An Extraordinarily Dangerous Moment

The First World War wasn't supposed to be the First World War (or the Great War as its contemporaries called it). It was supposed to be the Third Balkan War, another minor regional conflict, this one involving Austria-Hungary and Serbia. In the tragic, farcical aftermath of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, misunderstandings, diplomatic ineptitude, poor judgments, fear-driven decision making, and sheer reckless irresponsibility, combined with a fatal inability to anticipate a worst-case scenario, brought about a conflagration that slaughtered 9,000,000 soldiers and countless millions of civilians, left millions of brutally mutilated war veterans, destroyed four monarchies, burned up more than $4 trillion dollars (in today's money) in precious resources and lost economic activity, helped set the stage for the current Middle East crisis, facilitated the rise to power of the Communists in Russia, the Nazis in Germany, and the Fascists in Italy, and basically set the Twentieth Century on its catastrophic course. Would a major war have erupted anyway, only later? Who can say? We can only judge the consequences of the one that did erupt--and they were disastrous.

Now we are at what is perhaps an equally dangerous moment. There is a more than even chance that the current war in the Middle East will broaden. In a very disturbing phenomenon, there is a war party in our country that is now highly influential in the United States government. I often disagree with the Cato Institute, but I can't fault them here.

Here’s the money quote from the Bill Kristol piece George Will went after yesterday:

“We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions — and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.”

And here’s a front pager in today’s Washington Post about neoconservative anger towards the Bush administration because of its newfound restraint in foreign policy. Prominent Iraq hawks like Max Boot and Cakewalk Ken Adelman are upset that their favored tactic, “bomb today for a brighter tomorrow,” no longer commands the respect it once did in Washington.

Now, you could marvel at the brazenness of all this: the same people who helped lead us into the biggest foreign policy disaster in 30 years trying to push another war (or wars) on us without so much as a prefatory “sorry about the whole Iraq thing, old boy.” But the current squawking also strikes me as a useful reminder of how very, very important war is in the neoconservative vision. It is as central to that vision as peace is to the classical liberal vision.

For the neoconservatives, it’s not about Israel. It’s about war. War is a bracing tonic for the national spirit and in all its forms it presents opportunities for national greatness. “Ultimately, American purpose can find its voice only in Washington,” David Brooks once wrote. And Washington’s never louder or more powerful than when it has a war to fight.

The Neoconservatives are pushing for war with Syria. They are pushing for war with Iran. They are willing to see much of Lebanon destroyed. They are for unending war in Iraq. They are seeking to extend an abstract concept of political liberty to the Middle East that is wholly at odds with the reality on the ground. And they are for doing all this with other people's blood. They seem utterly oblivious to what the philosopher Karl Popper called, "The Law of Unintended Consequences". The scope of the violence they are willing to unleash--and Kristol's proposed attack on Iran would be especially horrific in this regard--would cause myriad unintended consequences to erupt, consequences which could embroil our country for decades, perhaps the rest of the 21st century. What particularly appalls me is the casualness with which these hugely consequential actions are urged, as if they were relatively minor and easily accomplished. None of them would be. The policies of the Neoconservatives are now bordering on madness, and in the name of sanity must be stopped.

In the terrible aftermath of the Great War, statesmen and historians tried to figure out what had gone wrong. In my view, what had gone wrong was that humans had created ways of doing things that were too complex for them to control, methods that relied on variables so numerous and complicated that no set of humans could really understand them. If anything, the international system is even more complex and multivariable today. In the blithe willingness of the neoconservatives to plunge our country into a general war lies the road to potential disaster--and ultimately the death of the great Enlightenment-era experiment called the United States of America.