Another good one - the world is heading for some big nuclear trouble down the line. And Obama and the other middle-aged children who rule us are playing games.
The Third Nuclear Age
Sometimes a gun isn’t just a gun. About 740,000 assault rifles and pistols are stored in Swiss homes or in private possession. Nobody knows the exactly how many firearms are in circulation, but there may be up to 1.3 million firearms in Switzerland. Despite this you are more likely to murdered by knife than by gun. “Police statistics for the year 2006 records 34 killings or attempted killings involving firearms, compared to 69 cases involving bladed weapons and 16 cases of unarmed assault. Cases of assault resulting in bodily harm numbered 89 (firearms) and 526 (bladed weapons)”
Sometimes a nuke isn’t just a nuke. The country with the largest known deposits of uranium, which tested 7 nuclear devices on its soil in the 50s and whose head of government isn’t even going to attend President Obama’s nonproliferation summit won’t keep statesmen up at night. It’s Australia. The first thing its scientists did after devising a way to enrich uranium with lasers (SILEX) was worry about keeping it out of the wrong hands.
The danger posed by weapons is crucially dependent on their human modifiers. Guns in the hands of the Swiss are not the same as guns in the hands of a Sudanese militia. Enriched uranium in Australia is no worry; but uranium in the hands of Kim Jong Il is. It is changes to the political environment that create or diminish the problem even when the hardware remains the same. Professor Paul Bracken describes the advent of the Second Nuclear Age, in which we now live, in terms of a change in the actors not a change in the weapons.
The second nuclear age is defined by the spread of nuclear weapons to countries for reasons other than the Soviet-American Cold War rivalry, which was the defining aspect of the first nuclear age. … [It is] an n-player game—a multiplayer game. Game theory tells us that even three player duels create great complexity. Equilibrium and stability are harder to achieve. …
[In the Second Nuclear Age] nuclear weapons have become an essential part of state-building programs … They symbolize state power. Armies used to serve this role … [it is now] the preferred method poor states use to demonstrate power.” …
In the first nuclear age, no states or institutions could retard the expansion of the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals. Today’s emerging nuclear states struggle to get the established powers and institutions off their backs. States give up their programs under US and international pressure. …
In the first nuclear age, both superpowers were relatively rich. The new nuclear powers are generally poor. They cannot afford the kind of control systems the superpowers had. …
Today’s nuclear weapons states can observe states who went nuclear in the past to find out what works. … A second mover may wait and then suddenly play its hand—for instance by weaponizing its nuclear capacity and generating sudden instability.
The Second Age represents both the triumph and the ultimate failure of the NPT. Bracken writes that “the superpowers cooperated in a very successful nonproliferation regime—the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Some think that the NPT failed, but the treaty succeeded for twenty-five years. At the time the NPT was framed, the hope was to delay proliferation for five to ten years. Instead it worked for twenty-five—into the nineties..”
What kept nuclear weapons contained was the coercive power of the superpowers themselves. Just as the policeman ultimately relies on firearms to restrict firearms, it was the concentration of power in the bipolar world, as manifested by nuclear weapons, that kept everyone in line. Now the power is diffused. Even the United States, speaking through Barack Obama, has declared it will refrain from using nukes except in defined circumstances.
The key to understanding the difficulty of the nonproliferation problem is to realize that the core of the difficulty is a human one. Above all it is a question of who has nuclear weapons; it is one of legitimacy and rationality rather than technology. Bracken noted that the Second Nuclear Age required a “massive change to intelligence programs” precisely because the problem consisted of monitoring the who. The billions of dollars that the Obama administration is prepared to spend on buying fancy locks and safeguards for Pakistan and other Second Age countries may be more useful in terms of developing intelligence contacts within their nuclear establishments than for buying the safeguards themselves. It’s not what’s in the vaults that is the problem, it is who can get to use them.
