July 4th is bearing down on me, and it has me thinking about Independence Day the movie. For those unfamiliar with the movie, not to worry, the plot is formulaic. It goes something like this: aliens invade earth, things go poorly, but mankind (literally) bands together and triumphs. I have often fantasized that what we need, as a species, is an existential threat from "without," far "without," another planet in a "galaxy far far away," and perhaps then, just maybe, we could forget our petty differences and band together. Instead of focusing on the potential terrorism of the Syrian refugees, instead of focusing on the Mexicans sneaking over the border to rape our women, we could focus together on a real existential threat to mankind and take a break from killing each other. It's a fantasy, of course. If the aliens really did attack, we would find new and exciting ways to squabble among ourselves, and end up killing each other over how best to deal with the aliens. Still, it's pleasant to think that it might just be possible for us to "just get along."
Are the existential threats to our species? Last night my wife was called into work, the cubs lost again, and so to cheer myself up I was listening to a couple of Noam Chomsky lectures and interviews. In one, an interview conducted by Democracy Now, he identified today's GOP as a candidate for the most dangerous organization in the world. Why? Because they exist in willful denial of two existential threats to our species -- one is nuclear war, the other is climate change. I will return to climate change another day.
He did not identify ISIS or any of the jihadist terror organizations, and it's worth pausing for a moment to consider why. Chomsky did not identify them, in part because most of the "terror" is aimed, not at the west, per se, but at adversaries within their own sectarian squabbling. We become a target when we intervene, taking sides with one sect or another. As Chomsky explained in another interview, there are conspiracy theories, and then there are actual conspiracies. The first sort lacks credible evidence, the lack of which itself becomes evidence of a cover up. The repeated "something's going on" from Trump, of course, follows the classic pattern of the conspiracy theorist. Just as there is some desire to believe we are beset with illegal aliens from space, and have Roswell conspiracy theories, there is some desire to believe we are best with aliens from the middle east and that the highest levels of government are in collusion to keep the "secret." There is little in the way of credible evidence for such collusion, but the very lack of evidence serves as confirmation of the darker collusion to keep the "secret." These sorts of conspiracy theories have some level of credibility because, on occasion, they turn out to be real. An alienated and angry Osama bin Laden (not to be confused with Barak Hussein Obama) was already on the FBI terror most wanted list. He actually was conspiring to commit an atrocity. For the most part, however, the actual conspiracies tend to be right in our face, and the conspirators are simply coordinating business as usual, hardly conscious that they are "conspiring" for or against something. Motivations are multiple, sometimes cynical, sometimes idealistic, but in the end they are simply colluding to conduct business as usual. Think of it as the "banality of conspiracy."
For the first Bush and the GOP, less so for the Democrats, the invasion of Kuwait proved to be a god send. It justified the continued projection of military power abroad, acting as the world police on the cold war model, to create "a new world order ... a new era – freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace." The "war on terror" continued through the Clinton administration, and with the bombing of the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, created a new international bug-a-boo in the form of Osama Bin Laden. In August of 1998, Clinton ordered a "cruise missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan against the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory, justified in part because they were suspected of assisting bin Laden in making chemical weapons, aka banned weapons of mass destruction.
Again, for the second Bush and the GOP, less so for the Democrats, the 9/11 terror attacks, an actual conspiracy, proved a god send. Following his father's lead, the invasion of Iraq nevertheless satisfied the need for retribution in the form of military intervention and a continued projection of military power abroad, acting as the world police to contain the spreading "jihadist" threat. Iraq, however, over-turned the stone. I'm still a bit unclear why we felt the need to invade Iraq and depose Hussein. We gave three reasons. The first was to divest Iraq of nuclear weapons, to end their aid to terrorists, and to liberate the majority Shia people of Iraq from the Sunni oppression. Of the three reasons, the first, perhaps, is the most legitimate, and followed the pattern of justification set by Clinton. If Saddam Hussein were indeed about to possess nuclear weapons, then certainly we should divest him of those weapons. As it turns out, however, there were no weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration had acted on very scant credible evidence of their existence and so it seems reasonable to call it a false pretense, but it hardly mattered. The failure to find nuclear weapons, or anything resembling a real capacity to make nuclear weapons, raised eyebrows for a news cycle or two, but faded quickly, in part because the conflict was simply a continuation of business as usual, with a familiar cold war rhetoric adapted to fit the new bug-a-boo of radical islamic terrorism. We have effectively "normalized" our intervention in what were local sectarian disputes in order to contain first the communist threat, now the terrorist threat, without considering that our intervention simply magnified and amplified and added a new target for long standing resentments. Although Wikipedia can be suspect, they summarize as follows:
Following the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and subsequent fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the minority Sunni sect, which had previously enjoyed increased benefits under Saddam's rule, now found itself out of power as the Shia majority, suppressed under Saddam, sought to establish power. Such sectarian tensions resulted in a violent insurgency waged by different Sunni and Shia militant groups, such as al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Mahdi Army. Following the U.S. withdrawal in 2011, violence has increased to 2008 levels.
