Subject: two articles worth reading together
Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2001 16:07:33 +1300


The New York Times

December 29, 2001  Opinion

Missile Defense: The Untold Story

By BILL KELLER

In the nearly 40-year fight over building weapons to shoot down incoming
missiles, the proponents have generally fallen into two camps, the dreamers
and the schemers.

When the idea of missile defense had its most celebrated moment under
President Reagan, the dreamers - including the president and the renowned
nuclear scientist Edward Teller - seemed convinced that we could be made
invulnerable against nuclear weapons. The more cynical camp - including the
national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, and the military assistant to
the secretary of defense, Colin Powell - saw an impregnable defense as a
pipe dream, but also a useful bargaining chip. It wouldn't stop a nuclear
strike, but it would worry the Soviet military planners, and make it easier
to drive a favorable deal in arms control talks.

That time around, the schemers had it right. The impermeable superdome was a
technological fantasy, and one that could have bankrupted the national
treasury. Even if it had worked, it would have been dangerous, because it
would have encouraged the illusion that we could win a nuclear war. The
prospect of an American missile defense system did, however, help goad the
Soviets into mutual cuts in our nuclear arsenals.

Now, too, there are dreamers and schemers. The dreamers, possibly including
the president, embrace missile defense at face value, as something that will
make us safer in our beds. Such a system, they assert, will protect us
against a terrorist with a ballistic missile, an accidental launch from the
aging Russian arsenal, or a rogue state bent on demolishing an American
city. The public debate so far has been almost entirely about this dream of
missile defense, which - because it aims to stop a small flock of missiles
rather than Russia's thousands - is technologically more plausible than what
President Reagan had in mind.

The schemer agenda, on the other hand, is about nuclear strategy, a
forbidding subject framed in arcane and speculative language that tends to
scare off laymen. But let's see if we amateurs can get our heads around it.

The concept at the heart of nuclear strategy is deterrence, which means that
our ability to obliterate the enemy prevents him from doing something rash.
It is generally accepted that our nuclear strength deterred the Soviet Union
from raining nuclear warheads on America. But preventing Armageddon was not
the main purpose of our nuclear forces. The foremost purpose was to stop the
Soviet Union from sending its superior non-nuclear armies into Western
Europe. By deliberately leaving open the possibility that we would go
nuclear if Soviet tanks crossed the Fulda Gap into West Germany, we deterred
the Soviets from beginning a conventional war in Europe. Would we in fact
have risked decimating the planet to save Europe? Maybe not, but the Soviets
could never be sure.

The schemers in the current debate fear that any nation with a few nuclear
weapons can do to us what we did to the Soviets - deter us from projecting
our vastly superior conventional forces into the world. This could mean Iraq
or North Korea or Iran, but it most importantly means China. The real logic
of missile defense, to these advocates, is not to defend but to protect our
freedom to attack.

There was a funny misfire of a debate about deterrence earlier this year.
President Bush, arguing the need for missile defense, suggested that a rogue
state might not be restrained by the fear of nuclear annihilation, the way
the Soviet Union was. Critics pounced gleefully: wouldn't North Korea or
Iraq be deterred from launching an unprovoked attack, just as the Soviet
Union was, by the certain knowledge that we could reduce them to molten
rubble? Well, sure they would. Unless we happened to have our tank divisions
parked at the outskirts of their capital, prepared to move in. Under those
circumstances, even a semi-rational megalomaniac like Saddam Hussein might
just decide to launch whatever he had. Or, more to the point, we couldn't be
quite sure he wouldn't. If Saddam had possessed a nuclear missile in 1991,
could we have persuaded such a broad coalition to drive him from Kuwait? Or,
if the Taliban had a single missile capable of pulverizing Washington, would
we have been so quick to go into Afghanistan?

You won't hear President Bush saying so, but the scenario that preoccupies
many of those in and around the Pentagon is this one: Taiwan decides to risk
a climactic break with mainland China. The mainland responds with a military
tantrum. America would like to defend the island democracy against the
Communist giant - but we are backed down by hints that Beijing cares enough
about this issue to launch nuclear missiles. American voters may or may not
support a conventional war for Taiwanese independence; they're much less
likely to support one that risks the obliteration of our cities. Ah, but if
we have an insurance policy, a battery of anti-missile weapons sufficient
(in theory) to neutralize China's two dozen nuclear missiles, we would feel
freer to go to war over Taiwan.

