[Peace-discuss] Give nukes a chance

[C. G. Estabrook]

I disagree that "Bush's current drive to re-frame the NPT to assure that
Iran doesn't develop into a nuclear weapons state" is a "good thing he's
done," Matt.  It's a cynical ploy to try to reduce one of the few road
blocks to complete US control of energy resources via hegemony in the
Middle East.

Any Iranian government, looking east (Afghanistan) and west (Iraq) and
noting that the US invades countries without deterrents, while leaving
alone those that can retaliate (North Korea), would be seriously derelict
in its duty to its citizens if it didn't try to to obtain weapons that
would deter the US -- which has made its plans perfectly clear, from the
"National Security Strategy" of Sept 2002 to the "National Defense
Strategy" announced just this past Friday.

But Iran has in fact announced that it's not seeking nuclear weapons. It
should be.  It's threatened practically daily by its regional opponent, an
American attack-dog with several hundred nuclear weapons.  Israel has
received the most advanced F-16s from the US with "special weapons," meant
to show how Iran can be attacked from our "stationary aircraft carrier."

The Bush administration acknowledges that Iran has the right to enrich
uranium to produce electricity under NPT, but the USG is pressuring the
EU-3 to make Iran give up that right, rather obviously to produce a casus
belli. Iran in response is prepared to offer the US a half share in any
future nuclear program to show that it is not pursuing atomic weapons!
Needless to say, Washington hasn't responded. Meanwhile, despite its
demands that Iran give up its uranium enrichment program, the US
administration has dismissed any cause for alarm over a somewhat similar
nuclear program in Brazil.  The hypocrisy is evident.

Also, you say that "it seems irrelevant ... to helplessly ponder [Bush's]
motivation" but then dismiss the "Realist school of political scientists"
on the basis of "the very complex ways in which individual minds work and
the wide array of values that different people have throughout the world."
If you're right, wouldn't that mean that we'd have to ponder Bush's
motivation to see what the US is up to and decide what the proper
responses should be?

I don't intend to defend "political realism" tout court, but I would say
that the Neocons (whose positions aren't unique -- just the extreme end of
the US policy spectrum) have had a certain mad rationality about their
policies -- rational in the sense of fitting means to ends, mad in terms
of ignoring the dangers of their overall goals (nowhere better set out, I
think, than in Chomsky's "Hegemony of Survival.")  It's certainly true
that they've said clearly from early on what they intended to do, horrible
as it is.

I certainly agree with you about "the violence brought to the homefront by
a society that invests in a lucrative military industrial complex at the
expense of important social programs."  But that means that we should try
to stop our government from perpetrating that violence, not aid that
government in its machinations against other countries.  The NPT pledges
the US to move toward the elimination of its own nuclear arms -- which we
manifestly haven't done: the Bush administration is building a new
generation of them.

But I do find John Mearshimer's analysis of great power politics helpful,
in spite of political disagreements.  His book, "The Tragedy of Great
Power Politics," published just before 9/11, strikes me as accurate, not
to say prescient. Writing a decade after the end of the Cold War, he
observed "Hopes for peace will probably not be realized..." and tried to
say why.  Two years ago, he offered the most accurate prediction I saw of
how the invasion of Iraq would go.

I have no brief for the U. of Chicago, but if we want to counter in any
way the crimes of our government, we need the best accounts of what's
really going on. In the absence of a correct understanding of the
situation, the best will in the world will only make mistakes -- or at
best do the right thing entirely by accident.

Regards, Carl


On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, Matt Reichel wrote:

> I really don't see the point of critiquing Bush's current drive to
> re-frame the NPT to assure that Iran doesn't develop into a nuclear
> weapons state:  this is one of the few good things he's done, so it
> seems irrelevant to me to helplessly ponder his motivation.
> 
> The problem with the Realist school of political scientists, as with
> their economist friends, is that the entirety of their line of
> reasoning is grounded in the idea that states and their individual
> citizens all act "rationally." Rarely do any of these theorists
> explain what they mean by "rational," nor do they give any thought to
> the very complex ways in which individual minds work and the wide
> array of values that different people have throughout the world. If
> anything, they attempt to transplant a morally empty western set of
> values on all people and states throughout the world under the veil of
> "rational thinking."
> 
> It is an academically incoherent approach to political science, and a
> thoroughly perturbing way to deal with the issue of nuclear weapons.
> To say that nation-states are more peaceful when they have nuclear
> weapons ignores all of the violence brought to the homefront by a
> society that invests in a lucrative military industrial complex at the
> expense of important social programs. This is the real tragedy of
> nuclear weapons: for each nuclear weapon that is built, another
> community in the United States is starved of its right to develop into
> wholesome and productive citizens.
> 
> You will never see such "rational" arguments as these in John
> Mearsheimer's work, as with soo soo many others who have been faculty
> at the cankersore of Chicago's South Side.
> 
> A Bientot, mer
>