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| We have ample forewarning. But will we ever act? |
| 2005-01-24 |
| I don't agree with the author's conclusions, and I think some of his premises are flawed, but he makes an interesting argument. From the Wall Street Journal, presented entire. A hundred years ago, Republican presidential incumbent Theodore Roosevelt had just defeated the now obscure Judge Alton B. Parker, the army had long been fighting Muslim insurrectionists in the Philippines and was recasting itself to fight insurgencies, reformers were concerned with the environment and money politics, and the country's meat supply was viewed with suspicion. Those absorbing passions would nonetheless prove completely irrelevant to the influenza pandemic that little more than a decade later would kill 50 million people, including half a million Americans; to the rise of Germany, Japan, and Russia; and to the century's three great wars. Our own absorbing passions, which are remarkably similar, have blinded us in the same way. We have yet to find a serviceable framework for the application of our military power in the war on terrorism; in view of potential catastrophes of which we have a great deal of forewarning, we have yet to provide adequately for what used to be called civil defense; and we have no policy in regard to China's steady cultivation of power that soon will vie with our own. Some here have commented on this point at length. Though any one of these things is capable of dominating the coming century, not one has been properly addressed. God help the army that must fight for an idea rather than an objective. After somehow failing to argue competently on behalf of a patently justifiable invasion, and as its more specious arguments were collapsing,Because everyone disowned the positions they'd taken up until the moment of invasion the Bush administration then pivoted with breathtaking enthusiasm to nation building, something so Clinton-tinged that it had previously been held in contempt. The more that nation building in Iraq is in doubt, is it? the more the mission creeps into a doubling of bets in hope of covering those that are lost. Now the goal is to reforge the politics, and perforce the culture, not merely of Iraq but of the billion-strong Islamic world from Morocco to the South Seas. That--evangelical democracy writ overwhelmingly large--is the manic idea for which the army must fight. I would have said the Army holds the ground while the politicians fight, but this is far outside my expertise. Oh, and we're seeing a remarkable number of calls for democratic involvement in countries where that was unthinkable, and fairly unsafe, just a few days ago. But no law of nature says a democracy is incapable of supporting terrorism, true so even if every Islamic capital were to become a kind of Westminster with curlicues, the objective of suppressing terrorism might still find its death in the inadequacy of the premise. Even if all the Islamic states became democracies, the kind of democracies they might become might not be the kind of democracies wrongly presumed to be incapable of supporting terrorism. And if Iraq were to become the kind of democracy that is the kind wrongly presumed (and for more than a short period), there is no evidence whatsoever that other Arab or Islamic states, without benefit of occupying armies, would follow. And if they did, how long might it last? They do not need Iraq as an example, they have Britain and Denmark, and their problem is not that they require a demonstration, but rather their culture, history, and secret police. If we could transform Germany and Japan, then why not Iraq? Approximately 150,000 troops occupy Iraq, which has a population of 26 million and shares long open borders with sympathetic Arab and Islamic countries where popular sentiment condemns America. The Iraqi army was dispersed but neither destroyed nor fully disarmed. The country is divided into three armed nations. Its cities are intact. In contrast, on the day of Germany's surrender, Eisenhower had three million Americans under his command--61 divisions, battle hardened. Other Western forces pushed the total to 4.5 million in 93 divisions. And then there were the Russians, who poured 2.5 million troops into the Berlin sector alone. All in all, close to 10 million soldiers had converged upon a demoralized German population of 70 million that had suffered more than four million dead and 10 million wounded, captured, or missing. No sympathizers existed, no friendly borders. The cities had been razed. Germany had been broken, but even after this was clear, more than 700,000 occupation troops remained, with millions close by. The situation in Japan was much the same: a country with a disciplined, homogenous population, no allies, sealed borders, its cities half burnt, more than three million dead, a million wounded, missing, or captured, its revered emperor having capitulated, and nearly half a million troops in occupation. And whereas both Germany and Japan had been democracies in varying degree, Iraq has been ruled by a succession of terrifying autocrats since the beginning of human history. To succeed, a paradigm of "invade, reconstruct, and transform" requires the decisive defeat, disarmament, and political isolation of the enemy; the demoralization of his population and destruction of its political beliefs; and the presence, at the end of hostilities, of overwhelming force. With U.S. military capacity virtually unchanged since the Clinton years, I thought that this year they begin upsizing? and a potentially heavy draw upon American forces in other crises, the paradigm is untenable. Though against all odds it may succeed temporarily in Iraq, it is premised upon succeeding in far too many other places of fierce and longstanding antipathy to what we represent. An impressive civil-defense effort has been made, but only relative to the absence of anything before it. It isn't a question of gaps in the fence here and there, but of sections of the fence here and there. Four and a half years after September 11th, air cargo is still not x-rayed; illegal immigration and drug smuggling prove that the borders are porous; simulated attacks are almost always a walk-over for the red-teams; and the nature of chemical, nuclear, and biological terrorism remains such that merely rattling terrorist networks is insufficient. Although nuclear detonations in American cities are not to be slighted, still, the