As technology is diffused nonproliferation will essentially become a human management problem. The SILEX enrichment process exemplifies how technological advances created regulatory and political problems. SILEX uses lasers “drawing no more electricity than a dozen homes” not centrifuges, to refine fissile material. One of its developers, Dr. Francis Slakey said:
“This next generation technology is so efficient and so small that we would no longer be able to see it with our satellites and we would no longer be able to detect whether there was some power source going into it, because it uses so little power … Historically every enrichment technology – that is every technology that has been used to develop nuclear fuel, every single one of them – has proliferated despite best efforts to keep the secret … Those rogue countries that may pursue a technology don’t do it unless it’s been industrially proven, and so prior to that if it’s just bench science or R and D [research and development], they don’t go that path.”
Under a deal with the US in 1998, development of the technology was transferred to the United States and in 2001 SILEX was classified.
Now General Electric Hitachi wants a licence from US regulators to build the world’s first SILEX plant in North Carolina.
It’s great stuff. The only problem is how long can one control the who? One interesting question posed by Barack Obama’s speech at the Prague nonproliferation summit is whether the world has gone from a short Second Age directly into the beginnings of a Third Nuclear Age, one in which not countries but proxies — and poorly controlled proxies at that — hold the power of life and death over millions. The President’s speech largely addressed Second Age issues and then went further. Obama raised the possibilty that nonstate organizations would get the bomb.
So let me be clear: Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran’s neighbors and our allies. The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed.
So, finally, we must ensure that terrorists never acquire a nuclear weapon. This is the most immediate and extreme threat to global security. One terrorist with one nuclear weapon could unleash massive destruction. Al Qaeda has said it seeks a bomb and that it would have no problem with using it. And we know that there is unsecured nuclear material across the globe. To protect our people, we must act with a sense of purpose without delay.
So soon? And who is this “we”? During the First Age, “we” clearly referred to the members of the Security Council who, more than any words written on paper, were responsible for the relative longevity of nonproliferation. They gave force to the letter of the treaty, which after all, did not enforce itself. Obama’s nuclear summit is clearly an attempt to create a new “we” with one important difference: it already mirrors the Second Age. With the US President backpedaling on America’s pre-eminence the world is left with a multipolar “we”; an n-player game, one capable of complex outcomes and perhaps no attainable stability. Already the danger is that the nuclear summit will follow the fate of the Kyoto Agreement — a broad statement of platitudes that everyone — except the scrupulous West intends to renege upon. National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough admitted that the summit would produce no binding commitments, no enforcement mechanism.
Garrett: How do you respond to those that point out that the communique is not binding and not enforceable?
McDonough: Well, you know, that’s a, I, I guess I think that’s a fair criticism, Major, but the bottom line is what we’re doing here is bringing people together to affirm what I think everybody recognizes is a principle threat for all of us — namely, loose nuclear materials in the hands of terrorists who will use that material. …
Garrett: As a candidate, Sen. Obama promised to spend $1 billion to augment international efforts to monitor and secure loose nuclear materials. He has asked Congress for hundred of millions this year. Will Congress provide it?
McDonough: Well I think there’s been a series of uh, observations made by Republicans and Democrats in the Congress that we have to invest the kind of resources necessary in this challenge.
Not nearly enough, and not nearly the will that will be necessary to make it stick. If the past is any guide, a Second Age nonproliferation enforcement mechanism will be less effective than that of the First Age. Perhaps the world may achieve a new equilibrium based on the condition of universal armament rather than a World Without Nuclear Weapons; a peace based on terror rather brotherly love. And the reason, if it comes to pass, will be simple. The world tried to achieve via arms control what it feared to attempt via democratization. It tried to control the weapons, and in a fit of politically correct absentmindedness, remembered only too late it was about the men.
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wretchard
How do you build consensus in a multipolar, nationalistic world? How do you overcome the attractions which have created the Second Nuclear Age? Answer: by invoking the possible horrors of a Third Age. In particular by offering up a nonstate fear object to unite the motely crew. Al-Qaeda is the greatest danger; that non-everything, non-Muslim, non-Arab, non-national menace. Except that who, besides Obama, believes it? Who thinks that if Al Qaeda gets one bomb that it will be Helsinki, Damascus or Teheran rather than the New York City in which it will be exploded?
