Stardate 20020806.1552

(Captain's log): I seem to be spending a lot of time the last few days writing here in response to letters people have sent me. Part of the reason is that some of them have brought up issues which I think are important. Kenneth writes:

In your post a few days ago, you discuss the Bush doctrine, deterrence, and the proper course of action with regard to Iraq. You point out, correctly, that when you're facing an opponent who wants to kill you and doesn't mind dying in the process, it won't work. Your threat of deterrence is meaningless; he expects to die and doesn't care. In that case, if you are pretty certain he does intend to attack you, the only way to prevent it is to attack him first."

But I don't see any support for the idea that Saddam Hussein falls into this category. He enjoys lots of personal wealth, power, and privilege, all of which would go up in (possibly radioactive) smoke if he were to attack the United States, directly or indirectly, and he knows it. He has consistently shown considerable reluctance to give those things up, and is completely uninterested in the religious ideas that have motivated the suicide attacks that have caused us such grief.

The fact that he proved willing to use poison gas on his Kurdish population proves nothing except the fact that he knew they were completely unable to retaliate. Willingness to attack your own population does not imply willingness to attack the United States.

The evidence seems to show that Saddam Hussein is at least as much of a rational actor as the Soviet leaders were. The Soviet leaders were notorious for slaughtering more of their own citizens than any regime in history, and yet showed no interest in launching a suicidal attack on the United States.

So, given our nuclear deterrence, I don't think that Saddam Hussein is particularly likely to attack us, and we would be better served by continuing to deter him rather than attack him outright.

His point is well taken and I should have dealt with it in the original article. Some of our enemies are willing to die, but I don't think Saddam is one of them. On the other hand, I also don't think our deterrent will work against him.

A deterrent fails either if your opponent doesn't care about it, or if he doesn't think you'll use it. There can be many reasons why he might think that, and he might be wrong. But if he misjudges the situation, attacks you and you do then use your deterrent, it may be satisfying but it didn't accomplish its mission of preventing the initial attack against you. It's something of a truism among those who serve on missile subs that they must at all times be ready to launch, but if they ever do then it means that their mission has failed. Their mission isn't to destroy an enemy, but to prevent an enemy from attacking us.

Any time a deterrent can't reasonably be expected to work, then you must be willing to use other means and sometimes a preemptive attack is the most effective. Sometimes it's the only answer.

Saddam is not suicidal. But he is arrogant, cruel, crafty, and totally contemptuous of us. He has underestimated us again and again. The policies of his government, and the way his government has tried to deal with us over the last 10 years have demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of what we are and what we're willing to do.

The current negotiations about the inspectors demonstrates this clearly.

Last September, in the wake of the attack against us, Bush made the Taliban what I referred to then as an "offer they can't accept". He demanded that the Taliban arrest bin Laden and turn him over to us unconditionally, and kick all traces of al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. As we all now know, this wasn't possible because by that point al Qaeda owned the Taliban and bin Laden was effectively the ruler of the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan. al Qaeda troops made up the core of the army which was fighting against the Northern Alliance. bin Laden's money helped keep things going.

We out here in the rest of the world didn't know these things, but I suspect that our government did. The Taliban were not able to comply with that demand. They tried making alternative offers, all of which were rejected. No, it's not acceptable for us to give our evidence to the Taliban for trial in an Afghan court. No, we won't accept a court in a neutral Muslim country, either. And so on.

I believe that Bush knew full well that this was something the Taliban could not do, but it was politically important to make it look on the surface as if there had been a way out short of war for the Taliban prior to an American attack.

By the same token, the current demand by the US and indirectly by the UN for the return of the weapons inspectors with unlimited and unfettered rights to search for and destroy WMDs and the equipment which produces them is a demand that I believe Iraq can't actually comply with.

I cannot prove what follows but I'm willing to bet money on it: since the inspectors were ejected, Iraq has been going full-bore on development of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. I believe that they have substantial stocks of nerve gas, probably have weaponized anthrax but I do not believe they have yet produced a nuclear weapon. Their excuse for ejecting the inspectors was that the WMDs had all been found, there were none left, and that it was time to end the process and remove the economic sanctions.

The reality is that the entire several-year process of weapons inspection was one big cat-and-mouse game with the Iraqis doing their best to hide what they had, but with the inspectors actually making some progress and finding things. Since the inspectors were ejected, the Iraqi line has been that they have none any more. I believe they are lying, and I believe that if true effective inspections were to begin again it would quickly become evident.

