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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Tuesday, September 10, 2002
All Nations –including Iraq- want Nuclear Weapons The first draft of this entry read as follows: I just finished reading this statement from The International Institute for Strategic Studies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities and I’m shocked beyond belief that another country would want to build nuclear weapons. The possibility of a country besides the United States having nukes sends chills up my spine. Don’t they know that only we are supposed to have them! I mean if that Saddam guy has them he might use them without our approval! He might even become the first person not named Sam to use them! This is outrageous and cannot be tolerated!The point, of course, was sarcasm but I pulled back from using it because the joke seems overused and thus is devoid of a real punch. Or is it? Surveys about this report via google and yahoo reveal only one story, an AP piece by William J. Kole, that points out that lots of countries have nukes and that it the outrage might appear hypocritical. But even that piece implies that there is a good reason to single out Iraq and doesn’t mention any events of 1945. It seems as if people find it perfectly normal for the U.S. to want to limit the ability of other countries to have nuclear weapons. And it is perfectly normal but not because the U.S. is virtuous or benign but rather because the U.S. is like every other country; it is to the advantage of the U.S. to have nukes and for as few other countries, particularly countries that it has less than cordial relations with, to have them. It should be noted that the howls of protest are particularly loud because, as Brendan O’Neill has argued, Iraq in general and Hussein in particular has been a consistent whipping boy of and demonized by the U.S., and, to the extent that it matters, Great Britain as well, for over a decade. They are an easy target and in the current environment, where war of some kind looks like it will happen sooner or later, it is even more important that Iraq and Hussein be viewed as the bad guys. Iraq’s potential to make nuclear weapons does give the hawks an additional justification to go to war, or at least in their minds it does, but it is mistake to think this is the sole reason for the outrage. The U.S. gets mad whenever another country goes nuclear. Americans were upset four years ago when India and Pakistan made it clear they had nuclear weapons. Some on the right went so far as to blame Bill Clinton, or more specifically what they saw as the weak leadership on national defense, for this proliferation. Whether such criticism was valid or not is beside the point, what really matters is that there is a widespread assumption that the U.S. should have nuclear weapons and be trying to prevent other states from obtaining them. Issues of military power often get translated into rhetoric about security and peace, and that is what happens with nukes. America has no moral justification to be the only country with nuclear weapons but it would be in a better strategic position if it were. The only time nuclear weapons have ever been used is when only one country possessed them. The U.S. attacked Japan with nuclear weapons in 1945 and did not have to fear retaliation in kind. That all changed when the Soviet Union. The U.S. no longer had the ultimate advantage over the rest of the world. Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had to watch themselves and eventually this lead to the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction. This was a military doctrine put into practice by the U.S. in the 1950s that said that the U.S. would not be able to achieve an absolute victory over the Soviet Union in an all out war so America should at least have the capability to destroy the Soviets and prevent them from achieving such a victory. The message for other states in all of this was that nuclear weapons meant increased security. And so many countries have attempted to gain nuclear weapons and a few have done so. An argument exists that the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction, makes the world a more dangerous place in absolute terms but, following the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma, each individual state becomes safer if it has nuclear weapons. After all, the likelyhood of a nation being attacked with nuclear weapons is certainly no greater if the nation has nuclear weapons to respond with than if it didn’t. (The possibility of an accident or losing control of the nukes does exist but every country thinks it can and will avoid that.) Seeing the anti-imperialist angle to nuclear proliferation, Alexander Cockburn, coeditor of CounterPunch, has written, “that every country should have at least one thermonuclear device, if necessary donated by the World Bank." (Some countries will no doubt at one point or another have higher priorities than nuclear weapons but that doesn’t change the fact that they would be safer if they woke up tomorrow with the ability to make and launch nuclear weapons. Similary there are people such as the members of Abolition 2000 who make a principled argument for the elimination of nuclear weapons but these people –like pacifists, a not exactly mutually exclusive group- these people have a tendency to not be in charge of running countries.) Since it is in the interest of every country to have nuclear weapons, Americans shouldn’t be surprised when a military strongman like Hussein is trying to develop them but America’s desire to keep Iraq from gaining them isn’t in and of itself hypocritical. Just as it is to advantage of any state to have nuclear weapons, it is to their advantage if their opponents do not have them as it gives the state with the nukes a military advantage. This has become even more important since the demise of the Soviet Union, which previously was a regular and valuable ally to states on the outs with the U.S. The U.S. doesn’t like to think of itself as an empire regardless of what it does and so instead of using this pure power justification for America’s desire to prevent Iraq from having nukes, hawkish government officials, politicians and other assorted proponents of war wrap up this desire in more noble language. They say Hussein is crazy without commenting on the mental state of Harry Truman when he was in office. They mention that he abuses the human rights of Iraqis without mentioning that the U.S. has a less than perfect record on that matter and that such a justification leads to some very interesting arguments. But most of all they just live with the going implication that the U.S. has the right to prevent a country like Iraq from obtaining nuclear weapons even, or perhaps especially, if that means taking over the country and installing a subservient government. International law might not be on their side. London based attorney Geoffrey Robertson argues in today’s edition of The Age that merely having or attempting to develop or obtain weapons of mass destruction is not a crime under international law and that proper proof has not been provided to show that Iraq is in violation of the documents it agreed to after being defeated in the Persian Gulf War. (Thanks to Tim Dunlop for the link and Lisa English for the link to Dunlop.) (One matter that I’m curious about is what recourse Iraq would have to claim that the war crimes that noted reporter Seymour Hersh has charged Barry McCaffrey with committed shortly after the end of the Persian Gulf War constitute a violation of the ceasefire and that as a result Iraq is no longer bound by the agreements it signed in defeat.) The U.S. government will likely continue down its current path of trying to maintain military advantage by preventing other countries from having nuclear weapons and justify it on shifting grounds that have nothing to do with reality. And U.S. citizens, to the extent that they care, will eat it up. But it seems to me that a far smarter and more justifiable approach is to recognize that nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction exist and that countries will continue to obtain them. And then, without necessarily committing to a position, ask government leaders to explain exactly why the U.S. has a right to posses these weapons and to have used them but that other countries do not? |