War and Peace

Shelby Steele is insightful about national self-confidence and about how the lack of such confidence seriously weakens a society like ours that is fighting a confident and determined enemy. (See also this post.) However, he paints with a broad brush and I think that his analysis may be improved if we pay more attention to the political dynamics of the various groups within our society.

For example, I’m not sure that “white guilt” is the best way to frame the issue. There are plenty of Jacksonians, white and nonwhite, who have no guilt at all about using overwhelming force to crush our enemies. There are also many Americans who are ambivalent about America and ambivalent or hostile towards the war. Between these two extremes there are many people who are on the fence.

My guess is that Americans are about evenly distributed between these groups. This means that our official policy, which is planned and implemented by realistic people who would like to use overwhelming force against our enemies — so that we can win as quickly as possible and get out — is constrained by the political difficulty, perhaps even impossibility, of doing so at the moment. It also means that the main impediment to our giving Iran and other enemies the same treatment as we gave Japan towards the end of WW2 is the opinions of the uncommitted third of our population.

Lately the war news has been uninspiring if not discouraging, the uncommitteds have become more negative about our involvement and, consequently, the Bush administration has become more hesitant in its prosecution of the war. However, the entire political dynamic of this country would flip in a strongly pro-war direction if something happened to shift uncommitted opinion in the direction of favoring greater aggressiveness towards our enemies. I assume that another major terror attack here could have that effect, but so I think could other events, including events that we can’t easily foresee.

The problem, then, is not ultimately guilt so much as it is the significant political divisions in our society, which for the moment exist in a weak equilibrium. It’s the same political dynamic that has made the last two presidential elections so close. I think that this equilibrium will eventually shift as the country moves decisively in one political direction or the other, but I don’t think we are there yet.

I hope that this shift, when it does happen, will be the result of thoughtful reflection on the part of many citizens rather than of some terrible event like another big attack.

UPDATE: Rethinking this topic in light of what commenters have written, I agree that guilt is an issue. Or perhaps “guilt” is a flavor of lack of self-confidence. But white guilt is a red herring. Americans who lack enough confidence in their country to defend it rhetorically or militarily are members of a distinct class, heirs to an intellectual tradition having nothing to do with race and whose adherents come from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Some of the members of the guilty class believe themselves guilty by virtue of being white; others believe that their guilt comes from being westerners, Christians or people of wealth. It is ultimately leftist ideology that underlies the lack of confidence and that uses race consciousness as but one of a number of tools of mass-manipulation.

UPDATE2: David Foster offers an alternative explanation.

In a comment to this post, Lex wrote:

If I were an Iranian, I would absolutely insist that my country have nuclear weapons, whether I loved or hated the Mullahs, whether I loved or hated the USA. . . So, the fact that pretty much everybody in Iran who does not want to see their country attacked or conquered wants it to have nuclear weapons doesn’t bother me. I call that common sense.

This statement does not make sense to me. If I were Iranian I wouldn’t want the hated regime to have nukes, because who knows what they would do with them, what trouble they would bring onto the Iranian people, and to have nukes would be to invite invasion by the USA and/or attack by Israel. Iran is a populous, wealthy country and can readily defend itself and its oil without nukes, especially now that Saddam Hussein is gone. (Who is left to try and take the oil?) The people running Iran are shrewd and know that the USA has no taste for involvement in their country–indeed they are counting on it. The whole point of Iran’s having nukes is to entrench the dictatorship and allow the mullahs to make mischief abroad. They know we’re going to try to deter them and they’re betting it won’t work. I have a lot of respect for their judgment; they’ve been right so far and have played their hand superbly.

The USA should try to impose costs on the Iranian regime, and if possible topple it and kill the leaders, by any practicable means. Kling’s proposal to target oil facilities is a good one, since the regime needs the revenue more than we need the oil, and attacks on oil infrastructure would kill far fewer Iranians than would attacks on cities.

It would be nice if Iranians overthrew the dictatorship but it’s delusion to pin our hopes on it. Too many oppressed peoples, from Iraqi Shiites to Panamanians to Kurds to Hungarians, have seen their hopes for rescue by the USA evaporate. The Iranian democrats aren’t going to chance it unless it’s clear that we will back them up, and it isn’t. The only way to make it clear is to commit ourselves to overthrowing the regime, or at least to destroying enough nuclear and oil facilities to weaken it and set back the Iranian nuclear program.

If the USA acquiesces to Iranian nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other countries are going to want them too. Who can blame them? I think that’s an outcome best avoided, and the way to avoid it is to attack Iran while we still can at relatively low cost.

As for deterrence, I don’t think we have a lot of leverage unless we are willing to fight at any time. Otherwise it looks like we are bluffing, as I think we are. Ahmadinejad & Co. are probably not suicidal, but then they are also not likely to hang around at any of the places that we or Israel are likely to bomb. They also have a record of brutality toward citizens of their own country. I see no reason to trust the lives of millions of people to the mullahs’ judgment, decency or sense of self-preservation.

Remember that while the USSR refrained from nuclear war it also supported proxy wars against us in a variety of venues, some of them at great cost to us. And the Soviets were interested in conquest rather than genocide. The mullahs appear to be interested in both. I see no reason to assume that they will not cause us a huge amount of trouble even if they don’t explode any nukes.

And what happens if a nuke in a chartered airliner explodes in Tel Aviv or Riyadh or a European city? Are we going to nuke Teheran? Even if we aren’t sure of the explosion’s origin? I think the mullahs would have a good chance of getting away with it, and they are risk takers.

The notion that we can rely for our safety on the sobriety of dictators is essentially the same kind of flawed thinking that led to our complacency in the years before 9/11.

The possibility that Bush currently lacks the political wherewithal to attack Iran does not lessen our failure of will.

Related posts: Here, here, here, here and here.

In sum: Iran is mountainous, full of hardened underground sites. Surgical anything is out. Conventional would be bad/really bad. Nuclear would be really really bad. Doing nothing would also be really really bad.

Take your pick……………….

~Colonel Jerry USMC

Strategic Forecasting, Inc. has published a report on Iran by George Friedman that is well worth reading. I am posting the entire content of the report below. (Stratfor permits republishing with attribution.)

UPDATE: In posting the Stratfor piece I did not make my own position clear and some readers may have misinterpreted it. I think that Iran is a serious threat and that we should treat Iran’s apparent impending acquisition of nuclear weapons very seriously. Indeed I have argued on this blog in favor, essentially, of preventive war.

I posted the Stratfor report not because I agree with all of its premises and conclusions (in particular, I think Friedman is unwise to assume that Iran cannot soon acquire nuclear weapons), and not because I do not take Ahmadinejad’s threats at face value (I do), but because the report seems to explain well the geopolitical dynamics underlying Iran’s recent foreign policy. While the situation looks bad and I share the concerns expressed by many bloggers about apocalyptic scenarios, I also suspect that like most frightening situations the Iran problem will become more tractable as it becomes better understood. The Stratfor analysis seems like a step in the right direction.

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Aaron raises an interesting question. Personally, I’m skeptical that this or any other administration could be that clever, or that the NYT, which sat on the story for a long time before publishing it, would have cooperated, or that such an ornate plan would make sense. I also think there’s plenty of evidence that the NSA has been doing this kind of mass-monitoring of communications for decades, which makes me think that they are still doing it. But who knows.