Neo Cons for the Bomb: More Advice from the Men Who Brought You Iraq
In an article in today's Wall Street Journal, Douglas Feith and Abram Shulsky have joined the chorus of neo-conservative pundits who have been criticizing the Obama administration for taking modest but essential steps towards the president's stated goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. Why anyone would listen to Feith and Shulsky, who were involved in promoting bogus intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to sell the Iraq war is beyond me. But these two men and their neo-conservative cohorts -- from John Bolton to Richard Perle to Frank Gaffney -- have been receiving far too much space in our nation's op-ed pages (particularly, but not only, in the WSJ) for their ill-considered theories about nuclear weapons.
Feith and Perle, for example, take umbrage at the Obama administration's efforts to reach a new nuclear arms accord with Russia, despite the fact that it is the best way to get other countries to join the anti-nuclear bandwagon. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 (signed by that well-known radical, Richard Nixon), the United States and the other major nuclear weapons states pledged to take urgent steps to eliminate their nuclear arsenals in exchange for a promise by non-nuclear states not to acquire them. Nearly 40 years later, with 27,000 deployed nuclear weapons (over 95% possessed by the U.S. and Russia), the big players have certainly stretched the meaning of the word "urgent" beyond any reasonable bounds. President Obama is seeking to change that, both by pledging to seek a world free of nuclear weapons and by taking concrete steps towards eliminating them, from concluding a new arms reduction treaty with Russia, to promoting a ban on all nuclear testing, to pushing for a global agreement to ban the production of bomb making materials.
It is Obama's determination to back up his rhetoric with concrete steps towards disarmament that is driving Feith and his not-so-merry band of colleagues crazy. Whatever rhetoric they may use to disguise it, the "neo-cons for the bomb" are addicted to these weapons of mass terror and can't imagine a world without them. It's up to us to prove them wrong,
The explanation would seem to be that there are too many necons and necon sympathizers running the media, wouldn't it?
The public, in general, still seems to be unwillingly to directly face what a mistake the Iraq war was. Although we've faced it indirectly, via the nomination and election of Obama, we don't seem capable of admitting failure. Not of our leaders, that, we're willing to do, but rather, of our own judgment in having selected those failed leaders.
August 4, 2009 3:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
necon(sic) - neocon
August 4, 2009 3:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Forget Iraq, the WSJ editorial board is shameless, and thinks its readers have no memory. It can't even be trusted on economics.
Who would trust their opinions when they employ on their editorial board Stephen Moore, author in 2004 of the book Bullish on Bush: How George Bush's Owenership Society Will Make America Stronger . This in a paper that calls itself a source of financial expertise. They WSJ opinion pages and editors are worthless.
August 4, 2009 3:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
...amazon com likes Moore's Bush book so much they didn't even spell check the title on the linked page.
August 4, 2009 3:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Owe-nership society" sounds more like a Freudian slip, as it could be read to describe what we *got* during the Bush years.
August 4, 2009 6:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bill,
Neo-cons enjoy Hold-Harmless! -- better than mere constitutional -- protection from the Democratic Party, the Obama Administration, and the SecDef. The neo-cons can talk away and make good money at it -- better than ye or me, I bet.
There is also a bit of an anti-nuclear left out there somewhere, and the "soft center" uses that left as an excuse to indulge the hard right.
The hard right, neo-cons, -- who used to be a sort of hard-left -- and soft center all share two things in common: (1) A love of our agro-military pork-barrel (Jeffersonian!) and and of (2) of an all-volunteer military (Hamiltonian!). It's all gain, no pain for them.
If we had a hard center it would, I think, have a certain priorities:
1. De-alerting (no first-strike)
2. Stockpile reduction (no counter-force)
3. Non-proliferation (no leverage)
These, in that order, seem urgent to me. And, each seems like a pre-condition for the next, with (1) being essentially unilateral, (2) being bi-lateral, and (3) being multi-lateral.
The first two are a domestic political-economic challenge for my government and party. They may entail as much public expenditure as building up nuclear war-fighting capability we still seem to have. But, a build-down would not always be on the existing bases, plants, concessions. It could be elsewhere. And, that is actually a political and economic opportunity, if any of the cringing, reactionary liberals can ever figure that out.
In any case, as Barney Frank notes, the hard right and soft center "don't need no stinkin' stimulus" -- they have theirs already.
Where I think the sort of hard center that we need misses the boat, so to speak, is on nuclear testing and development.
Once you close LRL and get away from Star Wars, Frickin' Lasers, and other Edward Teller/Lyndon LaRouche fantasy-weapons, development and testing of warheads, including upgrading and replacement of fewer and fewer residual weapons, is not very costly. And, it is less dangerous, I think, than just sitting around spending money on academic pork and union make-work, which is all the big, old weapons labs are now.
There are really only a handful of people who really know how to do any of the requiesite r&d. Lord, they must be bored -- not a good thing.
So, if the US and others are going to keep others outside of an agreed non-proliferation regime from succeeding, we need to be engaged enough to know who and what to watch for.
Moreover, continued r&d -- high-quality but small-scale, should be, with (1)-(3) a matter of international priority and co-operation, getting away from Cold-War competition to a planetary security regime based on deterrence of nuclear and large-scale conventional warfare alike.