"The logic of missile defense is to make the stakes of power projection
compatible with the risks of power projection," says Keith B. Payne, a
deterrence theory expert and an ardent supporter of missile defense. Missile
defense, in other words, is not about defense. It's about offense.

This debate about missile defense is one we're not having. The schemer
rationale exists mostly between the lines. It is implicit in documents no
mere citizen reads, like the Quadrennial Defense Review, and encoded in
speeches. There is little frank discussion of it in publications for
non-specialists. (One exception is the right- wing National Review, whose
editor, Richard Lowry, has articulated the force projection rationale
clearly.)

Why is everyone being so coy about this?

For one thing, the dreamers' just-plain-defense argument is easier to grasp,
and much easier to market. In principle it's hard to argue that a system
that could shoot down a rogue missile or two would be a bad thing to have.
Even liberals are buying into it. Their reservations are framed almost
entirely as variations on: Is it worth the cost? Can we afford the money to
make the thing work? Is it a better value than the alternatives? Is it worth
the political angst of withdrawing from the ABM treaty?

Personally, if missile defense is about defense, I can imagine better ways
to spend $100 billion. Defending our porous seaports against a nuclear
device in a tugboat or shipping container seems like a more urgent
investment. And if we're really worried about an accidental launch from a
decaying Russian missile command center, we might revive a bright idea the
physicist Sherman Frankel developed a decade ago - retrofitting nuclear
missiles, ours and theirs, with devices so they could be disarmed and
destroyed after a mistaken launch. (Incredibly, civilian rockets have
post-launch destruct devices, but not nuclear missiles.) But after Sept. 11,
the public is less likely to quibble over priorities and cost-benefit
analysis. If it makes us feel safe, the mood is, buy it.

The schemers' agenda, on the other hand, makes a more complicated and
uncomfortable debate, because it raises the question of whether missile
defense might, in fact, make the world less safe. "Force projection" has an
unpleasant, bellicose ring to it. It also drives the Chinese up the wall.
There are already plenty of hawks in China who believe we have a long- range
strategy to "contain" it - and the force projection rationale tends to
suggest they are right.

Arguing that we need missile defense to assure we can take the battle to the
nuclear-armed bad guys opens up two ticklish lines of discussion.

One is whether missile defense makes it likelier we will get into a war that
is not essential to our national interests, or that we will move more easily
from containing bad regimes to ousting them, and whether as part of such a
conflict we may find ourselves playing nuclear chicken.

The other is whether missile defense might lead to a new arms-building
competition. If it is true that China cares enough about Taiwan to threaten
nuclear war - that is, if China's ability to deter us with nuclear weapons
really matters to Chinese leaders - then it stands to reason they will work
hard to protect their deterrent. However they do that, by manufacturing more
missiles or putting multiple warheads on each launcher or by a shift in
strategy, a Chinese buildup may well influence the behavior of China's wary
nuclear neighbor India. What India does in turn alarms its nuclear neighbor
Pakistan. If you're following the news, you know that India and Pakistan are
at this moment on the verge of war.

Strategic planners have a technical expression for this kind of discussion.
It's called a can of worms.

Copyright New York Times 2001


***********************************************

December 30, 2001

ZNet Commentary
The Age Of Scorpio (vrishchika): Star Wars And Star Signs
by Vijay Prashad
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-12/26prashad.cfm

This is the dawning of the Age of Scorpio, or as our Sanskrit texts have it,
the Age of Vrishchika.

The symbol of Vrishchika is the umbrella and its planet is Mars. If the
latter is the godhead of War, then the former might stand in for the
umbrella National Missile Defense so coveted by the US who are obediently
followed by the Hindu Right-led coalition in India.

And under the sign of Mars and Vrishchika, the bombardment of the Afghans.

The captains of contemporary imperialism, like their forbearers, twist words
around so that war is called defense and greed is called freedom, as the
hand that throttles the poor is painted invisible and as unreasonable hopes
get sanctified as science.

As hard science is needed to devise missiles and launch smart bombs, the
mass of humanity is asked to indulge in a fog of unreason - in such arts as
astrology.

The Hindu Right-led government's Human Resource Development ministry has
asked the University Grants Council to adopt "Vedic Astrology" as a subject
for the university. Some Brahmanical conservatives savour the fantasy of an
all-knowing Sanskrit corpus: the ancients knew everything (including the
nuclear bomb, viz. Pashupatra), so that time is a myth and what we call
progress is actually a dilution of the eternal truths.

More cynical followers of Hindutva want the adoption of non-verifiable ideas
as science to undermine the construction of a critical consciousness among
the youth.

