Wednesday, January 21, 2004

 
"Worse than a Mongol"
Or: "As Tamerlane Lay Dying"*


Watching "The Barbarians" on *The History Channel* seemed a less painful prospect than watching the Democrat's response to the SOTU address, given knowledge that the West escaped total annihilation despite assaults upon it from around 400 to around 1400 AD. No more than a minute or so of Nancy Pelosi elapsed before surfing back to accounts of more honest scourges. The fifth column c*nt(Derplorable language to be sure, but spat out from some part of the ol' cortex or subcortical basement with Howard Dean-like intensity) asserted that our citizens are made safe not by the dreaded policy of preemption, but by avoiding unilateralism and by throwing more money on domestic inspections and the like. Her prescriptions would all but gut our deterrence. That is, if one essentially rules out attacking an enemy both before *or* after an attack or anticipated attack on us, an enemy risks little more than arrest or seizure of trivial quantities of human or material assets.
Spending some money on domestic defence and in particular, anti-missile defence makes some sense of course -except to most Democrats with respect to the latter.

During the Cold War people made at least *some* effort to think seriously about nuclear deterrence; wrote books, papers and so on. If any papers have been written on the subject recently, they don't seem to have been picked up, at least with any frequency, by even the conservative press. Even the redoubtable John Derbyshire seems to do no more than occasionally toss off something like "The best defense against nationwide destruction remains good old-fashioned deterrence." If
he has written any useful regarding deterrence of those seeking to take out a city or two(about which he quite rightly frets)I've not read it or have inconviently forgot about it.
From time to time I exult in reminding myself that I made sensible, common-sense(albeit "locked out" from the minds most or all widely read commentators) observations and reccommendations about deterring this in posts made well *before* 9/11. (Sigh, not having taken the common-sense precaution of backing up the hard drive, I have no proof of this, but who knows? maybe others have):
One still reads the staggeringly stupid argument that "suicide bombers" cannot be deterred because they anticipate the loss of their own lives in their attacks. It is reasonable to suppose that those making suicidal attacks make them if, and only if, they believe that they are likely to inflict a disproportionate injury upon their enemies. That is, the damage that they inflict will probably be greater than any harm that may come to those about whom they care about. (As to the expectations of rewards in the afterworld(and I haven't the foggiest promised by Shintoism), one suspects they have more doubts about that than the earthly outcomes and, in any event, probably believe that the otherworldy goodies will be forthcoming because the Big Guy approves of the likely gains and losses)I wrote sumthin' high-falutin about the necessity of a very public policy of launching a massive nuclear strike against Moslems "from the Pillars of Hercules to Jakarta" in response to any use of nuclear weapons against by suicice bombers or *suicide states.* And argued that the leader of some Islamic state might decide that the annihilation of virtually his entire population would not be too great a price to pay for nuking an American city or small number of cities. And sho' 'nuff, some time later, 'long comes a former president of Iran, Rafsanjani, agitating for nuclear attack on Israel and deeming the cost of some 100 million dead Mohammadans an acceptable price for the total destruction of the lil' satan. Would a suicide bomber or suicide state use nukes if they/it believed that their actions would likely result in the destruction of all Islam?
Among other arguments made by moi, albeit with less certitude was that terrorists have *not* wanted a serious war between the West and Islam. Rather, they have believed that the West, which has been pilloried by Osama for the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, would *not* use its WMDs against Islam. (While I am in sympathy with our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is at least arguable that those actions have not proven Bin Laden wrong and that *much* more needs to be done to deter terrorists.-liberation, democracy, freedom etc. while despised by Islamists, offer comforts even to Islamists and may not inspire the terror to deter them or the will of sane Moslems to risk their lives to turn the bastards in)
I do have some memories which I won't bother to confirm at the moment that the Derbinator dismisses some strategies primarily because the electorate wouldn't approve of them and admitted something to effect that our progeny might thank us if we loosed our nukes now, but am uncertain as whether even he is able to think rationally on the above subject. If he has decided that the nation or NRO is not ready for rational thought in this matter, he's not likely, of course, to tell us.
I wuz' writing something along the lines of the above for the "Real Blunders" post of several days ago. It may be that Really Big Blunders are deemed to have occured because of reasons that are difficult to discern or to face at the time the blunders are made, but seem easy to think about at some point in time after said blunders are made. It may be that a Great Big Hairy Blunder has been made by failing to issue a "we'll nuke *all: yer Kabba-kissin' asses if *we* are nuked-no matter if we have no evidence from whence it cometh-think of it like "strict liability," Omar" proclamation to the world. We *did* have something like this with respect to any use of nuclear weapons by us that probably originated in some way from the U.S.S.R. -Oh, it was by a "rogue commander"? Tough titties, Ivan. Shoulda' been more careful with your nukes."
There may be something in all of us(most assuredly including Yours Truly) that savors the thought that one is a sort of lone hero gifted with the ability or courage to think about the unthinkable. This coexists uneasily with the opinion that those thoughts are, in fact, shared by great numbers of one's fellow yomen citizens. JD may have alluded to something along those lines by noting that a lot of his readers favored the use of nukes.
Something like that applies to JD's comparison of himself with some lone and lonely little old lady who had some rare expertise in matters Cambodian. Even someone as relatively unintelligent and unread as Yours Truly had a wearied sense of been there-done that, deja voodoo economics all over again regarding ridiculous myths about the economic effects of immigration. But again, given the opinions expressed to pollsters for decades regarding immigration, and for that matter, JD's prediction that an articulate, well-financed third party candidate might garner at buttload of votes on the issue of the boatloads of furriners, these feelings hardly make one unique. -obviously I understand the feeling-and just hope that this love of country(miscast as hate of the other)dare speak its name- from the highest offices and platforms.(The title of one of the previous aborted posts, "10 Years of Delusions of Solitude"(copped from a Castro loving commie's book) refers to the above, and yeah, it's a little er,(again) lame.
Getting late and gotta' work in the Derb-supplied Islamic epithet, "Worse than a Mongol." Tonight the History Channel supplied an historical tidbit with which I was not familiar. On June 22, 1942 Soviet archaeologists dug up the tomb of Tamerlane[a.k.a. Timur the Lame-a triple threat guy: he was a Mongol, and a Moslem and would today be able to bring ADA lawsuits(see NRO article on ADA-boiling mad here)-and was also the captor of Bajazet I]. It may have been undisturbed for centuries because of a curse reportedly made while "The Iron Limper" lay dying. A Googled source writes: "On June 22, 1941, Soviet archaeologists working in the Samarkand crypt opened the sarcophagus to study the body and found the inscription: Whoever opens this will be defeated by an enemy more fearsome than I.' Hours later, Hitler invaded Russia. Five weeks after the great Emir was reinterred in 1942, the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad."

* A (very)little attempt at Yoknapatawpha humor.