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Northern Alliance gang in Kabul reports that our air force had a
really good hit, an American rocket that opened up a Taliban compound
that seems to have been a library/laboratory for ultimate war. It
stored, in the account of the Associated Press, "room after
room filled with papers, formulas and maps . . . some with handwritten
Arabic notations." The Times of London reported written
"descriptions of how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium
into a critical mass, sparking a chain reaction, and ultimately
a thermonuclear reaction."
There is a
way of contriving an optimistic reading of the Kabul Compound Library,
with scattered notes on weapon construction. We can say we don't
have much to fear from people who need Atom Bombs for Dummies manuals.
That's true, but also it is apparently true that not a great deal
of sophistication is required, given presumptive knowledge of modern
scientists, to piece together a nuclear device.
On the specific
question of such weaponry in Afghanistan, we bear in mind that President
Bush has declined to say that we know the enemy to be without a
nuclear repository. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld would go no further
than that he "doubted" they had such weapons. We know
that two Pakistani nuclear scientists sympathetic to the Taliban
were brought in and questioned in Islamabad. Stretching away from
believable commentators on the question, we get to the statement
of Osama bin Laden, that in the event the United States used chemical
or nuclear weapons, he would retaliate in kind. How far they are
(were) from developing a dirty bomb is a fit study for the Rand
Corporation in years to come. What is a fit subject for the moment
is concern over the critical need to take the loose information
we have got from the sorcerers' apprentices loose in Afghanistan
and apply it to strategic action elsewhere, specifically Iraq.
One reasons
reasonably in the matter of nuclear weapons. If we learned at midnight
that the Swiss had developed a nuclear bomb, we could turn over
in our beds and go back to sleep. On the other hand we know there
are active leaders in the world who, if they had the stuff and could
profitably deploy it, would not hesitate, for moral reasons, to
do so. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds in
northern Iraq. In decades to come it will strike Western moralists
as simply unbelievable that, in the 1990s, the United States failed
to force its hand against Iraq, notwithstanding that it had international
sanction for probing the country for its little quarries of biological,
chemical, and nuclear weapons.
With the confidence
that has come to us this week on the tide of our achievements in
Afghanistan, we need to press on in the direction of pursuing al
Qaeda wherever it festers, and Iraq is the most qualified target.
In the New York Times, William Safire worried last week about
the presidential decision to empower military courts to administer
justice. He proposed an arresting compromise, namely to inform Osama
bin Laden, or whoever is left in the crypt in which he is found,
that we require the surrender of the al Qaeda organization wherever
it is encysted, whether in Pakistan or in Libya or in the Philippines
or in Indonesia: They must give themselves up or endure the relatively
undiscriminating brunt of general wars in the style of ours against
Afghanistan.
The idea of
an ultimatum is appealing, and ours to Saddam Hussein would be:
Remove yourself and your court to the island of Elba, or on Day
3 the following airfields, arsenals, and military camps will be
bombed; on Day 5, the following industrial centers; on Day 7, the
internal transportation system. Upon your removal, with guaranteed
personal safety, an Iraqi unit will exercise power in Baghdad under
a U.S./U.N. mandate to identify and eliminate every trace of atomic/biological/chemical
research and material.
Remember, too,
that we are discovering in Afghanistan the true human subculture,
which is the response to liberation, expressed there by shaving
beards and removing burqas from the women. After Iraq cooled down,
even as France cooled down after Napoleon was finally, verifiably
off, we could expect the relief, felt particularly in Iraq, and
derivatively in humankind.
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