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wanted to wait to write about how Tuesday's attacks will affect
the debate over missile defense, but missile-defense critics have
already jumped right in — on Wednesday, the New York Times
apparently thought scoring points against the idea of missile defense
was one of the most important things to say immediately in the wake
of the most catastrophic attack on American land ever.
Others have
followed suit, on TV, and in the case of our old friend Robert
Wright, in the pages of Slate.
The most obvious
answer to the criticism that missile defense wouldn't have stopped
these attacks is that most weapons technologies that the U.S. military
deploys didn't stop these attacks, but that they are still worth
having. Should we stop investing in the aircraft carrier, the M-1
tank, the cruise missile, because they were worthless on Tuesday?
Those are
specific technologies with specific purposes that happened not to
have any application in this case. So, too, missile defense has
a specific purpose — shooting down ICBMs — that wouldn't
have helped on Tuesday, but that obviously doesn't mean that for
all time the U.S. will never face that threat.
In fact, as
we move toward what may be war with Afghanistan and Iraq, we had
better hope that Saddam Hussein doesn't have a more sophisticated
missile-capacity than we know (he’s been flight-testing short-range
missiles and working on his longer-range missiles), or things will
get more complicated very quickly.
In previous
attacks on missile defense, Robert Wright (I’ll let him stand in
for all missile-defense critics at the moment) has shrugged off
the additional power that a nuclear-missile threat would give dictators
such as Saddam Hussein: "I don't deny that the possession of nukes
would probably give a dictator more leeway in world affairs, or
that, specifically, great powers might be less inclined to confront
such a dictator."
So, in a future
crisis such as the one that confronts the United States today, Wright
would blithely accept the diminution of U.S. power and influence
that would come with having no defensive capacity against possible
missile attacks.
If this isn't
bad enough, Wright seemed in his previous columns to welcome
this possibility: "This may be the scariest thing about missile
defense . . .: It could give some American political leaders the
illusion of insulation from world problems."
By this logic,
the more attacks to which we are vulnerable, the better, since it
increases our engagement in world affairs. Besides being outlandish
on its face — we should try to protect ourselves against every
attack imaginable — it’s really quite the opposite. The more
vulnerable we are, the less likely we are to act in the world, as
Wright admits when he talks of the possession of nukes increasing
the power of our enemies.
But Wright
has reconsidered one important point.
During our
exchange earlier this year, he was adamant that every world leader
would be a totally rational actor--deterrence apparently worked
against the Soviets, therefore it would work against everyone else
as well.
When I suggested
that this wasn't the case, that the U.S. would confront enemies
who would by our standards be totally unreasonable, he scoffed:
"Is he indeed saying that European people can be counted on to comply
with Western notions of rationality, but people from Asian or Islamic
cultures can't be?"
Well, yesterday,
he wrote: "Islamic radicalism . . . at the grass-roots level, is
simply not susceptible to normal deterrence." Just so: this is the
real world, after all, one in which hyper-rational considerations
don’t dictate everyone's every move, one in which people are sometimes
murderously, suicidally unreasonable.
Wright tries
to save his original position by stipulating that it is at the grassroots
that Islamic radicalism isn't deterrable, because he apparently
still thinks that all leaders of states are disciples of John Nash,
the creator of game theory.
His worldview
has no room for those voices in the Japanese cabinet, who in the
wake of our atomic attacks supported the idea of leading Japan into
total destruction; no room for Hitler near the end essentially ordering
the utter annihilation of his own nation; no room for Castro welcoming
the idea of a nuclear strike on Cuba during the missile crisis,
so that Cuba might be destroyed but socialism might triumph.
The world
will see such leaders again, and we had best prepare.
Finally, Wright
argues essentially that it is a zero-sum game between missile-defense
spending and counter-terrorism spending, that we would have to have
"infinite" resources to pursue both. But the idea that the richest
nation in the world can't try to protect itself from all possible
threats is nonsense. Missile-defense spending would have been 3
percent of the Bush defense budget — hardly breaking the bank.
We spend massively
on counter-terrorism now, and should spend more in the future. This
should be all the more possible now that everyone will finally admit
what Jonathan Chait of The New Republic has been saying for
weeks: that the various "lockboxes" in Washington are just "artificial
devices" meant to prevent more spending on things like defense.
Anyway, this
debate feels a little unseemly in the circumstances. Amid the couple
of "I told you so's" here, let me stipulate that, although NR
has always supported spending on both missile defense and counter-terrorism,
I never would have predicted such an awful thing would have been
possible.
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