The War

Steve Den Beste has written a couple of posts recently discussing things like the doctrine of MAD, and the fact that war in Iraq was the least bad option amongst a lot of bad alternatives.  Here’s a quote from a little further back that considers some possible scenarios regarding North Korea:

NK could detonate a nuke. In that case, the Bush administration would have to publicly and formally renew a basic tenet of Cold War deterrence policy: any nuclear blackmail will be treated as if a nuke had actually been used, and the response to any such threat will be maximal.

During the Cold War, nuclear blackmail was one of the dangers. What would we do if the Hotline phone rang and the voice in the handset said, "Pull your forces out of Germany or we’ll nuke Pittsburgh"? The strategists wrestled with that, and ultimately concluded that only deterrence could prevent such a thing. Thus it became American doctrine that if we received such a phone call, then the President would "push the button" (or at least consider doing so). Understand that I don’t mean that it would happen ten seconds after hearing such a thing; there’d be time for diplomacy, and an attempt to deal with the situation via lesser means. But in the final resort, if we really faced such a demand, then it was publicly stated that American doctrine was to launch every nuke we had. No "proportional response", no city-trading-duel, no waiting to see if Pittsburgh really did get vaporized before launching. It was important that this be public because like any deterrent its real purpose was to make sure that the situation didn’t arise at all. Since the Soviet leadership knew that was American doctrine, they couldn’t be at all sure that we wouldn’t really do it if they made that phone call, and it never happened.

The US and the Muslim extremist terrorists are oppositely arrayed with regards to the capabilities/intentions balance. America has the capability but not the intention to quickly obliterate the majority of the Muslim world.  The Muslim extremists have the intentions but not the capability to bring an end to America.  But it’s only a matter of time until they acquire weapons that will allow them destroy large parts of our nation and kill massive amounts of our people.

There is no question that our destruction is their goal; it’s their publicly stated doctrine that we are the Great Satan and that we (together with Israel, of course) are the cause of all their problems; more than that, it’s their ultimate purpose from Allah to destroy us infidels.  September 11 was only the worst of a slew of Muslim terrorist attacks against us and our interests abroad.

So our choices are few and simple: kill them, let them kill us, or convince them that they shouldn’t kill us.  We’ve chosen door number 3, because although it’s difficult, dangerous, and costly, destabilizing and reforming the Arab world is a better alternative than killing them all, or letting them kill us.

Anyway, as Den Beste has been expounding upon these various paths and outcomes, some people have been getting their panties in a bunch:

...sitting in my apartment in Tehran, I can’t help but oscillate between despondency and amusement these days.  Do you not see what’s happening to you folks out in the yonder lands?  Debating "final solution" are we?  Mass murder in a cool, collected way?  Killing over a billion, or is it perhaps just a few hundred million?  Nuking a city or two, or is it only just the vicinity of a large metropolitan area?  Issuing ultimatums to the world to take sides between mass murderers in ties or those with rags on their heads?  Even here where passions run high and surrounded as we are by a bunch of religious bigots, I don’t hear discussions framed quite that way.

He is apparently one of the many people who either don’t understand, or aren’t willing to face the reality of this war.  (And it’s a shame; he sounds like one of the more sensible ones.)  Here’s part of Den Beste’s response, most of which should be painfully obvious to people who’ve been paying attention to the world for the past couple years:

One of the reasons I wrote about how I thought the US would act in case of a nuclear attack against us was to make clear why it was that we had to do everything we can, NOW, to make sure that doesn’t happen.

I know my nation. I know my people. We don’t want to destroy you all. But if you (I mean "Muslims") place us in a position where only you or us can survive, it’s going to be us, and you’ll all be dead. We can do that; we’ve had that capability for a very long time. We don’t want to, but we will if we must.
...
It’s not a question of my nation making a decision whether people will die. Islamic militants made that decision. America’s only decision now is who will die, and where and when. If we stand by idly and passively, then it will be Americans who die, whenever and wherever the Islamic extremists choose to kill them, probably in huge numbers.

We don’t consider that acceptable. That’s surrender. That’s not going to happen.

Instead, we’re attempting to take control of events, in hopes that we can minimize the total number of deaths caused by this war. That’s why we’ve embarked on the highly risky and unprecedented strategy we’re following. If we were only concerned with minimizing American casualties and if we didn’t care about anyone else, then every major Muslim city on the planet would have been vaporized by September 15, 2001, and the war would have ended in a week.

But we’re trying to minimize the total number of deaths, not just American deaths. In particular, we’re trying to minimize the number of Muslims who have to die. So we sent our young men into combat; we sacrificed some of our own in order to try to save Muslim lives -- because we think you are important, and we want you to keep living. Our men are sacrificing their lives for you in Tehran, because what we’re trying to do in Iraq seems to be the only way to keep the body count in this war from making WWII look small. Is it the act of a monstrous nation to sacrifice its own men to save the lives of people in hostile nations?

If Americans were truly the warmongers or Nazis or any of the other handy left-wing catch-phrases that seem to be in endless supply, we would not have chosen the path we’re on, so fraught with danger, risk of failure, and death of our own citizens as it is.  We possess means for complete destruction of our enemies which are much quicker and less costly than the ones we’re using now.  But we aren’t using them because we aren’t the bad guys here.