It should be more and more apparent that anything resembling a secular "new world order" is unlikely to emerge, and that we were simply exacerbating what were essentially regional, sectarian squabbles fueled by religion. Under the Obama administration, the "war on terror" culminated on the one hand with the capture and assassination of bin Laden, but found new venues in Syria. Again, although Wikipedia can be suspect, they write, "a United Nations report released in December, 2012, stated that the conflict had 'become overtly sectarian in nature', between Alawite-dominated government forces, militias and other Shia groups fighting primarily against Sunni-dominated rebel groups." In the meantime, more refugees, more refugee camps, more virulent rhetoric, and new breeding grounds for the next bin Laden. So far as the war on terror and the liberation of the Iraqi peoples are concerned, when the sand has absorbed the blood, I believe history will confirm that our interventions took what were regional and, for most Americans, incomprehensible sectarian squabbles and made them first regional and then "global."
I believe history will also confirm that our interventions were simply a status quo continuation of business as usual, with "radical islamic terror" displacing and/or supplementing "communism" as the bug-a-boo. Rubio, as the most mainstream of the GOP candidates, invoked the old cold war rhetoric, with the old cold war foes. He called for military expansion, to include nuclear modernization, in part because "right now we don’t have enough defense contractor competition" and a build up would, in Rubio's world. A more massive buildup would provide stimulus for competition, not only increasing the number of defense related contractors, but also driving down prices. He then invoked the old business of keeping up with the traditional threats from Russia and China, invoking the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, saying "the way to guarantee you never have a nuclear war with a major power is to insure that both sides know that neither one of them can win one." He went on to say, "and then you have these radical terrorists groups who pose a real threat to America. We’ve never faced a threat like this. People using the refugee crisis and the immigration system to infiltrate killers into other countries. Using the internet to radicalize Americans like they did in San Bernardino, where an American citizen born and raised in this country killed 14 people and was on his way to killing more." Speaking at the Iowa Faith and Freedom summit on April 25, Rubio said that threats worldwide "require strong American leadership, which we cannot exert as long as we eviscerate military spending, which is what we are doing now. We are placing our nation at a dangerous position." He used he same alarmist hyperbole to justify increases in military spending, saying "we are the only nation that is not modernizing its nuclear weapons." It is unclear, at least to me, if Rubio believes that a more robust nuclear force would deter the terrorist threat, along with China and Russia, but according to PolitiFact Florida, the claim that we are not modernizing our nuclear weapons is substantially untrue. As they report, "The National Nuclear Security Administration’s March 2015 report to Congress details plans to modernize nuclear equipment including various warheads over the coming years. A Congressional Research Service Report issued the same month covered similar topics." The cost would be in the neighborhood of 348 billion over the next ten years. It might be argued, along with Tom Donnelly of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, that "we are not really modernizing our nukes very seriously" and that some projects are years -- even decades -- away and could could fall prey to budget cuts," we are nevertheless modernizing, but to what end?
There are a couple of differences worth emphasizing between the cold war on communism and the current interminable war on radical islamic terrorism, and those differences change the threat calculation. regarding nuclear weapons. First, it might bear noting that communist nations actually had nuclear weapons. While there might have been some debate on their capacity, the quality and quantity of their nuclear arms, there was no real debate on the presence of those weapons or that the Soviet Union was essentially hostile to the United States. As documents become declassified, it becomes more and more apparent that we escaped nuclear annihilation by the proverbial skin of our teeth, but in the end we escaped because neither side was suicidal. Communism, as a comprehensive ideology, resembles a religion, but it differs in one crucial respect -- they sought the worker's paradise, but it was paradise on earth. Nuclear annihilation would have severely disrupt those plans. Both nations continue to possess nuclear weapons. China, of course, remains communist and belligerent in theory, and we do have our issues, but its entanglements with the US economically are now obvious to any Walmart shopper who can read the "made in China" sticker on the bottom of the plastic pumpkin. Whether the current plutocratic Russia presents a comparable threat to the old Soviet Union is, I suppose, a matter of debate, and here again we do have our issues, but we also share a mutual and rational recognition that the current stockpiles are more than sufficient. Between us, we have more than 90% of all the nuclear weapons, and there have been on-going talks since the 60s to reduce the arsenals, and will decline further under under the 2011 START Treaty with Russia. It is not clear to me whether the core GOP position sees efforts, like the START Treaty, as part and parcel of the evisceration of US military strength, but in either case the GOP seems intent on "business as usual," both in a literal and a figurative sense, supporting a status quo bellicosity of the sort that insures a continuation of the military industrial complex as a government funded "stimulus" to at least a portion of the US economy.