What's been going on in the political maneuvering is that the Iraqis are trying to arrange a situation where the sanctions against them are partially or fully lifted before inspections begin again, and that the inspections will take place under circumstances which make it possible for the Iraqi government to again play cat-and-mouse. Among other things that they tried to insist on was the idea of a limited period, more or less "If you can't find where we've hidden them in three years, you have to give up and pretend they don't exist." Oh, and they also want a promise ahead of time that the US will not attack if they let the inspectors back. (To which Powell responded that the point wasn't inspection, it was disarmament. I understood what he meant: there's a difference between ineffectual inspections and ones which really find and destroy Iraq's WMDs, and there's been no indication yet that Iraq was willing to actually cooperate with the inspectors.)

I do not think that this is the struggling of a desperate man, looking for some sort of compromise as was the case with the Taliban offers of various ways of having a meaningless show trial for bin Laden at which he'd be acquitted by a fixed court. I think that these proposals by the Iraqis are genuine, because I think they think we're stupid or gullible enough to agree to them. I think they actually believe that they can manipulate the situation so that the sanctions can be lifted and the threat of war removed without their actually having to give up their WMDs.

Their recent proposal for members of the US Congress to come, and to bring with them any experts they wish, and to have three weeks to look around, was an example of that. It's ludicrous on its face; no-one can find anything in three weeks. But that was the point; Iraq was willing to risk that because it would look as if they were open to inspections without actually being so.

The problem is two-fold: Saddam has some weapons of mass destruction and I believe he is actively working to acquire more of them, and also to acquire working nukes. Other nations have weapons like that but no intention of using them against us, which makes them at least tolerable (if uncomfortable). But I also believe he has the will to use them against us.

He would not do so directly, as a formal act of the Iraqi government. If nerve gas is released in NYC or if Miami is nuked, then any nation formally taking credit for it will unquestionably regret it, and Saddam is realistic enough to know it.

But if he thinks he can fool us, and deliver those weapons indirectly in such a way as to preserve plausible deniability, then I think he believes he can escape our response. In that case we have no deterrent. The way he'd do it is by leaking those weapons to a group like Hamas, or Hezbollah, or al Qaeda, or Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Berkeley, and let them take care of delivery, since they'd be quite happy to die during the process.

With respect to a nuke, let's be clear that there is no direct defense. There are ways that such a weapon can be delivered to an American city which are virtually certain of succeeding, and almost impossible to detect. (No, I'm not going to say what they are.) If someone out there has a bomb and truly decides to use it against us, one of our cities will go away. The idea that we'd be able to stop the attack is not credible; we cannot rely on defense to save ourselves. We'd try, but we would probably fail.

The best way to stop such an atttaqck is earlier in the chain. Once such weapons are in the hands of groups willing to make suicide attacks, our deterrent doesn't work against them. We have to stop the source of supply, and by far the most probable source of supply is Iraq.

These things are not certainties. There's no proof available to me. What I have is a strong suspicion that Saddam may think he can get away with giving weapons like that to other groups to use against us, if he can manage to do so in a fashion sufficiently surreptitious and indirect so that we can't directly prove that they came from him, even though we'd have a strong suspicion of it. In that case, he would think we'd be paralyzed and wouldn't respond. If an enemy knows you have a deterrent but doesn't think you'll use it, you have no deterrent.

That is the situation I think we have to preempt. And containment doesn't stop this, because smuggling is much too easy. Iraq has been smuggling thousands of tons of oil over the last few years; 500 kilos of nerve gas would be trivial. (The most likely smuggling route would be through Syria, and it's difficult to see how we could prevent it.)

If we contain him, then he's free to continue to work to develop more and better weapons (including, eventually, nukes), and he's free to give them to others to use against us. He might not, and if he tries he might not succeed, but the stakes are too high in my opinion to take the chance. The risk and consequences of inaction, of letting him have that opportunity, are higher than the risks associated with attacking.

I do not believe he can be assassinated, and I do not believe we can foment revolution or induce a coup. I think our only choices are containment and invasion, and I think containment is too risky, and only postpones the invasion. Because even if he is not willing to give those weapons to al Qaeda, what about Uday when he takes power? That man is supposed to be a raving maniac; no-one knows what he'll do.

Those weapons are also dangerous against us in a direct war, but the longer we wait to attack, the more and better weapons he'll have. It's already too late to take Saddam out without any risk of their use, but though there is a substantial risk of them being used against us now if we attack, the risk rises if we wait.

There's no question that an attack would be expensive (in both blood and money) and dangerous and that the results could be very chaotic. It's a lousy choice. It's just that all the others are worse.