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Ideas are bulletproof
Apr. 12th, 2006 09:17 amIf you read just one thing today, make it this from Billmon on the prospect of yet another pre-emptive war, this time with Iran:
I've been trying to picture what the world might look like the day after a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran, but I'm essentially drawing a blank. There simply isn't a precedent for the world's dominant superpower turning into a rogue state – much less a rogue state willing to wage nuclear war against potential, even hypothetical, security threats. At that point, we’d truly be through the looking glass.
[...]
...the current hegemony of American influence and ideas (backed by overwhelming military force) would be replaced by an overt dictatorship based – more or less explicitly – on fear of nuclear annihilation. U.S. foreign policy would become nothing more than a variation on the ancient Roman warning: For every one of our dead; 100 of yours. Never again would American rulers (or their foreign counterparts) be able to hide behind the comfortable fiction that the United States is just primus inter pares – first among equals. A country that nukes other countries merely on the suspicion that they may pose a future security threat isn't the equal of anybody. America would stand completely alone: hated by many, feared by all, admired only by the world’s other tyrants. To call that a watershed event seems a ridiculous understatement.
[...]
Why should anyone or anything change? When a culture is as historically clueless and morally desensitized as this one appears to be, I don’t think it’s absurd to suppose that even an enormous war crime – the worst imaginable, short of outright genocide – could get lost in the endless babble of the talking heads. When everything is just a matter of opinion, anything – literally anything – can be justified. It’s only a matter of framing things so people can believe what they want to believe.
[...]
The bottom line is that most of the world’s powers – and nearly all of its weak countries – have a vested interest in sucking up to the hegemon, or at least in not antagonizing it. And this would still be true even if the hegemon turns out to be a full-fledged nuclear war criminal. If the realists are correct (and their batting average has been pretty high lately) neither morality nor democracy are likely to change that fact. States run by religious lunatics and self-appointed messiahs are still the exception, not the rule, in the global cockpit. Most states are as single-minded and relentless in the pursuit of their interests as your average Renaissance pope – like sharks, in other words, although not as warm and cuddly.
There's a lot more there to read and digest, but it got me to thinking. What will I do if this comes to pass? Can I settle this time for going to anti-war marches, blogging, and making donations to politicians and groups working to stop this kind of madness? Or would I be required to take some further steps, get into politics myself, pack my bags and head north of the border...or something more. I don't know that I can answer that question yet, and it terrifies me that I have to face it at all, but if America goes through with these threats, if we cross that line into genocide and hegemony, what will my response be? And you, what will you do?
I've been trying to picture what the world might look like the day after a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran, but I'm essentially drawing a blank. There simply isn't a precedent for the world's dominant superpower turning into a rogue state – much less a rogue state willing to wage nuclear war against potential, even hypothetical, security threats. At that point, we’d truly be through the looking glass.
[...]
...the current hegemony of American influence and ideas (backed by overwhelming military force) would be replaced by an overt dictatorship based – more or less explicitly – on fear of nuclear annihilation. U.S. foreign policy would become nothing more than a variation on the ancient Roman warning: For every one of our dead; 100 of yours. Never again would American rulers (or their foreign counterparts) be able to hide behind the comfortable fiction that the United States is just primus inter pares – first among equals. A country that nukes other countries merely on the suspicion that they may pose a future security threat isn't the equal of anybody. America would stand completely alone: hated by many, feared by all, admired only by the world’s other tyrants. To call that a watershed event seems a ridiculous understatement.
[...]
Why should anyone or anything change? When a culture is as historically clueless and morally desensitized as this one appears to be, I don’t think it’s absurd to suppose that even an enormous war crime – the worst imaginable, short of outright genocide – could get lost in the endless babble of the talking heads. When everything is just a matter of opinion, anything – literally anything – can be justified. It’s only a matter of framing things so people can believe what they want to believe.
[...]
The bottom line is that most of the world’s powers – and nearly all of its weak countries – have a vested interest in sucking up to the hegemon, or at least in not antagonizing it. And this would still be true even if the hegemon turns out to be a full-fledged nuclear war criminal. If the realists are correct (and their batting average has been pretty high lately) neither morality nor democracy are likely to change that fact. States run by religious lunatics and self-appointed messiahs are still the exception, not the rule, in the global cockpit. Most states are as single-minded and relentless in the pursuit of their interests as your average Renaissance pope – like sharks, in other words, although not as warm and cuddly.
There's a lot more there to read and digest, but it got me to thinking. What will I do if this comes to pass? Can I settle this time for going to anti-war marches, blogging, and making donations to politicians and groups working to stop this kind of madness? Or would I be required to take some further steps, get into politics myself, pack my bags and head north of the border...or something more. I don't know that I can answer that question yet, and it terrifies me that I have to face it at all, but if America goes through with these threats, if we cross that line into genocide and hegemony, what will my response be? And you, what will you do?
