Do We Need Unilateral Prevention?
Dedeist speaks up for unilateral preventive war, saying "I also think military action without U.N. approval is generally a bad idea, and should be used only as a last resort. But to rule it out entirely is insane. I would certainly support it if it was the only way to keep Iran from getting Nukes, Russia and China wouldn't go along, and it seemed militarily feasible at a 'reasonable' cost." This is well-put because it's sounds like common sense and captures, I think, why John Edwards didn't succeed in putting much pressure on his rivals to respond to his (correct, in my view) decision to specifically disavow the preventive war doctrine.
The beginning of wisdom here is to recognize that the usefulness of preventive counterproliferation strikes is largely illusory. Joe Cirincione has importantly observed that even Israel's famed raid on Iraq's Osirak reactor actually did more to convince Saddam Hussein to speed nuclear weapons research than to impede his pre-Gulf War quest for nuclear weapons. If you want verifiable nuclear disarmament (something that's been achieved in a number of countries that once had robust research programs or even actual weapons in the case of some post-Soviet countries) you need either a diplomatic agreement, or else you need "regime change" and as we're learning in Iraq, regime change isn't a very practical option.
Beyond that, it's imperative for the world's leading power (that's us) to try to articulate rules of the road that strike a balance between serving our interests and being rules we can reasonably expect other countries to follow. A set of rules in which a country gets to attack another country for non-defensive purposes just because the aggressor claims that doing so is necessary to ward off some hypothetical future threat isn't the world we want to see. We (rightly) weren't happy with Iraq's unprovoked aggression in 1990, and if India or Iran or Venezuela or China were to start mounting preventive attacks we'd want to rally a coalition to constrain them. We're not, in other words, prepared to concede a universal right to launch wars on such a thin basis.
Conversely, no other major or middling country is going to concede a principle granting the United States of America a special right to launch unilateral preventive wars. Given our current military preponderance it seems doubtful that anyone could actually stop us, but strong as we are we rely for our prosperity and security on a web of modes of economic and political cooperation that were frayed by Iraq and would be frayed further still by repeat adventures. Certainly the hope of any sort of basically cooperative international environment would be seriously damaged by us actually putting new unilateral preventive military strikes into action.
Beyond that, we must consider the role that U.S. insistence on maintaining such a forward-leaning posture plays in actually driving proliferation. Medium-sized countries like Iran and North Korea have no practical ability to ward off an American military attack through conventional means. The example of Iraq shows that we may not have the ability to subdue the population of such a country, but we certainly can shatter the regime. This gives countries with a poor or uncertain relationship with the United States a pretty strong incentive to explore nuclear weapons capabilities. If we don't want them to do that (and we shouldn't) we need, among other things, to be responsible actors in our right. That entails living up to our Non-Proliferation Treaty obligation to work toward general nuclear disarmament, but also to avoid giving the impression that Iraq-induced logistical problems are the only thing standing between us and a new series of wars.
Disavowing Bush's preventive war doctrine would be one easy way of doing that. Previous Presidents have gotten along just fine without counterproliferation strikes, and the Bush administration's one effort to put the doctrine in practice has been a huge fiasco.
Comments (21)
"But to rule it out entirely is insane. I would certainly support it if it was the only way to keep Iran from getting Nukes, Russia and China wouldn't go along, and it seemed militarily feasible at a 'reasonable' cost.""
What an unmitigated prescription for disaster. What is your "reasoning" for this? No one wants nuclear proliferation, but that is the coin of the realm, and until a nation has a nuclear arsenal (e,g, N. Korea) they are powerless to bullying and nuclear threats and vulnerable to attacks without a deterrent. I never realized Mr. Yglesias prescribes to such a dangerous view. The only thing that could justify such a view is a detailed case for Iranian exceptionalism; that is that Iran is SO bad, SO evil, SO dangerous that nuclear weapons in its hands (unlike nuclear weapons in the hands of the Soviets, or the Chinese, or the Pakistanis, or the North Koreans, (for those of us that remember the evil Soviet Empire, or the barbaric Chinese, or the brainwashed zombies of North Korea) or for that matter the Americans (for those of us that remember the unhinged American military aggression in Vietnam or Iraq)). So please Mr. Yglesias make the case for Iran as the Hitler/Nazi state of the day; the nation which if they do not change, or if they get nuclear weapons will annihilate the earth; do push aside Chavez who held the new "Hitler" position yesterday, and Saddam and Kim il Jong who held it the previous day. We can just reinstate them tomorrow without a pause.
