Stardate 20020803.1159

(On Screen): Erik writes to me and asks that I look at a post on Kuro5hin (which, I'm told, is pronounced the same as the word corrosion). He has attempted to argue against it but has had the worst of it. It's hardly surprising, because Erik has been conned.

The post by "pyramid termite" begins as follows:

Is this the Bush Doctrine?

That any country in the world whose policies, leadership, or actions we dislike will not be allowed to possess nuclear, chemical or biological weapons? That any such country doing so will be attacked and have its government overthrown by us? Leaving aside the obviously impossible cases of India, Pakistan and China is this a doctrine we have the will and the ability to enforce? And will the rest of the world be willing to go along with us on it?

The entire discussion could have ended quite simply by answering the first question: No, this is not the Bush Doctrine.

What it is, presented as a series of rhetorical questions, is a Strawman. The essence of a strawman argument is to caricature and distort the position of your opponent and present it in such a way that any reasonable person can't agree with it, in hopes that your opponent or his supporters will take your statement of his position as correct and attempt to defend it anyway. By so doing, you force them onto ground most advantageous for you.

Termite demonstrates facility with rhetorical tricks by presenting his strawman as questions instead of statements; by so doing he can't actually be blamed for statements since he made no statements.

Unfortunately, Erik fell for the gambit and did accept and attempt to defend the strawman position, and thus Termite was able to vanquish him in the resulting debate.

In actuality, the simple answer to Termite is no. No, this is not the Bush Doctrine. No, we aren't going to attack anyone we happen to dislike. Since we don't intend to do these things, no it won't present a problem with ability and will. SInce we don't intend to do these things, then no, the question of what the rest of the world is willing to go along with is moot. No. No. No.

The argument would be more useful (to everyone except Termite) if it were based on the actual Bush doctrine. For Termite that would be disaster, but it will take some explaining to show why. Termite had to resort to a strawman because he can't defend his true position once it is clearly stated.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, many people around the world woke up to the fact that there was no longer any military power which counterbalanced that of the US. In economics there's a term called "discretionary income" which refers to the amount of money you (or a corporation or a government) has whose spending is not preallocated and automatic. I have to pay my rent each month because if I don't, I'll be evicted. I have to pay my utility bills, or my utilities will be shut off. But I also have other money which I can use for luxuries, or impulse buys, or to acquire things I want but don't really need, like a new computer with dual P4's when a much smaller and slower one would probably have served adequately. To a great extent, one's perception of personal wealth is a function not of total income but of discretionary income. If one makes a lot but is forced to spend it all automatically, one doesn't feel wealthy.

One way to increase discretionary income is to increase total income. But another way is to reduce the load of non-discretionary payments each month.

During the Cold War, it was always recognized that the US was militarily very powerful, but the majority of its military might was preassigned to matching the power of the USSR, so what we might call the discretionary military might of the US was not viewed as being extreme. But with the end of the Cold War, a great deal of American military power was freed from those assignments, and the amount of discretionary military might increased quite dramatically.

Over the course of the last ten years, this has caused a lot of concern around the world. The US was a sleeping giant. Analyses have shown that the proportional military might of the US relative to the rest of the world is unprecedented in history, and the only saving grace was that the US didn't seem to be interested in using it.

The September attack changed all that, and the sleeping giant has awakened and seems willing to use its power. No other military power is capable of preventing it, by threat or direct opposition, and many fear just what we might do. They hope to prevent it, and the only way they can do that is to convince us to not exercise our capabilities.

It has to be understood that this operates on two levels, nuke and non-nuke. There are several nations who have the ability to threaten us with nuclear weapons, but doing so would be a suicide pact. Any nuclear attack on us would draw a full-scale nuclear response from us, and no nation on earth is capable of surviving the onslaught of even a single Trident sub, let alone all the other weapons we have. For all intents and purposes, the situation would have to be extremely dire for any of the established nuclear powers to actually use a nuclear threat against us to try to make us back down.

