November 05, 2002

This began as a response to a Commentarium entry made by Sylvain in response to yesterday's bit of fluff(go check it out), but it got too long and then morphed into a post. I beat it back with a chair and forced it into the blog template.

Sylvain wanted to know whether I crave "Justice" or "revenge" regarding Iraq. Interesting question, to which I respond:

"Justice" is a lot more problematic than "revenge," simply because Justice with a "J" can't really be had in perfection on this earth, which is why folks like Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin and Woody Harrelson are doomed to be dissatisfied with the world throughout their entire cushy lives: they think that it's possible to bring an Ideal down from whatever ethereal space it inhabits and make it work here in the mud with the monkeys...right now! Perhaps that's because they're used to living entirely in well-lit fantasies with a well-appointed trailer out back, I don't know. But there are plenty of less-famous folks who believe the same thing, and at the moment I have no explanation for them.

Revenge, on the other hand, is a very mud-and-monkey sort of affair: a fistful of feces flung in the face deserves a bash on the head with a stick, resulting in a sock in the snout with a rock, which in turn necessitates the deployment of the Seventh Fleet. The wisdom of such automatic responses is debatable, of course, but revenge doesn’t have a lot of theory behind it, and thus has the virtue, if you can call it that, of being practical.

So, on the one hand: yes, it would be grand to neither want nor need a massively complex military-industrial machine that is capable of laying waste to thousands of square miles and killing our enemies in ultra-Biblical proportions. On the other: we live in a world where significant numbers of people think that it's acceptable to fly airliners into buildings, kill 500,000 people with machetes and rocks based upon ethnic differences invisible to the outside world, and persuade populations to relocate by shooting large numbers of them in the head and dumping them into big pits.

It is quite possible to have "American Pride" without regarding the war opposition as "commie tree-hugging anti-Americans." Neither does American Pride mean that The Only Good Muslim Is A Dead Muslim. I view the force we can bring to bear in defense of this nation as a product of this nation; that is, it is a direct result of American ingenuity, dedication, and skill. It is made up of millions of American citizens whose job it is to keep pudgy armchair critics such as myself safe and secure.

So: I don't crave Justice, because in a world this complex, it can't be had, and it won't be until we solve a million other problems, which will then allow for an equitable, European-style Diplofest where everybody's rational, well-fed and willing to talk.

I will admit to being immensely satisfied by the thought that Osama Bin Laden, thinking himself safe in his cave and pursued by cowardly weak Americans, was in all probability pulped by a laser-guided BLU-118/B “bunker buster” thermobaric explosive device designed by the military’s top explosives expert. This expert also happens to be a woman who emigrated to the United States from Vietnam after the war. I’m not satisfied because such a thing was “Just," but because he was an evil bastard and now he won’t bother us anymore because he’s very, very dead. I’m not proud of the act: I’m proud of the nation that allowed a destitute war refugee to come here, rise to the top of her profession, and make such a contribution to the defense of her fellow citizens.

Such a nation is worthy of defense. It is, in fact, a testament to the national ethical sensibility that we even have such things as precision, laser-guided munitions. We could have cheaper, “dumb iron” bombs, and a lot more of them. Instead, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the development of weapons so accurate that we can take out a munitions factory and barely scratch the hospital next door to it. Or—as was demonstrated yesterday—we can blow up a car with a Hellfire missile fired from an unmanned Predator drone and kill a top al-Qaeda operative without taking out a city block in the process. I'm proud of that, too.

Many people like to compare us to Rome, but that reflects an ignorance of history. The Roman response to September 11 would have been to turn most of Saudi Arabia into an expanse of black glass on September 12, level Mecca and Medina on September 13, and take over the oil fields on September 14. What did we do instead? We deployed 2% of our available active-duty soldiers, destroyed the al-Qaeda training infrastructure in Afghanistan, toppled a despotic theocratic regime, and installed a nascent democracy. The Roman response would have been to reduce Baghdad to rubble in 1991 and mow down anybody who tried to leave. Now, we're dealing with the results of our restraint.

Finally, seeking either "revenge" or "Justice" in this case would imply that Hussein has a direct causal link to September 11. He might, he might not, but that's not really the point. As I've said elsewhere, the point is that we cannot allow a man with a proven record of expansionist aggression and genocidal tendencies to develop nuclear weapons, which he would then use to hold us at bay while he rolls across the entire Arabian penninsula and acquires the oil revenue needed to develop ICBMs.

If we developed fusion power tomorrow, or could use Shipstones or geothermal taps to generate the 3 terawatts of power we consume annually, then I'd be more than happy to tell Sadaam to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. But that's not the situation, and the reality is that we can't afford to let him have his way with the region, any more than we can continue to let him harbor folks like the late Abu Nibal, or lend military expertise and assistance to organizations like al-Qaeda. Enough's enough. Lights out.