One might critique Carter and the democrats for using chemical weapons as a pretext for his invasion of the Sudan, but they did so within the general expectation (and in the minds of some, given our status as the remaining "super-power," the general obligation) that the US act as the international police, preventing if possible, punishing if necessary, those who would wreck havoc, particularly those really bad actors who would use chemical weapons in a genocidal war on their own people. Islamic terrorists with chemical weapons, in short, might wreck havoc, but they were not an existential threat to the US as a sovereign nation or to the species as a whole, not in the way that a nuclear exchange was an existential threat. When the second Bush and the GOP upped the ante and used nuclear weapons as a pretext for invasion, they invoked the more apocalyptic fears of the cold war, but in a quite different context, the more ancient, more enduring clash between christianity and islam. I do not recall anyone strapping a bomb to their chest, rushing an airport and detonating it while shouting "workers of the world unite," but the recurrence of suicide bombers throughout the middle east has become, well, almost too banal to report. It seems too that conventional military success has a counter-intuitive effect. In our current war on ISIS, as the territory of the caliphate shrinks, their influence grows. As reported by the Washington Post, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said that the Islamic State is “vicious and adaptive” in what he called a “global terrorism campaign. [The caliphate is] very much losing territory, but at the same time, expanding its global presence.” They go on to report, "While the core of the caliphate in Iraq and Syria has been pummeled by coalition airstrikes and by armies and militias fighting them on the ground, Islamic State soldiers have spread throughout the Middle East and far afield. Attacks in Turkey, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Libya, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and several European capitals, and the lone-wolf attacks in Orlando and San Bernardino, show the Islamic State’s potency as an ideology." The more we win, the more we lose. In response to this frustration, Chomsky identified the GOP as the most dangerous group, in part because, to a person, the GOP candidates for president have all suggested that they would use nuclear weapons, one almost eagerly. "We will utterly destroy ISIS," Ted Cruz said. "We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don't know if sand can glow in the dark, but we're going to find out." It is perhaps not surprising that the most christian of the candidates invoked nuclear holocaust as a response. Both islamic eschatology and christian eschatology promise paradise, on earth perhaps, but a restored earth well after armageddon. Though not "real" in the cold war sense, insofar as the terrorists do not possess nuclear weapons, the nuclear threat is nevertheless more credible and more frightening and more "real" in quite another sense. One can, in short, imagine the radical islamic terrorist, should they get their hands on a bomb, actually using it without hesitation, without rational calculation. Assuming, as one must, that they believe their doctrine, the suicide bomber is himself (or herself) "exempt" from the sum of all fears that Mutually Assured Destruction depends upon. The nuclear flash would simply hasten not only their personal entry into paradise through martyrdom, but it might also also Yawm al-Qiyāmah and Yawm ad-Dīn, the final days of judgment and resurrection.
Not one GOP candidate called for the reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons, and Trump, the presumptive nominee, echoed the assurance of Mutually Assured Destruction, “I’m never going to rule anything out—I wouldn’t want to say. Even if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t want to tell you that because at a minimum, I want them to think maybe we would use them,” he said in a Bloomberg interview. He has also taken an almost nonchalant attitude toward international proliferation. “You have so many countries already — China, Pakistan, you have so many countries, Russia — you have so many countries right now that have them,” he said. “Now, wouldn’t you rather, in a certain sense, have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons?” The short answer to his question is "no, I would prefer that neither Japan nor North Korea had nuclear weapons." China, I imagine, would answer in the same way, and their possession of nuclear weapons is truly frightening. So too is Pakistan's. In the end, I won't be on a street corner soon with an "the end is near" sign, but there is an acrid whiff of dissolution in the air. The presumptive republican nominee is critiquing the European Union, and applauding as the United Kingdom withdraws, a withdrawal that has revealed the Kingdom itself is perhaps not so united after all. The old cold war paradigms of "containment with conventional forces," exemplified by NATO, does not seem to work with "radical islamic terrorism" quite as well as it did in the good old days of the radical communist threat. Indeed, it does not seem to work at all, and NATO itself seems moribund and ineffectual and on the verge of dissolution. Yet we persist, repeating the Russian mistake in Afghanistan, repeating our own mistakes in Syria, doing the same thing all over again, exacerbating our frustration all while expecting better results which are just not forthcoming. In the end, I don't know whether it is a paranoid fantasy fueled by binge watching 24, or a rational response to the current state of world politics, but the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons seems MORE, not less real today than it did in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, in part because the old paradigms that sustained us through the cold war no longer seem tenable, but there are no new paradigms to replace them. I will not be standing on a corner with a sign that says, "the end is near," but Yeat's poem, "The Second Coming," comes to mind with greater and greater frequency:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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