April 22, 2008 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
See my post below about Iran. As for North Korea, they already have enough conventional missiles to destroy Seoul, which effectively makes any military strike against them unthinkable.
April 22, 2008 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for your post on Iranian brutality. I do not dispute it. I certainly abhor the regime there. That does not qualify them for the appellation of "Hitler" of the day; with all due respect, there are regimes the United States supports and does not criticize that do worse, actually a lot worse. Kazakhstan, for example. And I am not sure even with your account that Iran is a lot worse than our client regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But even if it were, this is not justification to me for a preemptive military attack to forestall Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Is it? If so, we should have attacked USSR, China, N.Korea, Pakistan (although our ally, a gross violator of human rights). Is the only answer that it was impractical because they already have nuclear arms? you seem to make this case. But that is why a nuclear arsenal is such a necessity. It deters the nuclear attacks of the "peacemakers" and "serious" human rights advocates like yourself, as well as those who want to police the world and enforce their order, like Bush, Cheney, Lieberman, McCain and the rest of the gang.
April 22, 2008 11:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
We can't really do anything about the countries that already have nukes, except pray they remain in safe hands. The issue of an Iranian bomb is proliferation. A Shiite bomb means Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and every other Sunni country in the region would want their own bomb. We're already seeing this with every major Sunni country in the region talking about nuclear power, and you've got Iran promising to "share nuclear power" with every Muslim nation in the world. AQ Khan on steroids.
This doesn't make sense really, to the Western mind, but it makes perfect sense in that part of the world. The extremely dangerous and unpredictable genie we could let out of the bottle here needs to be carefully considered by the int'l community. Once it's out -- there is no going back. We better get a handle on this and quickly.
Russia has guaranteed nuclear fuel under the IAEA to Iran's power plants, plus an extremely generous package of incentives offered by the West to accept. If Iran really only wanted peaceful power, they would have taken the deal already. The fact that they contstantly refuse points to ulterior and more nefarious motives for wanting to enrich themselves. Mix this together with their obvious ruthless brutality, and it's a combustible mix.
April 22, 2008 6:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
In my opinion you do not make a compelling or convincing case for unilateral preemptive military action to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear armed nation. Admittedly this is a big threshhold and in my opinion should be one. The arguments you make could have been made (in spades) concerning many of the current nuclear powers; you seem to regret that we did not go to war with North Korea, USSR and China to prevent them from becoming nuclear powers; I am thankful we did not.
April 22, 2008 11:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Matt was QUOTING someone else and then arguing against the view.
April 22, 2008 11:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
i am totally abashed and apologetic to Mr. Yglesias. Thank you for pointing this out.
April 22, 2008 12:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
VLaszlo: Never mind--I see I am very late to this party, on what Matt was advocating re preventive war and that you've already accepted the point.
April 25, 2008 12:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
VLaszlo, maybe someone else has made this point already but if you reread the first paragraph of Matt's post, he is opposing the view you attribute to him. He supports Edwards' view that we should specifically disavow the preventive war doctrine.
April 25, 2008 12:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
As far as I can tell the only way to prevent nuclear proliferation is to have nuclear disarmament (but the US loves its arsenal too much to consider that. That would really threaten the "New American Century". Unfortunately it is the "New American Century" and the insistence on con trolling and dominating the world's nuclear arsenal that drives any unpopular (in the West) regime to develop nuclear weapons. The alternative explanation of course is that Iran plans to USE such weapons aggressively. If it does it is subject to nuclear reaction from Israel on a much greater scale...so they will do it...because they are bloodthirsty crazy Nazi-savages. We always come around to this same point).
Be quiet for a moment and listen carefully. Where is nuclear saber-rattling coming from? The only place I hear it is here in the United States, coming from McCain, Clinton, Yglesias, and other right-wing and liberal hawks. They make the worl,d a very dangerous place and they are a danger to all of us.
April 22, 2008 10:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Couldn't agree with you more!
April 22, 2008 11:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
you're really only going to get the UN to sanction military force against small, insignificant countries. Bosnia was a NATO operation, as is Afghanistan.
There are things we could do short of a military strike against Iran, like cutting off all refined gasoline to their country. That would cripple them, but as we see in Zimbabwe, Iraq, North Korea, these kinds of regimes are run by men who are willing to be as brutal as it takes to remain in power, and they couldn't give a damn about internal or external pressure.