But suppose it were true? Then another question presents itself. Who besides Obama believes that anyone will retaliate to avenge Helsinki, Damascus or Teheran? If the answer in both cases is ‘no one’ then it will follow that each country will have to make its own private arrangements for vengeance. Hence we can expect that a growing North Korean nuclear arsenal will push Japan to re-arm rather than recoil from nuclear weapons. An Iranian nuke will not provoke a convulsion of disgust across the Sunni world, but rather a stampede to arm.
This goes double for Al-Qaeda. The problem presented by a nonstate attack on a state is that the victim has no peer against which to retaliate. There is no culpable government to nuke, no named person to drag before the International Human Rights Courts. No. There are only the usual suspects, the hated Other, the object of the blood feud. So if anyone else besides America is ever actually nuked by Al Qaeda, don’t count on Barack Obama retaliating on anybody, especially when that anybody is truly something like a religious group, faction or ethnic community. He only does man-made disasters, not terrorism; certainly not Islamic terrorism, let alone Sunni or Shia Islamic terrorism. About all they can hope for is a bouquet of flowers and boxed DVD set of Hollywood hits.
If the summit can’t create a credible source of deterrence and enforcement the real question it will raise is why shouldn’t we arm?
April 13, 2010 - 4:50 am Link to this Comment
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Gary Ogletree
You people have such an appalling lack of faith in Obama. If only He had been there and could have talked to Herr Hitler. What’s wrong with peace in our time?
April 13, 2010 - 6:43 am Link to this Comment
Alexis
We could start acting like bedu.
If al-Qaeda attacks us, we could simply retaliate against whomever we have a strong reason to think would applaud an attack by al-Qaeda against us.
I think the root cause of terrorism is people who approve of terrorist attacks, be they Palestinians in Gaza and Nablus, watchers of al-Manar in Beirut, Saudis in Riyadh, or Pushtuns in Peshewar. It may be difficult to find the actual perpetrators, but killing those who celebrate attacks against us is reasonably easy.
Nuclear deterrence during the Cold War was essentially nuclear hostage taking. Using cities as nuclear hostages was an extension of area bombing during World War II. As the Cold War kept going, the efficacy of nuclear deterrence got taken for granted and the killing of nuclear hostages became increasingly unthinkable.
Well, considering the nature of the enemy we face, we may need to start thinking about killing hostages again. Who supports al-Qaeda? Who names her son Sirhan? Who has a son named Osama younger than nine years old? Who lectures us after the September 11 attacks?
Al-Qaeda is essentially an extension of Saudi Arabia’s religious police. The Saudi royal family has repeatedly threatened to murder expatriates living there en masse. So, Saudi Arabia has a target rich environment for future hostage killing if the need comes around.
Now, imagine a future where the Peninsula is no longer the “Arabian Peninsula” because the principal language there is no longer Arabic…
April 13, 2010 - 7:46 am Link to this Comment
[ Personally, if I were President I'd announce any nuclear attack on the US by a Muslim directed bomb (no matter what country or unaffiliated group it comes from) would result in the destruction of Mecca and Medina as well as the destruction of every nuclear site in the Muslim world. ]
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sol vason
Iran will never launch a direct nuclear attack on the U.S. It will create a secret terrorist cell, train it, give it nuclear weapons, and the terrorists will attack an American trophy city and/or anywhere in Israel except Jerusalem. And claim victory on behalf of World Peace.
The bomb does need to explode. Just be lethal to large numbers of people. And it needs to be portable. Iran already has the smuggling routes it needs to make delivery.
April 13, 2010 - 8:36 am Link to this Comment
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Subotai Bahadur
Wretchard, thank you for starting the discussion I asked for earlier.
I can only look at your #3 as prophecy. We will be hit. In the first, and possibly the second, iteration; Buraq Hussein will not retaliate, except perhaps against those Americans who oppose not retaliating. After that … “Only the Great Blue Sky Tengi Nor knows the outcome”.