Short of that, no-one has the conventional ability to resist us. Some nations are capable of defending themselves (notably China) but the majority of nations are not even capable of defending against a conventional attack by us should we choose to launch one against them.

That was true during the 1990's, too, and what held us in check was first, the traditional American isolationism and second, an apparent responsiveness of the US to world criticism (which is often described by others as a willingness of the US to be a "good citizen").

After September 11, both of those appear to be dead.

If the US decides to go out and start exercising direct military power around the world to further its own interests, there is no power that can stop it. The only thing that restrained it in the past was its own complacence, and its own unwillingness to fight. What you've been seeing is a concerted effort from many quarters both inside and outside the US to make us return to that state of benign neglect of world problems, so that we will again be restrained by silk ropes of our own making. It hasn't been working.

It has manifested in a large number of ways. You see calls for "multilateralism", for instance. NATO invoked Article V of the NATO charter which supposedly made this a war for everyone. But perversely, they then tried to use that to mean that the US would have to consult with other NATO members before making any commitment to battle. They hoped to get the US to voluntarily accept a European veto; the US didn't fall for it. European rhetoric in this vein has largely died down (though not totally) as they have come to realize that it is ineffectual.

Another approach has been quite perverse. There was the oft-cited and thoroughly-debunked Herrold study, which purported to show that the US had killed more civilians in Afghanistan than we had ourselves lost in the September attack. Others, most notably Ted Rall, have used even higher estimates of Afghan casualties.

The one thing they all have in common is that they all are larger than the number of dead in New York and Washington. (Indeed, when the estimate of dead in the US dropped from the range of 5,000 to about 3,000, Herrold revised his estimate down to a number in the mid-3000's, which remained higher.) It is critically important for them to prove to us that we killed more than died, because they're trying to make the argument that the war is, or should now be, over. They hit us, we hit them back harder; that's it, now go back to sleep.

Another manifestation of this perverse approach (which I will explain in a moment) has been claims from certain quarters that the US cannot attack Iraq unless it can prove that Iraq was directly involved in last September's bombing.

All of these (and much else, besides) are trying to establish that the US only goes to war out of a sense of revenge and that this is the only time the US should go to war. But they're not directly making that claim; they're assuming it a priori and hoping that those who advocate war will accept that without argument. I don't.

And neither does Bush. That's what the Bush Doctrine actually says; more on that later.

What they're saying, in essence, is that the US can only attack someone if the other attacks the US first. The US must remain passive, and must let the first blow fall. Only when that has happened may the US mobilize its forces and crush those responsible for the attack.

Their reason for this is if the US accepts this principle, it will bind our military power and make it no threat to anyone in the world. It's one way of returning to the situation in the 1990's when the US was powerful but immobile.

Given that they are weak and we are strong, it's understandable that they'd like us to accept rules which make it impossible for us to use our power against them. But there's also a more general argument in favor of this, because much of American foreign policy actually has been based on that principle.

Another way of describing that is to call it a policy of deterrence, and it's the backbone of our nuclear doctrine. We won't use nuclear weapons first, but if anyone else uses them we will use them ourselves. (American doctrine is a bit more generalized than that; we'll also use them to defend US territory and that of certain allies against a major attack, and we consider any use of chemical or biological weapons to be equivalent to nukes and we reserve the right to use nukes in response to them.)

The point of this is to present any potential adversary with the certainty of horrific consequences to any preemptive attack of that kind against the US. If that opponent has a certain mind-set, then it will prevent them from making any attack against us; and with the USSR and China, it did work. The leaders of those nations do indeed have the correct mindset (they are "rational players").

But 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.

The technical term for this is "spoiling attack" although it can manifest as preemptive war. One of the most famous examples of this was the Six Day War in 1967 between Israel and a coalition made up of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Those three nations were mobilizing and preparing for a major coordinated assault on Israel, with the full intent of destroying that nation and returning it to Arab rule. Israel knew about the preparations (because of superb espionage and other means of intelligence gathering).

