Kumbaya Watch: Wright’s Not
The latest in foolish commentary.

By Ross Douthat
October 15, 2001 9:50 a.m.

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.