On an earlier thread, I roughly described the dynamics of Poland and the Czech Republic hurriedly acquiring a minimal nuclear deterrent as a necessity for survival as nations and free peoples. It is a process that would hold for small states throughout the Western world who now realize that the bi-polar world is gone and that the United States not only does not intend to protect them from aggression anymore, but also actively desires to betray them to any aggressor in the name of appeasement.
There is a rationale there, that we as observers can at least understand. It is neither stable, nor in the long term survivable, but it is in terms we can understand.
“It tried to control the weapons, and in a fit of politically correct absentmindedness, remembered only too late it was about the men.”
Spot on, but we have so far ignored another basic part of that formulation. “it was about the men”.
Deterrence requires that there be an underlying agreement and understanding of certain basic values to work. If they are not there, there is no deterrence, only a very dangerous illusion of such that WILL break down catastrophically.
Going back to the basic bi-polar world, we reached a sufficient understanding with the Soviets [not a total one, which made things still dangerous] over some basic things. 1) that it was not possible for a nuclear attack to be launched from either party without the responsible party being absolutely known to the other [the joy of a bi-polar world]. 2) both sides valued the lives of its civilians and its infra-structure sufficiently to make the risk of their loss a sufficient hostage to deter not only launching nuclear strikes, but also a wide range of actions that might conceivably lead to the other side being forced into a corner where it felt it had to launch.
This value was not equivalent. This is in part due to the influence of Marxism-Leninism that was/is a larger faith that superceded the survival of any one people, in theory. As the dominant “faith” of the Soviet Union, it influenced events, but did not overwhelm Great Russian nationalism, which valued survival of the Russian people. An example of the difference is the concept of nuclear warfighting. Soviet military doctrine considered nuclear warfare as part of a continuous spectrum of warfighting and not necessarily a special case. There are plenty of texts on this available from the Soviet higher military academies. What you train to do, your military will do in time of war. Weapons systems designs freeze doctrine in steel and concrete for all to see.
Soviet doctrine, with the approval of the organs of the State and Party; made the assumption that they would in fact get the first strike off. It went something along the line of how the valiant Intelligence Organs of the State would discover the dastardly Capitalist plot to launch a nuclear attack on the innocent and peace loving Soviet people. Forewarned, they would beat the Running Dogs to the punch and launch first, counterforce. They would then reload and launch again before the surviving Western warheads arrived. Those silos that survived, would reload again and be used to attack or threaten the remaining Western countervalue targets.
A short digression on missile silo design. [nota bene: I have been in both the missile silo control capsule training "emulators" (precise replicas that you cannot tell that you are not in a real one once the door is closed) and in active duty missile silo control capsules a number of times, back in the ancient days when editors would send me checks for my then sideline of writing articles for military journals. I have crawled around and through the training missile silos. I have performed the launch procedure used by the control capsule combat crew in a training emulator, and I can tell you, turning that key even in a drill gets your undivided attention. And I have recieved a number of interesting briefings in conjunction with all that.]
There are two ways of getting a missile out of a silo. You can start the engine, and let it just fly out. This totally fries all the fancy wiring and plumbing that you need to make the silo/missile combination work. It can be reloaded …. in months to years after it is rebuilt. It is far cheaper and easier to build the system that way, if you only plan to use the silo once. Our doctrine was, if we had to launch it was TEOTWAWKI. No reloads, no do-overs.
On board ships, firing the missile in the silo/tube, at least missiles the size of an ICBM, is not considered a good thing. Fire and ships do not get along at all well, especially when you are underwater when you do it. The method is to blast the missile to the surface with compressed gases, and the engine ignites as soon as the nozzle breaks out of the water into the air. As a byproduct of launching without sinking the ship and killing the crew, you can reload the missile tube almost immediately if the reloads and handling equipment are there and it is safe to surface.