We generally think of Israel as the underdog in that war, which is true. We (at the time) celebrated their victory because of its brilliance. Less well known, then and now, was that Israel attacked first. In modern high-tech war, preparation is everything and timing is critical. Israel knew that the Arab nations intended to attack it, but Israel was able to prepare its own forces earlier, and begin the war before the Arabs were ready, and caught them by surprise.

And the war was essentially won in the first two hours, by a surprise attack by the Israeli Air Force which crippled the Egyptian Air Force. Because of that, Israel rapidly attained air supremacy over the Sinai, and was able to force the Egyptian army to retreat all the way to the Suez Canal. It then pushed Jordan out of the West Bank, and Syria out of the Golan Heights. The Arabs then asked for a ceasefire before Israeli tanks rolled into Cairo and Damascus.

Israel won, but only because it attacked first. If it had waited and let the Arabs attack when they were ready, Israel would no longer exist.

Deterrence is useful, but it isn't universally applicable. Attempting to use deterrence where it is not appropriate is a suicide pact; it gives your determined enemy carte blanche to try to make his first blow as devastating as possible in hopes of preventing you from responding at all. Or it gives your enemy the ability to launch his blow when he doesn't care what you do in response.

A few days ago, in LA, a monstrous man kidnapped two high school girls at gunpoint and stole a car from one of their boy friends. He raped them, and almost certainly intended to kill them. It turns out that at one point the girls managed to free themselves while he was asleep, and actually attacked him. One of them took one of his knives and stabbed him in the throat. The other hit him in the face with a whiskey bottle. Then they shoved him out of the car, and hoped he'd leave. What he actually did was to draw a gun, and recapture them.

They had the right idea but they didn't go far enough. The one who stabbed him in the throat should have stabbed him in the eye. The one with the bottle should have kept hitting him until he stopped breathing. It hadn't yet sunk in to these two girls that they were in a kill-or-be-killed situation, and they were only saved by the fortuitous arrival of police officers, who understood the gravity of the situation and shot him seventeen times, killing him. (Good riddance.) The girls actually said that they intended to kill him, but when they had the opportunity they didn't carry through, and it damned near cost them their own lives.

When you have a good reason to suspect that someone means to seriously harm you, there is no honor in letting the blow fall. It is merely stupidity. But that's what the world is demanding that the US do, because they are trying to bind our hands with moral persuasion.

The Bush Doctrine rejects that principle. What Bush said was that if we had reason to believe that some other nation was directly plotting to attack us, or directly aiding a rogue group which intended to do so, then the US would feel itself justified in preemptively attacking them in order to prevent attacks against us.

It has to be understood that this wasn't a promise. He didn't say that we'd automatically do so, only that we refused to permit ourselves to be prevented from doing so. There are ways and means, and in some cases non-military forms of response may be more effective. What he refused to accept was that those non-military means would be the only ones the US would ever use; he stated that sometimes we might decide to attack, instead.

And that only bears a passing resemblance to the caricature of it presented by Termite. As he continues his post, Termite leaves the mode of rhetorical questions and begins to make actual statements in his second paragraph.

It's my opinion that we are overplaying our hand on Iraq. An invasion could have unforeseen consequences that could enormously complicate the world. The American people will only be for this war if it's relatively easy like the Gulf War was. If it's not, watch out. Worst of all, it sets a precedent - that we will interfere with any other hostile governments who try to develop such weapons, anywhere. Eventually, we will attempt too much and the world will see that our power has all too human limitations.

A war with Iraq is a bad idea, especially with other dangers present in the world. Just what would we do, being tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan already, if North Korea got desperate and invaded South Korea?

An invasion could have unforeseen consequences that could enormously complicate the world. This amounts to an argument that "better the devil we know than the one we don't." Much of the argument from around the world against an American attack against Iraq echoes this point, which is that an American attack there could destabilize the region, resulting in dramatic political effects radiating out. It's surely what King Abdullah most fears; he's afraid that it could lead to a Jordanian revolution (against him!). The governments of Saudi Arab