And this latter point is well known in the United States. Historians of the
1940s and 1950s now tell us that the US government's various cultural
ministries funded and promoted cultural projects that tended toward
abstraction and away from social realism.

Therefore, the cultural Tsars promoted the paintings of Jackson Pollock and
a generation of abstract expressionists, almost to wash away the sin of a
1930s socialist realism. Writing, too, suffered this fate, as the Committee
for Cultural Freedom promoted spare and non-political prose or else
blatantly anti-Communist harangues.

And now, into the 21st Century, the United States is not behind in the
promotion of unreason. In Scottsdale, Arizona, base of the right-wing giant
Barry Goldwater, the United States Department of Education gave
accreditation to the Astrological Institute (AI).

Joyce Jensen, the school's founder and a Scorpio, told the media that "this
was a good time" because the school's stars were favorably aligned. Students
will learn to write horoscopes and offer their clients a glimpse of the
future: they will take courses in astrology and psychology, and earn a
diploma that allows them to work at such places as holistic healing centers,
cruise ships and spas.

Psychology is a must, one can only surmise, because the astrologer will need
to study the personality of their clients to find the best method for
delusion.

But there is a great distance between Delhi University, say, and AI. AI is a
private institution that gets some government funds and fills a niche; it
does not claim to offer a comprehensive education.

The Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa and the Maharishi
School for the Age of Enlightenment in Vedic City, Iowa, do try to offer a
full education, from mathematics to Yogic Flying, from meditation (Vitamin
M, in the school's parlance) to the study of time. The complexity of
Hinduism is reduced to a few slogans that sooth the overtaxed ego of venture
capitalists and that earn a fabulous profit for Maharishi Enterprises and
other sly babas.

Astrology, mediation, and yoga - these seem to refer to the Age of Aquarius,
to the 1960s when many middle-class people from the overdeveloped world took
refuge in a stereotype of Asia to rid themselves of guilt and consumer
exhaustion. But even as some of the forms are similar, astrology means
something else now than it did even three decades ago.

Then it was a salve against consumerism; now it is consumerism itself, and
it is a way to discredit those who want to fight against capitalism. Be at
peace with the system, don't hate your enemy, learn to love them as your
friend, and finally, your fate is not in your hands, but in the stars.

And our fate is increasingly in the stars: in rocket ships that fly the
stars and stripes and plan to control the global political economy with
"Full Spectrum Domination," as the US Space Command puts it.

The Swedish critic Sven Lindqvist has a new book out called "A History of
Bombing" (New Press, 2001) which reminds us that the fantasy of the sky has
a racist history that is over a hundred years ago.

In 1896, novelist Joseph Conrad described the British naval bombardment of
the African coastline: the "invisible whites," he wrote, "dealt death from
afar." Italian airman Giulio Cavotti was the first to drop a bomb from a
plane, outside Tripoli on 1 November 1911, and an Italian commentator said
that it had "a wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs."

Eight years later, the British bombed Iraq from the air, and Arthur (Bomber)
Harris noted that "within forty-five minutes a full-sized village can be
practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by
four or five machines which offer them no real target."

This is all before the Atomic Bomb, and indeed, before the cruise missile.
Iraq continues to face the wrath of a thousand guns, which, of course, offer
no real target either (or when the Iraqi defenses are warmed up, the US uses
that as an excuse for "retaliation"). The bombardment of the Afghans, now
slowly eased up, is the latest in this present history of racist warfare.

Lindqvist's book contains summaries from a series of chilling apocalyptic
science fiction European novels of the 19th Century that foretell the defeat
of the darker peoples by colonial bombs.

In William Hay's "Three Hundred Years Hence" (1881), for example, the white
nations save themselves from the blight of a Malthusian nightmare (massive
populations, no food) by defeating two recalcitrant zones (Africa and China)
through bombardment, "a rain of awful death to every breathing thing, a rain
that exterminates the hopeless race."

These visions, Lindqvist intimates, have now become a reality, and our
students are enjoined to turn away from the real star wars and take refuge
in the warring star signs - we are in a postmodern nightmare now, where the
sign of the star is more hearty than the star itself, where the signifier is
all and the signified is beyond reach.

Vijay Prashad
Associate Professor and Director, International Studies Program
214 McCook, Trinity College, Hartford, CT. 06106.

--> If you pass this comment along to others -- periodically but not
repeatedly -- please explain that Commentaries are a premium sent to
Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet and that to learn more folks can consult ZNet at
http://www.zmag.org







     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---