After the first generation or so of Soviet missile silos, they used the gas-boost system on their land based silos. They could be reloaded and fired again, in theory, in less than the time an American retaliatory strike took to get there. [We do not launch on warning, but only after we are sure we are under attack, proved by warhead detonation. This means the Soviets had the flight time of their launch, the time it took us to launch after the debris settled in the missile fields, and the flight time of our missiles, to reload.] We watched them do the launch and reloading drills from satellites. We could see they had reload missiles stockpiled nearby. They went to enormous extra time, effort, and expense to build weapons systems designed for warfighting and not for deterrence. We considered having to launch to mean that it was all over. That difference in basic understanding drove a significant part of the strategic instability of the bi-polar era.
We did not think totally alike, having different cultures and values. That is inherent in people being different people. Fortunately, we had just enough in common to achieve a literal modus vivendi.
Now we are facing a multi-polar nuclear world. And it is not a world where the European cultural worldview is universally held. Cultures value different things. Can one rationally think the Islamic culture values the survival of cities, populations, and infrastructure over theology? To the same degree that a European based culture does? If a culture believes in reincarnation as a religious tenet; will it consider the same things to be “hostages” worth protecting by moderating their conduct as we would? If a culture believes that the will of a god-king/dictator/Party Chairman is the functional equivalent of divine, will it respond to the same external stimuli, threat or otherwise, as a Parliamentary democracy? And let us not forget my own ethnic background, which has as an underpinning the basic concept that “If y’all ain’t Han Chinese, y’all ain’t s**t.”. [Family comes from South China]
We do not think the same. Unlike American Democrat/Leftist proponents of “Cultural Diversity” I do not believe that we are “all different, but really all the same inside [unless you are white, in which case you are irredeemably evil]“. I believe that people’s culture and world views can differ around the world, and those differences mean that they put different value weights on different things. I emphasize again, that deterrence only works if there is a sufficient meeting of minds between the parties that something that they value highly enough is at risk if they act dangerously. And each side has to understand the other’s value system so as not to accidentally put them into a corner where they believe that they have no choice but to attack. I do not see a prospect of a sufficient degree of mutual comprehension and understanding between all actors in a multi-polar nuclear world. It only takes one “oops” moment.
In the past, time and distance attenuated the friction between cultures. Today when people are linked instantaneously, and the consequences of misunderstanding involve hard gamma radiation; a multi-polar nuclear world is doomed to break down exothermically.
I invite comments and arguments to increase the understanding of all, including myself.
Subotai Bahadur
April 13, 2010 - 10:15 am Link to this Comment
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buddy larsen
Increasingly, it is the tendency of our culture to sugar-coat facts, to color unpleasant realities, to demand a happy ending. Fifty years ago people were seriously worried about World War III. They anticipated the destruction of civilization in a nuclear holocaust. Somehow our adult concern was transformed into a childish program for world peace and universal disarmament.
Middle-aged children imagine that nuclear weapons are the problem. In reality, nuclear weapons are an unavoidable consequence of human nature. Can we eliminate crime, bad manners or lying? Can we establish permanent peace? The child sees no obstacle because the child does not know himself, and does not know human nature. A mature mind, however, knows that peace is precarious and temporary. It is not a question of eliminating nuclear weapons. Peace is only possible if we can mitigate the wickedness of human beings (e.g., like you and I).
The men who rule Russia and China are bad. The men who rule the United States, Great Britain and France are also bad. The difference between the two types of men have nothing to do with inherent goodness in one or badness in the other. The difference is found in traditions that either concentrate power in the hands of a few individuals, or distribute power under a system of checks and balances. The latter mitigates human evil; the former intensifies human evil. The one system presents the political criminal with an opportunity; the other system limits the harm that he can do.
(above is a snip, read more please, from Nuclear Disarmament: A Modern Fairy Tale by JR Nyquist, September 25, 2009)
What the heck, here’s a little more of the essay, italics mine:
In terms of nuclear weapons, it is childish to suppose that leaders of systems based on the concentration of power will agree to an honest reduction of their nuclear forces. Without any system of checks and balances to regulate them, they will follow their nature – which is to accumulate and concentrate more power in their own hands. Internationally this means that they will cheat on any arms control agreement involving nuclear weapons; or they will rely on lethal biological weapons which have been outlawed in those countries where power is checked and balanced.
