The second Gulf War is proceeding well. Thousands of Iraqi troops have surrendered, and many of the more elite have been destroyed. As American and British ground forces approach Baghdad, the fall of Saddam Hussein appears imminent.
Saddam, however, is not one to simply be defeated. Fully recognizing the personal ramifications of the “regime change” promoted so publicly by the Bush administration, Saddam decides he would much rather be a martyr than a Milosevic. Soon, U.S. and Israeli radar pick up volleys of incoming Scud missiles, and eyewitnesses report low-flying drones making their way across the desert.
Within hours, it is clear that Saddam has attacked with chemical, and perhaps even biological, weapons of mass destruction.
The Bush administration rationale for aggressively confronting the Iraqi dictator has so far been premised largely on vague assumptions made from limited information: Saddam has had the opportunity and the incentive to restart his weapons projects, there has been recent construction at “dual-use” civilian/military sites, weapons inspectors have been blocked for years. Something must be up, the public line goes, and we should assume the worst.
Let us therefore make a further assumption: Faced with the defeat the Bush administration has promised him, Saddam does in fact deploy the weapons of mass destruction we assume that he has. (This is not a great leap. History testifies to Saddam’s willingness to butcher and gas, and many suggest that the Iraqi leader did not use chemical warfare 11 years ago only because he understood that it would have sealed his fate as a dead man.)
So how do we respond? Blow up some dams? Deploy some nukes? In other words, kill civilians? This, after all, has been the cornerstone of our strategic defense policy since the middle of the last century: No country will attack us, because they would be quickly and utterly annihilated by our massive retaliation.
Of course, a couple days shy of a year ago, this belief in the supremacy of deterrence was shattered. Suddenly, we found we could not retaliate against a group that lacked geography. Indeed, commentaries from that time practically pine for a Qadhafi: If only there were a sinister country at fault, the rationale seemed to go, everything would be so simple. Then we could retaliate. Baghdad or Tehran could simply disappear from the map by morning.
I remember seeing television images of joyous mobs celebrating the East Coast carnage. Mow them down, I thought. It would be the retaliation that we could not otherwise deliver.
Retaliation is nothing more than a euphemism for revenge, a sort of calculated spontaneity nested in the cold logic of the Cold War. Our missile silo technicians did not even know their potential targets–they were simply given codes. On instruction, they were to launch their missiles–perhaps toward Siberia, perhaps toward Prague–and then hunker down in continued nescience until they could eventually re-emerge into a world destroyed.
As reality set in after Sept. 11, it became clear to most Americans that there could be no justification for the retaliatory slaughter of thousands, and the subsequent campaign in Afghanistan was pursued–both concretely and rhetorically–with great concern for minimizing if not mitigating suffering. Similarly, no solid argument could now be made for flattening Baghdad, with its citizenry resigned to repression under a single tyrant.
Indeed, reason seems incompatible even with killing thousands of Iraqi troops, young men drafted to fight, insulated from Western notions of freedom and unable to exercise meaningful control over their own fate. Again assuming that Saddam uses weapons of mass destruction, would these young men become the targets of our uninhibited retaliation?
It would be, as Gen. Powell himself remarked 11 years ago, un-American.
Perhaps we admit that Saddam has called our country’s bluff. Old-fashioned deterrence, after all, requires an enemy unwilling to die and a nation willing to kill. Sept. 11 defied the former, and we have until now largely rejected the latter insofar as whole civilian populations are concerned.
But if old-fashioned deterrence is, well, old-fashioned, what replaces it? The ability to inflict the greatest possible damage over the greatest possible area may make for good bragging rights, but we are not a country that takes pleasure in parading our warheads down Pennsylvania Avenue. Even to the extent that we still implicitly threaten retaliation, the vagueness over what that entails and how it might be delivered seems just as rooted in our own uncertainty as it does in our defense strategy.
Over a hundred years ago, Teddy Roosevelt popularized the West African proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Today, when we represent the superlative in a world of big sticks (and loud voices), we may be faced with a frightening question unanswered since the end of the Cold War: What does it mean to start swinging?
Bryant Walker Smith (bsmith@badgerherald.com) is a senior majoring in civil engineering.
