Careful What You Wish For...

The Bush Admin has created a clear world view that “rogue nations” that sponsor terrorists must not develop Weapons of Mass Destruction, on pain of destruction. Presumably they feel that by invading Iraq they have (or will eventually have) set the example which will persuade all such nations into eliminating all WMD or development programs.

Really? Put yourself in the place of the guy in charge of a third world nation surrounded by dangerous, well-armed neighbors, and on the pointy end of US saber-rattling. Assume for arguments sake that, unlike Administration portrayals, you are reasonably rational, and while you may have some really nasty playmates, you also do not want to visit Armageddon upon either yourself, your Regime, or your Nation. In fact, let’s go all the way and assume you are a true patriot, and will do whatever it takes to protect your country from invasion a la Iraq. What are the lessons you’ve learned from the Bush policies so far?

I think it’s pretty obvious that if you do not have even a plausible threat of WMD, you are stuck and will need to play ball with the US (like most Middle-East kingdoms/dictatorships, Libya in particular), or be crushed (Iraq, Taliban Afghanistan). It’s pretty clear that you don’t want to bluff if everybody knows you are bluffing (hello Saddam!). Of course there IS the “Crazy as a Dog” gambit – be such an utterly violent, chaotic mess that nobody wants anything to do with you (Somalia in the ‘90’s, Sudan in the ‘00’s). But that option violates our initial assumptions, so we’ll let that one go.

Lesson #1: If ya don’t got it, and can’t get it: play ball or foam at the mouth.

What if you do have WMD working and complete with long-range delivery systems? Pakistan tested a bomb (maybe their only one…) and by doing so made it pretty darn clear to both India AND the US that there was no point in fucking with them – despite their blatant and prolific support of both the Kashmiri terrorists (of concern to India), the Taliban (of concern to you-know-who), and North Korea (selling nukes to NK – how stupid is THAT?!). But what is anybody going to do? Invade? Whups, there goes Delhi… Nope – India negotiated a cease-fire and we make them our ally. I guess North Korea saw that and thought they could pull off the same trick (and maybe get those darn heating oil shipments re-started), but that didn’t work. But they did get everybody’s attention, and now everybody is convinced NK has nukes and will use them. I guess you could say that they are using both the “WMD” AND the “Crazy Like a Dog” gambits.

Lesson #2: If ya got it, flaunt it. At best you join the Nuclear Club, and become pals with the big dogs – a Player at last. At worst, you’ll be a pariah. In any case, they leave you alone. Which is, of course, all that you really wanted anyway.

What if you have WMD programs, but nothing you can use yet? Well let’s think this one through… this is the most important case, and has real implications on the ground today… The most important fact to consider is that Iraq changed everything. Thanks to that dumb-ass Saddam trying to bluff his way out (violating Lesson #1), the US is now completely focused on, and tied up in, Iraq. So tied up, in fact, that the US realistically can’t pull another Iraq for another couple of years, although they certainly can (or could get someone else to) execute some nasty air-strikes. So what would you do? I believe you would do this:
1) Drive my WMD programs as hard as possible. The sooner I have these, the sooner I am safe from invasion. Lesson #3 taken to heart.
2) Officially, have nothing to do with Iraq. Unofficially, do everything possible to keep the yanks busy in Iraq. Whip up the martyr’s brigades, saturate the airwaves with US “atrocities”, send fighters, weapons, money, whatever it takes to keep Iraq in flames (all in secret, of course, and it’ll help to regularly decry this or that atrocity on either side, just to keep everybody guessing). How many of you are old enough to remember the phrase “proxy war”?
3) Same applies for Palestine, although here a real effort at peace will work just as well. Whatever it takes to keep the Israeli’s tied up at home – since they, for all practical purposes, are just an arm of the US military. If the yanks don’t bomb your breeder reactor, they will.
4) Absolutely fawn all over the AEA, the UN and the EU countries. Those outfits are sooo bureaucratic, sooo slow moving, sooo desperate to not have to take any unpleasant action, that you can keep your programs going for decades before they get wise. Shit, if that moron Saddam could do it you can. And while the Americans may bitch and moan, they’ll be forced to let the Europeans take care of it, 'cause they have their hands full.

By the time Iraq and the AEA all gets sorted out, you’ll have already tested one or two nukes and that, as they say, is that.

Lesson #3: In public - Cozy up to the international bureaucrats. In private - fight the proxy war in Iraq and get those damn nukes as fast as you can.

The Bush neo-cons have wished for a new World Order. And now they have it. But it is not, unfortunately, democracy in the Islamic world; it’s a world where it is in the manifest self-interest of the enemies of the United States to simultaneously work against any possible success in Iraq (not that that flame needs any external fanning...) and to develop WMD, preferably nuclear, as fast as possible. Sun Tzu in his “Art of War” stated that you must always leave your enemy an escape; when people fight to the death they fight most fiercely. The Bush neo-cons left an escape path all right, and it even has an exit sign; except this exit sign glows blue.