It is childish for Americans and the U.S. president to strive for universal nuclear disarmament. Once the Americans tie their hands with a treaty, the United States will be disarmed. On the other side, where laws do not constrain the ruling elite, a treaty is merely a piece of paper. As the Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin once said: “Treaties are like pie crusts, meant to be broken.” Because of the speed with which rockets travel, and the destructive force of a nuclear warhead, countries without such weapons can be stripped of sovereignty and plundered.
Children will deny the danger is real. They believe in the power of positive, utopian ideals. They denounce common sense as reactionary, as an obstacle to world peace. “If we do nothing, then nuclear war is inevitable,” they cry. But in reality, nuclear war is inevitable because fools are inevitable; and we are very great fools indeed.
Childish people who cannot look at the world through adult eyes, who righteously see themselves as the saviors of mankind, are actually our destroyers. Their program promises peace, but delivers the exact opposite. Their speeches drip with the honey of good intentions, but their actions unleash the world’s dictators from the chains of Mutual Assured Destruction. In a world where the global economy is shrinking, the outcome won’t be pretty.
April 13, 2010 - 11:23 am Link to this Comment
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Morton Doodslag
Armageddon Rex — I like your idea of seizing the assets of any Jihad-funding Muslim state — but I think the point of my approach is to find a way to first undermine and then destroy the supremacist Islamic creed the same way we destroyed the Nazi and Japanese variants. Simply walling off the Muslims from their unearned sources of wealth may not be enough at this point. They are already on our soil and entrenched in our camp in their millions — and plenty of Jihad funding flows from the West now, not just from those epicenters of terror in Riyadh and Tehran.
Because we have so far failed to grasp the true scope and danger of Islamic Jihad, we have failed to consider effective means to stop its ascendancy. I’d argue that the Jihad impulse is completely intact in the Muslim world, and perhaps stronger today than it was on 9/10/2001.
Muslims show little sign of taking on the supposedly more radical among their peers and fighting the violent terrorist themes which animate them. Again — they spend most of their time concocting pretexts to blame us for their violence, or denying and lying about the tenets of violence in their beliefs.
Western analysis must focus more on the task of subverting and destroying their creed. I believe that “winning their hearts and minds” is a fools errand — attested to in recent years by the vicious hatred which the Indonesians show us today, despite over $2 billion in tsunami aid, or the vituperation manner in which Karzai comports himself after billions $ in aid and loss of over a thousand lives bringing him to power and protecting his vile corrupt Islamic regime.
We have done very little to vanquish the Islamic enemy. This viper remains fully fanged, venomous, and willing to strike as time and circumstance place him at advantage. This isn’t about having “fun” with our “toys” — nor is this about accommodations with the Islamic world — those approaches just kick the can down the street at best, and do much to encourage our Muslim enemies. This is about annihilating a cancerous ideology which endangers the world. I firmly believe that Islam will annihilate us eventually if we do not alter our course and orientation towards it. Between Iraq and Afghanistan we’ve spent over 5,000 lives, and something in the area of $1 trillion to bring them the treasures of our freedoms and rights. They have repaid us with little more than treachery, disrespect, and Muslim venom. They are comfortable tossing us under the bus at every turn, and continue to agitate for our genocidal destruction and conquest in their mosques. Muslims still send their overflowing refuse populations to our shores where more beach heads are established for Islamic conquest. This must stop and be reversed.
It would damage Jihad
April 13, 2010 - 11:55 am Link to this Comment
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BattleofthePyramids
Wretchard:
The situation is much, much worse than you and the other commentators here realize. In order for the US to effectively excercise nuclear deterrance at all the following conditions must be met: The US must have a useable nuclear deterrent that cannot be destroyed by a pre-emptive strike and the American leadership must be willing to actually use this deterrent. Obama’s recent actions threaten both of these conditions. Consider: The USA has not actually tested a nuclear weapon in over 20 years. The reliability of the US stockpile is questionable at best, and Obama is unwilling to either test or deploy new warhead designs.
