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 riting
in Slate,
Robert Wright voices his usual complaint: the "hawks"
in the Bush administration want to expand the war beyond Afghanistan,
which would inevitably bring about "regional instability,"
threatening "the Pakistani regime's grip on power," and
diminishing "the life expectancy of the Palestinian Authority."
And even if Pakistan and Palestine weather the storm, Wright insists,
"those of us who have been stressing the perils of extensive
military involvement are worried about side effects that transcend
the fates of particular regimes. The longer and messier the intervention,
the more eager recruits there will be for Osama Bin Laden —
or, assuming Bin Laden winds up dead, for his successors."
This has been
Wright's line since the beginning of the crisis — that violence
begets violence, and that any American military intervention will
likely only make the terrorist problem worse. He hedges his bets,
of course, allowing that "there may be a case for opening other
fronts, especially if the action is covert," and insisting
that he is not merely repeating the "generic pacifist fear
that 'hatred and killing only breeds more hatred and killing.'"
But that "pacifist fear" remains central to his argument
— for though it "has often been wrong in the past,"
he says, "recent technological innovation has made it truer."
In the age of CNN and the internet, according to Wright, any American
military effort will inevitably become fodder for extremist recruitment
and bin Laden-style propaganda. Blowback is unavoidable — unless
we avoid military involvement in the first place, or keep it to
a bare, Robert Wright-approved minimum.
Of course,
he worries, "if the Afghanistan operation goes fairly smoothly
(an increasingly big 'if'), the Wolfowitz faction can do a quick
cost-benefit calculus that excludes this long-run blowback and thus
favors repeating the exercise elsewhere." In response, "the
best we skeptics will be able to do is point to the past: If you
had done a cost-benefit analysis of the Persian Gulf War right after
it ended, it might have looked like a clear winner — only a
few hundred American deaths! But it turns out that the presence
of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia triggered a conversion experience
in Osama Bin Laden that led ultimately to the destruction of the
World Trade Center and 6,000 deaths. Oh."
But wait —
what's the lesson here? That we shouldn't have prevented Saddam
Hussein from annexing Kuwait because of the chance that some pampered
Saudi tycoonlet might get religion and decide to take up Saladin's
sword? Is that really any way to run a foreign policy?
For Wright,
apparently, the answer is yes. Instead of military interventions,
he favors "tough global treaties that would slow the spread
of nuclear and biological weapons" — because there's nothing
the al Qaedas and Hezbollahs of the world fear more than a "tough
global treaty." And as for Iraq, well, Wright allows that "we
do need ... to reassess the likelihood that Iraq is helping terrorists
get a hold of nukes or biological weapons and, if the chances seem
real, figure out what to do. But this is no higher a priority than,
say, getting a clearer fix on what's happening to nuclear materials
in the former Soviet Union."
Except that
the nations in the former Soviet Union aren't the rallying point
for pan-Islamic anti-Americanism, as Iraq is, and aren't led by
a despot whose ultimate goal is to avenge a decade-old military
defeat, drive America from the Middle East, and make himself the
master of the region. But for Robert Wright, it seems, these very
facts make Saddam Hussein too dangerous to confront. A foreign policy
paralyzed by fear of "blowback," he suggests, is America's
best option right now.
Or, as FDR
didn't say, the only thing we have to fear is not being fearful
enough.
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