Jun 4, 2007
Iran, Nuclear Weapons, and how to prevent it.
According to international watchdogs, Iran will soon be capable of creating nuclear weapons. Considering its stated desire to “wipe Israel off the map”, we should be alarmed.
What can be done?
When we look back through history a trend becomes obvious. The more powerful a country is, the less likely its enemies will attack it. Seems pretty straight forward.
Unfortunately, since the fall of communism, many in the west have forgotten this. They have come to believe everyone holds similar peaceful intentions. Europe and America proudly disarmed and proffered peace. Tough times had come to an end.
As we might expect, this ideology emboldened our enemies. At the end of the cold war, it would have been silly for any country to try to compete with NATO militarily. Now America’s relative economic and military power wanes and Europe’s military capabilities are virtually nonexistent. Worse, our stated belief that civilian causalities should be avoided at all cost has stopped inimical populations from fearing us. (remember we fire bombed Dresden, and destroyed virtually every Japanese city in WWII. The Romans would enslave and kill any people who opposed them. Many people decided it was better not too.) For a short time, in 2001, this trend reversed. America attacked and defeated Afghanistan, and soon after Iraq. Libya renounced its Nuclear intentions and the world seemed safer.
Unfortunately, when it became clear America’s military would be tied up in occupation, other countries saw an opportunity. By occupying Iraq not only has America’s ability to project force diminished, but Iraq’s (Iran’s long time enemy) has too.The United States should have doubled its army. Without any credible threat of military intervention, both Iran and North Korea have flouted international law and have made the world a more dangerous place.
The west has made ideological mistakes as well. It has neutered its cultural ally Israel in an attempt to appease fanatic muslims. Terrorists intentionally target Israeli civilians every day, yet the west not only divests in its ally, but urgest that it ‘show restraint’. Countries are learning that they can challenge the west without major ramifications. And we wonder why the world gets more fanatical.
Time to rebuild our military and change our beliefs.
How has Israel been neutered? They have full nuclear deterrent capability, and probably first-strike as well. Urging “restraint” is just a way for American leaders to appear diplomatic while doing nothing.
You also conflate military attacks with guerrilla attacks. Israel is a military powerhouse in the region and is consequently no longer attacked militarily. Guerrilla attacks are not reduced by a strong military; if anything, the opposite is true. Israel has long tried a tit-for-tat approach to Palestinian attacks, with no effect.
Some problems are simply unsolvable. You can’t stop guerrillas who make up a sizable fraction of a population without committing genocide or ethnic cleansing. You can’t commit genocide or ethnic cleansing if you are a democracy, because the people (rightly) won’t let you.
So there’s a trickle of deaths by terrorists. And eventually the hawks get fed up and convince everybody to make a huge, self-destructive action. And then everybody stops listening to the hawks for another generation.
I think you hit on some really important points. The fact that Israel has Nuclear weapons and a powerful army keeps the region peaceful. If this were not true the Arab countries would see an oppurtunity to destroy the country once and for all.
However, where Israel has been neutered has been with terrorist attacks. Consider that as soon as the IDF and the settlers left Gaza (and left all the very rich greenhouses for the Gazans), terrorists immediatly started rocketing Israel. If the world stopped condeming Israel and starting condeming the Palestianians, there would be moral authority to excute broader attacks against terrorist targets, and this in turn would scare many palestians. “It is better to be feared then loved.” On a side note, no other country shows similar restrain in dealing with attacks (look at Russia).
Anyway, the main point of my post was to demonstrate how a large military and credible threat tends to strengthen peace and peaceful movements tend to create wars.
Grey Swan
If the world stopped condeming Israel and starting condeming the Palestianians, there would be moral authority to excute broader attacks against terrorist targets, and this in turn would scare many palestians.
I think this gets to the crux of your argument and is also the point I disagree with most strongly. I believe that broader attacks against terrorist targets would cause more terrorists, not fewer, just as the Iraq war is doing. Even some of Israel’s ex-soldiers with incredibly hawkish resumes like Rabin and Sharon have acknowledged this.
Anyway, the main point of my post was to demonstrate how a large military and credible threat tends to strengthen peace and peaceful movements tend to create wars.
It seems to me that the peace movement in the 60s, if it did anything, ended a war. I’m with you on the usefulness of credible threats as deterrent, but I don’t think the logic applies to terrorism since what we are combating is not a nation but a tactic. Slaughter enough Japanese and even the emperor surrendered. But you can kill all the al-Qaeda fighters you want and there will just be more of them. Their goals are not Japan’s goals or Germany’s goals or even the Irelands’s goals.
JewishAtheist – I think you make a good point about terrorism being a somewhat intractable problem. I actually have some very good data about terrorism and its trends, and I will post some graphs soon.
Since no one really knows what to do, it is quite possible that your argument that hawkishness does not work is correct. In its current form, it is Definitely correct.
On the other hand, if you recall that Hamas was elected by a democratic vote, I think that the idea that terrorists do not represent the views of there people is note entirely true. They just represent the extreme action of these views.
One reason that Israeli force has failed to produce results (as has Israeli peace movements in recent times) is that the more the Palestinians suffer the more the world sympathizes with them, regardless of who caused the suffering. Back when Israel absorbed over 700,000 refuges from the war for independence, arab leaders refused to absorb the Palestinians. These people have been used as pawns. Israel CANNOT make a credible threat of cutting off foreign aid or changing foreign opinion, it is barely allowed to defend itself.
Consequently, Palestinians find that on the margins, more violence improves world opinion of them.
I may post a (economically) marginal theory as to WHY groups of people make these ‘bad’ decisions soon.
I don’t disagree with any of that.