Obama’s statements that the US will not use nuclear weapons, even if attacked by chemical or biological weapons, shows he is fundamentally unwilling to use the deterrent. He is therefore either relying on the good will of other countries, his own unique ability to charm others, or a simple bluff.
Further, actions taken by Obama and previous administrations undermine the overall theory that the US would be willing to actually use nuclear weapons. After all, the US was attacked by Muslim terrorists and lost more civilian life in one attack than in all of WWII (note I said civilians, not soldiers). And in reply, the US tries to keep Muslim civilian casualties to an absolute minimum, adopting ROE where enemy soldiers can effectively hide behind human shields with impunity. It is hard to imagine such a country using nukes on cities full of women and children, and I doubt any potential enemy really believes the US would do so.
April 13, 2010 - 12:54 pm Link to this Comment
Armageddon Rex
Morton @42:
Before the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula, its total population was less than half that of London or New York City in 1900. It was rightfully understood to be a harsh, revolting, barren, throwback of a place inhabited by uncouth barbaric nomads little improved since the Bronze Age.
Without vast oil wealth it wouldn’t have changed. The Wahhabi sect of Islam would have continued to be viewed as the retrograde, ignorant cult of a group of nomadic, uncouth barbarians by nearly everyone including more decadent Muslims in Egypt, Turkey, India, Persia, Morocco, Albania, Syria, Indonesia, etc. Much the same as how most American Christians today view fundamentalist Pentecostal snake handlers with scorn and derision as hicks and ignorant fools.
The “revival” of fundamentalist Islam is being driven entirely by funding from rich oil pumping Middle Eastern countries. If that money goes away, the impetus goes away.
Islam was dying from contact with western culture before the boom in Middle Eastern oil wealth. Satellite TV is still today slowly killing it off. In the west, we like to obsess about Middle Eastern immigration and college student visas providing a security vulnerability. What we fail to remember is that when young people in particular are exposed to both traditional Islamic culture and modern western culture, 99.9999% chose to live in the secular west with its luxurious lifestyle if possible instead of the barbaric and harsh Islamic civilizations of their ancestors.
No one threw Leviticus out of the Torah or Old Testament, but you don’t see any witches stoned to death today in Israel, France, the U.K. or even Spain. Modern Jews and Christians have decided to ignore those passages in our holy books. We’ve decided that individual liberty and rule of secular law trump religious belief. It is a cornerstone of post enlightenment western civilization.
There is a sizeable, increasingly western university educated, Muslim middleclass in Saudi and elsewhere who would gladly go to Mosque every Friday and say their dawn, morning, mid-day, evening, and bed time prayers daily, hold down good jobs, obey the laws of the nation they live in, raise their children to be responsible, taxpaying citizens, and ignore the bloodthirsty, xenophobic, terribly un-politically correct portions of the Koran and Hadith just as Christians and Jews ignore Leviticus and many other exhortations to violence and intolerance found in the Bible and Torah.
Destroy the horribly corrupt, exploitative Middle Eastern governments. Replace them with responsible governance that seeks to improve individual liberty, build real infrastructure to promote the greater good, and deal with all citizens equitably and in strict accordance with non-Sharia law, and watch as Islam becomes just as tame as most popular Christian and Jewish sects.
April 13, 2010 - 1:03 pm Link to this Comment
Lifeofthemind
There is a common thread behind my concern over the rise of dominant subsystems that paralyze the capacity of state actors to respond effectively according to the rules of systems theory and my speculation over how Israel, or by extension any state actor, may respond to threats from hostile elements residing within theoretically non-belligerent states. If nation states are no longer truly subsystem dominant but merely components, merely different in function from NGOs, of a larger dominant international order then why should their territorial integrity be granted any special respect?
