I’m sure all this macho talk is emotionally satisfying to some people but there is no reason that Democrats should allow themselves to be trash-talked into another Iraq style debate where the only parameters that can even be discussed are the how not the why. That’s what they are trying to do — get us into a position where we will start saying “ok, yes, this is WWIII, but I don’t think we are at war with Iran and North Korea — just Iran.” Or “of course this is an existential threat and we are in a global war against islamic fascism, but we should get the UN involved, don’t you think?”

I remember that feeling of being bulldozed on Iraq like it was yesterday. Many of us knew the war was ill timed and unnecessary (not to mention illegal and immoral) but it was clear from the beginning that there was nothing we could do. It was like watching a car accident in slow motion. We are in the midst of another attempt to create a crisis for which the only answer is more war and once again I get the sense that the entire system is paralyzed by it.

I don’t think the American people are on board at the moment, but if the Democrats don’t supply an alternative narrative — and do it with strength and conviction — many people will think that the decison has already been made and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. That’s where the Republicans want the country be in November — scared Republicans streaming to the polls to support their government and disillusioned Democrats staying home.

But there is something much bigger at stake than domestic politics and much more dangerous, I think. Newtie and his friends are using the specter of this WWIII and a nuclear armed Iran to begin the process of removing the taboo against a US first strike.

The great big neoelephant in the middle of the room is tactical nukes. We have proved with Iraq that we can’t back up our big threats with conventional warfare. So what we are left with is “shock and awe” and there is only one thing left in our arsenal that can carry that mail:

To those who have been paying attention to the Bush administration’s pronouncements on nuclear policy since 2001, Hersh’s revelations come as little surprise. During its first term, the Bush administration codified a new nuclear doctrine that identified several specific scenarios in which the United States would consciously choose to initiate nuclear war. The 2002 “Nuclear Posture Review,” almost wholly unnoticed by the peace and progressive communities, put forth explicit plans for launching nuclear attacks against nonnuclear nations. It even named seven states—including Iran—as possible targets of a U.S. nuclear first strike.

[…]

If the U.S. actually does roll out a few atomic bombs in the skies over Iran, there will be no turning back for any of us. The taboo that has prevailed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki will prevail no more. The distinction between conventional and nuclear war will forever be lost. The inhibition that has kept everyone from stepping over the nuclear precipice will disappear in a single flash. Once someone throws open the nuclear Pandora’s box that has been so precariously held shut since Aug. 9, 1945, it will never be shut again.

Busting taboos is a specialty of the Bush administration. The taboo against torture is now pretty much fully inoperative. The taboo against genocide is being currently tested. Nukes are the most efficient way to get there so that taboo is being discarded too.

Of course, the neocons and other hawks have always been big believers in nuclear weapons and thought the taboo against a first strike was “tying our hands.” Part of their original raison d’etre was their antipathy toward detente back in the 70’s which led them form Team B and Committee on the Present Danger to hype the Soviet threat. They were hysterical then and they are hysterical now. But we are in a different world. The WWII veterans and foreign policy establishment types who knew to keep these crazies at bay are long gone. The crazies are in charge.

If we let Gingrich and Lieberman get away with this insane, reckless rhetoric comparing some would-be bombers with Hitler and Stalin and characterizing the GWOT as an existential threat requiring extreme violence, within a very short time period the slow motion car wreck will have begun and we will wake up one morning to find Cheney and his pals have exercized their “only option to win.”

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