[Culturechat] War

[WesTexas@aol.com]

(One could reasonably conclude that public opinion in Europe in the Thirties 
was overwhelmingly against confronting Hitler, and as I previously commented, 
Churchill was widely considered by the elite to be a nutcase for trying to 
sound the alarm about Hitler.   Following is an excellent column by Charles 
Krauthammer, regarding our own "holiday from history.")--J. Brown

Bracing for the Apocalypse--by Charles Krauthammer 

The domestic terror alert jumps to 9/11 levels. Heathrow Airport is ringed by 
tanks. Duct tape and plastic sheeting disappear from Washington store 
shelves. Osama resurfaces. North Korea reopens its plutonium processing plant 
and threatens pre-emptive attack. The Second Gulf War is about to begin. This 
is not the Apocalypse. But it is excellent preparation for it. 

You don't get to a place like this overnight. It takes at least, oh, a 
decade. We are now paying the wages of the 1990s, our holiday from history. 
During that decade, every major challenge to America was deferred. The chief 
aim of the Clinton administration was to make sure that nothing terrible 
happened on its watch. Accordingly, every can was kicked down the road: 

*   Iraq: Saddam continued defying the world and building his arsenal, even 
as the United States acquiesced to the progressive weakening of U.N. 
sanctions and then to the expulsion of all weapons inspectors. 

*   North Korea: When it threatened to go nuclear in 1993, Clinton managed to 
put off the reckoning with an agreement to freeze Pyongyang's program. The 
agreement--surprise!--was a fraud. All the time, the North Koreans were 
clandestinely enriching uranium. They are now in full nuclear breakout. 

*   Terrorism: The first World Trade Center attack occurred in 1993, followed 
by the blowing up of two embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole. 
Treating terrorism as a problem of law enforcement, Clinton dispatched the 
FBI--and the odd cruise missile to ostentatiously kick up some desert sand. 
Osama was offered up by Sudan in 1996. We turned him away for lack of legal 
justification. 

That is how one acts on holiday: Mortal enemies are dealt with not as 
combatants, but as defendants. Clinton flattered himself as looking beyond 
such mundane problems to a grander transnational vision (global warming, 
migration and the like), while dispatching American military might to quell 
``teacup wars'' in places like Bosnia. On June 19, 2000, the Clinton 
administration solved the rogue-state problem by abolishing the term and 
replacing it with ``states of concern.'' Unconcerned, the rogues prospered, 
arming and girding themselves for big wars. 

Which are now upon us. On Sept. 11, the cozy illusions and stupid pretensions 
died. We now recognize the central problem of the 21st century: the 
conjunction of terrorism, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction. 

True, weapons of mass destruction are not new. What is new is that the 
knowledge required to make them is no longer esoteric. Anyone with a 
reasonable education in modern physics, chemistry or biology can brew them. 
Doomsday has been democratized. 

There is no avoiding the danger any longer. Last year, President Bush's 
axis-of-evil speech was met with eye-rolling disdain by the sophisticates. 
One year later, the warning has been vindicated in all its parts. Even the 
United Nations says Iraq must be disarmed. The International Atomic Energy 
Agency has just (politely) declared North Korea a nuclear outlaw. Iran has 
announced plans to mine uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel; we have 
recently discovered two secret Iranian nuclear complexes. 

We are in a race against time. Once such hostile states establish arsenals, 
we become self-deterred and they become invulnerable. North Korea may already 
have crossed that threshold. 

There is a real question whether we can win the race. Year One of the new 
era, 2002, passed rather peaceably. Year Two will not: 2003 could be as 
cataclysmic as 1914 or 1939. 

Carl Sagan invented a famous formula for calculating the probability of 
intelligent life in the universe. Estimate the number of planets in the 
universe and calculate the tiny fraction that might support life and that 
have had enough evolution to produce intelligence. He prudently added one 
other factor, however: the odds of extinction. The existence of intelligent 
life depends not just on creation, but on continuity. What is the probability 
that a civilization will not destroy itself once its very intelligence grants 
it the means of self-destruction? 

Weapons of mass destruction have been around for less than 100 years. A 
hundred--in the eye of the universe, less than a blink. And yet we already 
find ourselves on the brink. What are the odds that our species will manage 
to contain this awful knowledge without self-destruction--not for a billion 
years or a million or even a thousand, but just through the lifetime of our 
children? 

Those are the stakes today. Before our eyes, in a flash, politics has gone 
cosmic. The question before us is very large and very simple: Can--and 
will--the civilized part of humanity disarm the barbarians who would use the 
ultimate knowledge for the ultimate destruction? Within months, we will have 
a good idea whether the answer is yes or no.