It is of course preferable to maintain a system of law and dispute resolution in which each nations territorial integrity is respected. As I have already discussed competent government systems are needed to ensure the freedom of commerce and security of people in a complex world. My concern is that by treating all entities as equal, when clearly many would have been subject to extraterritoriality or turned into dependents or protectorates or otherwise treated as non compos mentes under legal and diplomatic systems that existed before WW-II we have brought the dysfunction of local communities into international law. This has been compounded buy the subsequent denigration of the sovereignty of the powers themselves who created and maintained the system of law and free trade. Increasingly both internationally and domestically the forces, both physical and intellectual, of law are being rendered ineffectual and are being brought down to the lowest standard of dysfunctional 3rd World communities.
If you are being attacked by thugs from the town down the road and the police in that jurisdiction shrug their shoulders while the overarching authority of the Global Order is much more concerned with whether your grandfather built his house on a wetland without obtaining all the permits, then what do you do? Eventually as law and order break down people start to protect themselves or turn to market solutions.
If the the trillion dollar naval forces of the world are unable to stop Somali pirates at what point will the insurance companies or tax payers get tired and decide to hire some deniable guys to start blowing up docks, bars, boats, cars, warehouses and homes in Somalia until the piracy magically stops? When will steps be taken off the books and out of sight to convince Swiss bankers and Italian cutouts that the business is not worth the risk?
The point of the Israeli operations portrayed in the film Munich was that at some point a state that is truly sovereign must act where it knows that the international system cannot. International law is not a suicide pact. If the Israelis decide that the survival of their state and civilization are more important than the good will of guests on Charlie Rose then they should act. Once it is established that there will be a reaction to violence emanating from what were considered sanctuaries then the temptation to use those places goes down. That means that an established willingness to target a threat from within a community can actually reduce the risk of future targeting of that community. A state must be willing to protect its citizens and should not allow a hostile element to embed within it and draw it into conflict with others.
The Russians know this, they will pursue a target to the ends of the earth and strike within the heart of London. Unfortunately they do so for the narrow reasons and in the interests of a corrupt and destructive regime. All the strong state actors that Marie Claude admires know this. Only the dedicated soft power enthusiasts of America and Britain pretend that there really is a global system of law and order that does not depend on state actors willing to ruthlessly defend their interests and citizens. Most of the internationalists even know this and are really just fronting fronting for their sponsors while advocating standards of sovereign immunity and restraint that are only meant to work against the interests of the United States and Israel.
To be blogged under the title “The Munich Model.”
April 13, 2010 - 1:18 pm Link to this Comment
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wretchard
The real hallmark of a world which can control nuclear and other weapons (as a opposed to a world without nuclear weapons) is one which shows a willingness to either back a sheriff to stop the malefactors or form a posse to do it themselves. That kind of society survives. Societies which can’t bad together at need to face a common threat either require a guardian or fall of their own indecision.
The measure of the ability to survive as a society is not simply what laws a society can write on the books (in the form of treaties or other things) but its willingness to enforce them. Politics is the fundamental challenge of arms control. The question is whether the world, as a global society, has this willingness.
The Arms Control Summit has such limited goals precisely because the consensus to act is so wanting. Any bad guy will see it for what it is, an open display of weakness rather than a show of strength. In reality the smaller nations are waiting for the emergence of a strong, but reasonable horse whose play they can back. You have to assure the smaller nations of the earth that it’s ok to join the posse when necessary.
The problem with President Obama’s talk down of America’s role is that it sends a signal of weakness precisely when it should convey a feeling of assurance. Consider that if America is only willing to retaliate for an attack on itself in certain circumstances, whether any member of the posse will feel confident in joining such a sheriff. America’s legitimacy as a world leader comes from both is acceptability and its strength. They are complimentary, not exclusive. A “good country” without teeth would not be appropriate for the task of leading such a posse. Canada is “good” but it can’t lead a suppression of WMD terrorism because it has no teeth. A country with teeth that isn’t “good” might describe China or Russia. Neither are these appropriate. For all its imperfections the US has filled the strong, good guy role because it had enough of both qualities. Now we have a political leadership whose favorite cliche is “avoiding false choices” perhaps making the same false choice.
April 13, 2010 - 2:54 pm Link to this Comment
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