Do we not have an interest in making sure a Russian nuclear deterrent is just as small as ours but as secure and reliable.
Both the US and the Russians, but also the French and English, probably even Pakistan, India, and China need not just worry about rival pairs but about a third party with a very few unknown or unacknowledged nuclear weapons trying to leverage the other powers' larger stocks through a clever or desperate strategem.
What we do not want is anybody thinking that nuclear weapons provide a means of unilaterally achieving the offensive or apocolyptic goal of any one person or entity.
Maybe we need an international testing regime, not a fig-leaf testing ban.
August 4, 2009 3:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
You betcha. Of course they want the bomb. Its difficult, if near impossible, to bring about Armageddon without the nuclear bomb.
August 5, 2009 7:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
neo-cons are at the center of the game and need to be investigated for treason ... but that is not likely to happen! They are the vanguard of American Imperialism and we as a nation will pay for their lies and treason!
August 5, 2009 9:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Here's the most I can make of the neocon / anti-nuke treaty 'logic':
-They have this ultraparanoid and neurotic view that even getting rid of a few of our weapons will reduce our security and be the start of the slippery slope. While Obama and many others (as well as the NPT we signed) have committed to moving forward with denuclearization, this is not going to happen any time soon. I don't think these agreeements would even slice our stockpile in half. That still gives us plenty of counterstrike capability leaving us with a pretty much invincible triad deterrent.
-They think we're rewarding the Russians. Reductions are definitely good for the Russians in allowing them to dedicate money and resources elsewhere, but they also minimize the stolen warhead risk. So in a sense we are rewarding the Russians, but also getting something in return, paying very little for it, and hopefully advancing on other issues too.
-They just want to oppose anything Obama or the Democrats support. I left this one for last for a reason. Apparently arms control was alright when Nixon, Reagan and Bush pursued but not when a president with a D next to his name does it.
August 5, 2009 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
The key point for them is in the middle of the article.
Supposedly, the fifth article of this proposed understanding between Russia and the U.S. would count new ICBM interceptors as being nuclear weapons, for purposes of counting our national stock of them. That, in turn, might either reduce or eliminate funding for the development of a so-called missile shield, which is big money. Northrop Grumman and Raytheon got $4.5B over 8 years to develop a weapon capable of intercepting ICBMs in their boost phase, with the work spread out to: Huntsville, Ala.; Tucson, Ariz.; Chandler, Ariz.; Elkton, Md.; St. Louis, Mo.; Sunnyvale, Calif.; and Naval Base Ventura County, Calif. I think you'll find some powerful and usually Republican congressmen and senators with constituents vested in these projects, and I'm confident that all of them will have taken the statutory maximum in donations from Northrop Grumman.
Last but not least, the law firm of Feith & Zell in D.C. represents Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. There has to be a taste for the lawyers in there somewhere, if this contract means $4.5B and your lead counsel just happens to be a former Undersecretary of Defense. But I'm sure that both Mr. Feith and Mr. Shulsky are above such things, and would hold the same positions even if their proposed policy didn't keep a steady torrent of taxpayer money rushing towards their clients.
This, incidentally, is about a minute of Googling, tops: "missile shield contract" and "douglas feith northrop grumman." Of course, the WSJ would have to care about context first.
August 5, 2009 10:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
The great irony is there is a lot of missile defense work to go around. Gates' budget increased spending on important tactical and theater missile defenses, at the expense of Star Wars, fantasy land national missile defense (like SDI). Lockheed Martin was able to see the logic that new F-22s would come at the expense of their even bigger F-35 program. I guess they didn't get the memo on missile defense.
August 5, 2009 10:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
It may be that there's something we don't understand about this language would affect the economics of missile defense research and development, and it's significant enough to send these two scurrying to the editorial page at WSJ to go concern-trolling for $$$.
Maybe my willingness to settle for a lousy $4B program instead of a $4.5B program to intercept missiles - especially when it's at least as likely that the nuclear weapon detonated in an American city in the next 25 years will get there in a shipping container that crossed the border at El Paso - is what makes me one of the little people.
August 5, 2009 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well that catastrophic attack came on 9/11, except there was no state behind it and the terrorists cleverly used our own infrastructure against us. I think there was an estimate that said the attack only cost them about $100,000.
That's why the Rumsfeld Commission has to be my all-time favorite commission. It said the main threat to our security was rogue states with missiles. Rumsfeld and co.(Wolfowitz was on it too) came in, took us out of the ABM and started ramping up NMD. Then 9/11 happened, totally the opposite of what Rumsfeld and the majority of conservatives predicted. They took us on the Iraq detour and other excesses, but they've still refused to abandon their NMD fantasy.
I think a shipping container on a freighter in a port is just as likely if not more.
August 5, 2009 12:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
The reason that they do is simple, they want to use them.
Not only in Iran but they also believe the time will come(after some type of missle defense) when a nuclear war against Russia will be possible.
Sure its madness but war is good business and as long as the people in this country love war so much, these types get attention.
War is invisable and killing is accepted because its only "one of them".
As we speak the Obama administration seeks ways to cut off Irans oil while the congress accepts the opinion of the far right on how to proceed with sanctions that will kill untold people in Iran.
Just as the estimated 500,000 that died in Iraq because of sanctions.
These greasy slimy people are revolting.
August 6, 2009 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink