Dumbed-Down Hitchens
His recent Nation column on missile defense is laughably contradictory and poorly argued.

June 27, 2001 4:05 p.m.

aybe 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.