Last week the Iranian regime ordered their "security forces" to storm a manufacturing plant filled with striking workers who were beaten, shocked with cattle prods, and hauled off to Iran's notoriously brutal prisons. Their crime was to protest the fact they hadn't been paid in months. These are the kinds of people we are dealing with. If they have so little regard for the rights of their own people, we can logically assume they have even less for non-Iranians, which is why they can never be allowed to get the bomb.
April 22, 2008 10:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Iran has a sizable Jewish population which has resisted Israeli bribery to emigrate. In recent months, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Israeli officials and some American Jewish communal leaders have urged Iranian Jews to leave. But so far, despite generally being allowed to travel to Israel and emigrate abroad, Iranian Jews have stayed put.
According to the statistics compiled by HIAS, 152 out of 25,000 [some estimate 40,000] Jews left Iran between October 2005 and September 2006 — down from 297 during the same period the previous year, and 183 the year before. Sources said that the majority of those who have left in recent years cited economic and family reasons as their main incentive for leaving, rather than political concerns.
The situation for Jews improved in the years after the revolution, and Judaism is one of the recognized minority religions in Iran. Jews, Zoroastrians and Christians have rights enshrined in the Islamic constitution, and they each elect their own member of parliament and are entitled to worship freely but not to proselytize. The result is the only Jewish community living under an avowedly Islamic regime. In Tehran, where the majority of the community lives, there are six kosher butchers and about 30 synagogues. In addition, there is the Jewish hospital, which has a Jewish director and is funded by donations from the Diaspora, though the vast majority of its staff and patients are Muslim. Children attend Jewish schools where they are taught Hebrew and receive religious training. All principals are Muslim, the schools do not close on the Sabbath and the curriculum is supervised by the government.
April 22, 2008 12:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
April 22, 2008 4:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
credibility is lost, when it is proven I've said something that wasn't true. I didn't demonize Iran -- I simply pointed out what their regime does to those who do not go along with the status quo. Do you dispute my point that the Iranian government does abuse the rights of their women, their press, homosexuals, and any Muslim who tries to convert to another religion? If you can't dispute it, then you agree with me -- that this government has no respect for basic human rights.
As I write this, Arabs living along the Iraqi border with Iran have had their water cut off by the government. Why? I'll let you answer that question, since you seem to know so much about the country.
April 22, 2008 6:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
"The beginning of wisdom" as you put it, is to realize that the concept of "pre-emptive war" is completely insane, not to mention that it is nothing more than a rationale for illegal and immoral military aggression by one state against one or more others. This policy announces to the world that it will obey no law and will observe no standard of internationally legality or morality if it finds it convenient to violate them. Only a rogue state would even attempt to argue that pre-emptive war, as presented by the Bush regime, was either justifiable or legal.
It is absurd that we even seriously debate this evil policy.
Our position on preemption is nearly identical to the position of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan on this question. Why does no one in the punditocracy ever point out this obvious fact? Eisenhower and Truman both saw the folly in this idiotic, criminal doctrine and rejected it. Any state that adopts this policy is, by definition, an outlaw state operating outside of the bounds of long-recognized international standards.
The illegal/immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq is clearly in violation of international law and everything that goes on there is a war crime. Cheney and Bush, as well as the military and Congressional leadership are all direct accomplices in the ongoing criminal enterprise in Iraq. They should all be brought up on charges just as Milosevic was, before an international court and put on trial. They have murdered at least 100,000 innocent people for God's sake! We Americans discuss this as though it was a mere detail and not terribly important.
Imagine, just for a moment, if any foreign power successfully invaded our country and toppled our government based upon a trumped up set of lies, occupied it, and your children and spouse and possibly your parents were killed by the invading military forces. Would it really matter to you why they did it or how it came about? Would anything justify this clearly avoidable destruction of your loved ones and the loss of their lives? Not a chance! Would you detest and despise the nation that killed your family and also destroyed your cities, wrecked your economy, etc? Damn right you would and for good reason too!
And this idea that Iran represents some threat to the United States for any reason is absurd. The level of insanity on the question of how the US should handle Iran is out of control. The reason we are at odds with Iran is a result of America's own quite clear and unceasing idiotic belligerence toward Iran's government in retaliation for overthrowing the American puppet government of the Shah there 29 years ago.
