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Christopher Hitchens saves his best thinking for ways to smear Henry
Kissinger, but for whatever reason his recent Nation column
on missile defense is laughably contradictory and poorly argued.
He fails even to trot out the more compelling anti-missile-defense
arguments that have been retailed recently by Thomas
Friedman and Robert
Wright (and knocked down in this space). Hitchens's case is
the dumbed-down version, perhaps in deference to his Nation
readers.
First, he tells us that the reason missile defense has gone nowhere
is that "people in the United States…remain substantially unpersuaded."
Then, explaining why Clinton and Gore supported a limited version
of missile defense, he writes that "the early impetus given to the
project under Clinton and Gore…derived from poll findings showing
that millions of Americans believed that the United States already
had a missile-proof roof arching above its fruited plains." Well,
which is it? Are the American people unalterably opposed to the
idea, or smugly confident that it has already been put into practice?
Then, Hitchens argues that the system's "selling point is essentially
isolationist: 'We' can have our very own shield against 'them.'"
But an "us" versus "them" mentality is not necessarily isolationist.
It was "us" versus "them" in World War II, and again in the Cold
War, with "us" working in the world to defend our security and freedom
against "them." Missile defense has the same impetus. And part of
the point of defending "our" cities against "them" is to preserve
our freedom to act in the world, to turn back, say, a Saddam Hussein
assault against Kuwait, without having to fear he would take out
Los Angeles in retaliation (or at least threaten it, as a way to
try to intimidate us).
Hitchens acknowledges this obliquely when he argues that the only
use a missile defense would have would be to make it possible for
the U.S. to launch a first strike against another nation. This is
preposterous, but even if true, this would not represent an isolationist
tendency, but an extremely aggressive interventionist one (you can't
be more active in the world than when you are nuking someone!).
This is where Hitchens hints at the more sophisticated anti-missile-defense
case, which rests on the idea that the system would be destabilizing
because it would potentially counteract the Russians' retaliatory
capability.
But a system wouldn't be far-reaching enough to counteract the Russian
missile force for years and years. So, this argument is mere fancy.
Grant Hitchens this, however: At least he considers it a bad thing
that the U.S. might launch a nuclear missile against another country.
Other missile-defense skeptics, like Friedman and Wright, argue
against a system because they would apparently prefer — should
someone launch a missile against us — to incinerate hundreds
of thousands of innocent civilians in the offending country in retaliation
rather than try to knock down the incoming missile.
Hitchens is at his silliest when he writes that "Once in place,
[a system] would make its own decisions." Maybe he has seen one
too many advance screenings of A.I. Maybe this is how things
work in the Hitchens household, with blenders and VCRs making their
own decisions as to when to mix a margarita or tape an episode of
Survivor. But machines don't think or act in the world on
their own. The only way Hitchens's statement makes any sense is
if he thinks that there would be pressure to use a system once it's
in place, i.e., we would try to shoot down a missile launched against
us once we had that capability. Well, uh, yeah.
And if Hitchens really hates nukes as much as he pretends, he should
welcome that prospect as much as all those people in the Clinton-Gore
focus groups.
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