The recent leaks and discussions about the Bush administration seriously considering the use of nuclear weapons in Iran is starting to make me wonder if we haven't been missing a critical aspect of the motivations behind the Iraq War.
One of the essential features of the neoconservative/Bush administration passion for preventive war is that the theory behind it grew directly from Cold War advocates of developing a capability for preventive nuclear war. The only place I've seen this discussed at length is by Andrew Bacevich in his 2005 book The New American Militarism. I saw Bacevich on the California swing of his book tour for it about a year ago. As he was signing a copy of the book for me, I mentioned that I was particularly impressed with the way he described the connection of the Bush Doctrine on preventive war with the nuclear-war theories of previous years.
He replied that I was the only person who that had even mentioned that part to him so far. Which really surprised me. The recent news makes me think even more that it's a neglected connection in the discussions of the Bush Doctrine.
Jonathan Schell of the Nation Institute touched on this last year in The Bomb and Karl Rove 07/28/06. His article is not as clear as his arguments usually are, probably because he was trying to explain a complicated issue in a limited space. But I think he was on to something: the Iraq War may have had more to do with nuclear weapons than we know. Not the nonexistent Iraqi ones. But with ours.
Schell talks about how the Valerie Plame case had specifically to do with the outing of Plame as a CIA operative in retaliation for her husband Joe Wilson's criticism of the Bush administration. Remember the memo that Colin Powell brought on to Air Force One in July 2003 that was much discussed a year ago because it talked about Plame's CIA role? Schell points out that "the bulk of the memo was devoted to rebutting the Niger uranium allegation", the famous tall tale that, in his words, "must be one of the most rebutted claims in history".
He uses this as a lead-in to placing the Iraq War in the context of American nuclear strategy. Of course, whatever the Bush's administration's real motivation for invading Iraq was, we now know beyond any remotely reasonable doubt that it wasn't because they seriously though Iraq had an immediately-threatening nuclear weapons program. But Schell sees a different nuclear connection:
Whatever else the scandal is, it is also an episode in the six-decade history of the nuclear age. In the wake of the cold war, many people imagined that nuclear danger had disappeared. A decade of utter neglect [of nonproliferation policy] followed. Then, in 1998, the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests launched the two countries on a nuclear arms race. Soon other countries, including North Korea and Iran, were knocking at the door of the nuclear club. But it wasn't until 9/11 that the neglected peril reared up again in the public mind - and returned to the center of policy. The fictional danger of an Iraqi bomb bursting in an American city was, of course, the chief justification for the war [a point which the administation and war fans have been trying hard for years now to make us forget!], but it was more than that. It was the linchpin of the broader policy of preventive military strikes - necessary, the President said, to forestall the hostile states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. In his words, "as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed." (my emphasis)
But it's entirely possible, even very likely, that characters like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and Richard Perle were especially interested, not just in conventional preventive war, but in their Curtis LeMay/Dr. Strangelove dreams of finally making nuclear weapons usuable in wars again - even against enemies that do not possess them.
Schell continues:
At the root of the policy was a radical reconception of the way to stop proliferation. Hitherto, the policy had been to address it by negotiation and disarmament treaties. Now it was to be addressed by military force. The decade of neglect had led to the most severe collision of nuclear policy with nuclear reality since the Cuban missile crisis. The Iraq War was the result, though not the only one. While the U.S. military was looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, where there were none, it was in effect ignoring them in North Korea, which reportedly was either acquiring or expanding a nuclear arsenal, and in Iran, which was pressing forward down the nuclear path. It's worth recalling that the Vietnam War, too, was in part the product of misguided nuclear strategy. Policy-makers, well aware that they could not win a nuclear "general war" with the Soviet Union in the Central European theater, hoped instead to win a "limited war" with conventional arms on the "periphery." When it went wrong, the consequence was the Watergate crisis, born directly of Nixon's fury at antiwar protesters. (my emphasis)
That passage seems to indicate that Schell is willing to believe that there was some seriousness to the administration's claim that they were worried about nuclear proliferation. I'm not sure if that's quite what he meant to imply.
But the connection he draws to nuclear weapons policy is important. The first-strike advocates, those who wanted to make nukes usuable in war again as "tactical" weapons as well as "strategic" ones, also opposed any kind of arms-control treaties that in any way restrained the United States in its unilateral choices about our nuclear program. The idea behind the first-strike strategy was that the US should make the maximum use of our technological advantages by, to use plain language, pushing the nuclear arms race forward rather than trying to restrain it. To this particular branch of our "nuclear Jesuits", as John Kenneth Galbraith memorably called them, the greatest security for the US was in the overwhelming superiority of our own nukes, not in promoting international nuclear disarmament.
Understood in that context, his conclusion makes sense to me as a way of understanding the Iraq War and its spinoffs like the Plame leak scandal as relating directly to the doctrine of preventive nuclear war:
That chain of reasoning died with the cold war, but nuclear danger lived on to produce new and possibly more dangerous illusions. The worst is that the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their associated technology and know-how can be stopped, or prevented in advance, by arms. Once that conclusion was accepted, mere hints of danger, wisps of fact and speculations became actionable, bomb-able. But if there is one thing in this world that cannot be bombed out of existence, it is an illusion. And illusions, when rigidly defended, breed encounters with the law. Thus did a mistaken revolution in nuclear policy, proceeding under the guise of the "war on terror," produce the lies that produced the war that produced the whistleblowing that produced the smears that produced the blown cover that produced the cover-up that produced the legal investigation that produced the political and legal crisis that now swirls around Karl Rove. (my emphasis)
In the short run, this becomes even more reason to worry that the Bush administration, having established the precedent for preventive war in Iraq, might be eager to establish the precedent of using tactical nuclear weapons in a preventive war against Iran.
But Schell is right about the larger policy. It's based on an illusion of perfect security based on invincible military power. And no amount of conquest, no number of successes in taking out this or that threatening facility, can ever get us to that goal. Because it's a illusion, like a desert oasis that always recedes out of reach whenever you seem to be getting close.