If we weren't threatening to attack them constantly and if we would apologize for our outrageous manipulation and intervention in their country, the wounds of the Revolution of 79 would begin to heal. But, like an adolescent who didn't get his/her way, we remain openly hostile and continue threatening Iran, giving them little choice but to try and do all they can to defend themselves. Yes, the mullahs are undesirable, but they're actions are a perfectly rational response to our hostility.
We could still prevent a nuclear Iran if we would guarantee them we will live in peace with them and quit trying to undermine their independence. We seem, however, incapable of behaving like mature adults when it comes to Iran and so we relentlessly pursue the policy that has failed now for 30 years, not unlike our continued insistence on maintaining our belligerent posture toward Cuba. Folks, all this stuff is just downright lunacy.
April 22, 2008 11:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
"I would certainly support it (unilateral military action) if it was the only way to keep Iran from getting Nukes..."
It's a good thing I have plenty of guns and ammo, because I just heard that my neighbor is thinking about getting a gun. He has no right to threaten me like that. I'm heading over there right now to kill him and his family and burn down their house.
April 22, 2008 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
preventive=invasive=illegal=immoral=unjust war
April 22, 2008 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dear Matt,
I haven't read your book, only your first post here.
My question is this: How different is your view from what might be called the internationalist foreign policy consensus following WWII? Leaving out for the moment, the Cold War--I know, a big omission--but simply focusing on the creation of the UN, its attendant organizations, and other international organizations, isn't what you're proposing really a return to that period of at least nominally peaceful, cooperative engagement with the world?
I say "nominally" because, as I recall, that was our philosophy, even if we didn't always follow it in practice e.g., Cuba, Latin America, Viet Nam, etc.
April 22, 2008 12:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, now we're getting somewhere. We have to confront the duality, the contradictions of American Post World-War II liberal internationalism.
On the one hand the open, public, generally democratic policies, beginning with the Marshall Plan, the support of humanitarian international agencies, the Peace Corps, the test-ban treaty, the START treaties (which, IIRC, even under Reagan and GHW Bush committed the US to mutal reduction of nuclear arsenals).
Americans generally like and appreciate these policies, if they can understand them, and are proud to the extent that they have helped create the world's most progressive and advanced civilizations.
And on the other hand, the militaristic, imperialist and covert actions, growing out of the culture of military necessity/covert action learned by the OSS in World War II, (and where there was at least fairly overt conflict between Rooseveltians and leftists doing these actions to bring down old regimes and business/Republican types supporting imperial regimes).
This culture of overt/covert military/manufactured front groups/pysops action transferred from the OSS to the CIA and the Defense establishment, becoming increasingly identified with the conservative side of American politics, there is probably much more we need to know about the involvement of these people in the events of Nov. 1963, and on and on until today they openly speak of universal eternal military empire as the only rationale of American policy, they have completely smothered political, media and business elites so that, just for example, they use their business associates to help spy on EVERY electronic communication on the face of the earth, they don't care if everyone knows it and 4th Amendment be damned. And their representatives in todays Congress openly advocate giving up Congress's war-making authorities to an imperial President.
That part of our history is sick, is evil, is insane, words can't express ... and yet American citizens who understand that also feel powerless to express any effective opposition to it.
Because thanks to our recent generations of media and politicians, this negative imperialist vision of American policy has been VERY successfully sold to the 29%, and smothered the next 40% in the middle so that they say, even on TPM Cafe, that (for example) Iran must be forcibly prevented from getting nuclear weapons, when in reality Iran will be behind Israel by hundreds of nuclear weapons and orders of magnitude in delivery systems for as long as we can foresee.
We need to begin to create a leftish political organization, bringing together all people who oppose American imperialism for any reason whatever, ready to work both with and against the Democratic party towards a single goal : An American Foreign Policy (including foreign economic policy) that is truly democratic rather than imperialistic, that follows the "golden rule" of not advocating policies for others that we would not wish for ourselves.
The advanced cadres will form an organization favoring education, over a 3 or more generation timespan, for creating a truly small-d democratic world federalist government ... (a union of the current highly imperfect existing governments is the opposite of what we desire).
April 22, 2008 3:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Given our current military preponderance it seems doubtful that anyone could actually stop us...
I wish someone could sometimes. Part of the reason parts of the country and especially the punditry are so bat shit crazy about this, is because they can't remember and can't even conceive of a situation where we COULD be stopped.
As far as they're concerned we've always been top dog and will always be top dog.
Short sighted idiots.
April 23, 2008 12:55 AM | Reply | Permalink