greatest and most likely perils are natural epidemics and biological warfare. A common belief among public health experts is that a viral shift such as that which caused the 1918-19 pandemic is almost certain. Yes, but in the U.S. at least, the population is much more spread out, much healthier, and the epidemiologists are much better at recognizing and isolating early carriers. And lots of us have well-filled pantries, and our computers allow us to work in isolation at home. Estimates of the number of dead run to the hundreds of millions world-wide and scores of millions in the U.S. If nature fails to deliver an epidemic, it is unfortunately easy for a highly trained terrorist, by genetic manipulation, to create a super-virulent pathogen with a nearly 100% rate of mortality. From what I've read, it may be easy to create, but not as easy to spread. Natural or artificial epidemics are collectively the greatest threat this country has ever faced, ever? and will not be exceeded for decades to come. But though the biological sciences advance day by day and could put up a spirited defense, they can do so only if efforts are begun now on a scale several orders of magnitude beyond what is scheduled. Given current plans and preparations, this will not occur, and the greatest enemy the country has ever known will have no opposition. By taking intelligent advantage of the fertile relation between economic development and military capacity, China will be able to leverage its extraordinary growth into superpower parity with the United States. Without the destruction of Chinese social and political equilibrium, this is only a matter of time. And just as we had no policy for dealing with the rise of Germany, Japan, and (prior to the late 1940s) Russia, we have none here. But with the exception of South Korea, which chafes under our protection and may eventually break from the fold, tt seems to me we are slowly turnng SKorea loose our major allies in the Pacific are islands, and conveniently in this regard our strengths are the air, the sea, space, and amphibious warfare. We have not since the Korean War been able to face China on the mainland, but if we vigorously augment what we do best, we and our allies--by deterrence and maneuver rather than war--can hold the chain of islands well into the coming century or longer, after which our objective would be to contest the open ocean. China's objective is to establish a defensive line to the east of the chain, and it is building up its navy accordingly. But we, to prepare for the coming maritime century in the Pacific, are forcing naval strength to its lowest levels since the 1930s. Uneven and ineffective application of military power, vulnerability to mass terrorism and natural epidemics, blindness to the rise of a great competitor: matters like these, that may seem remote and abstract, are seldom as remote and abstract as they seem. A hundred years ago, our predecessors, unable to sense what had already begun, did not know the price they would pay as the century wore on. But, as the century wore on, that price was exacted without mercy. I was under the impression that clearly seeing the future is the province of God, not Man. Certainly I'm generally surprised by what I find in the future when I finally get there. Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #13 The ratios are wrong. Historically, occupation/pacificatiopn.conversion have needed 1::9 ratio (WW2, Malaysia, etc), but we have less than 1::20 these days. Another 50K troops would have been ideal. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-01-24 11:28:28 PM |
| #12 The ratios are wrong. Historically, occupation/pacificatiopn.conversion have needed 1::9 ratio (WW2, Malaysia, etc), but we have less than 1::20 these days. Another 50K troops would have been ideal. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-01-24 11:28:28 PM |
| #11 The ratios are wrong. Historically, occupation/pacificatiopn.conversion have needed 1::9 ratio (WW2, Malaysia, etc), but we have less than 1::20 these days. Another 50K troops would have been ideal. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-01-24 11:28:28 PM |
| #10 There is a vast difference between activities like making and spreading sarin or anthrax vs. lex's fear that some Islamofanatic might "genetically engineer viruses that could wipe out millions of infidels in short order". |
| Posted by: Tom 2005-01-24 4:16:08 PM |
| #9 Read this: http://highway99.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_highway99_archive.html#110438775416021585 |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-24 4:02:19 PM |
| #8 Frank Herbert wrote that book 20 years ago. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-01-24 3:31:54 PM |
| #7 Case in point: check out the, uh, bio for Dr. Vladimir Sabetsky at this venture fund in Moscow: http://www.ttdc.net/Sections/our.management.htm "Prior to joining TTDC, Dr. Sabetsky was the Head of the Laboratory for the âRussian Federation State Research Institute of Highly Pure Biopreparationsâ in St. Petersburg, Russia. There Dr. Sabetsky's research focused on novel delivery systems for vaccines, peptides, enzymes, cytokines and other biologically active substances...." Get it? |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-24 2:38:31 PM |
| #6 what labs have this biological weapons technology Look North. how easy is it to get a spy in and the details out? Don't need spies. The Russian security forces are thick with oil trader middlemen who operate through Dubai and can get you nearly anything you like from the FSU. And the Russian biologists are looking for cash. |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-24 2:34:58 PM |
| #5 That's an interesting point, lex. Dr. Kahn found his place in the world by stealing existing enrichment technology and re-selling it. But what labs have this biological weapons technology and how easy is it to get a spy in and the details out? And how much human testing gets done? And how easy is it to limit the damage to the desired population? No, if I were a terrorist mastermind I wouldn't bother. Radioactive contamination is easier to execute, easier to limit to the infidels, and lasts a long, long time. |
| Posted by: Tom 2005-01-24 2:30:57 PM |
| #4 Why can't the terrorists simply connect with sympathetic scientists? Ever heard of Dr Khan? Surely eh must have his counterparts in the biological field. |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-24 2:07:43 PM |
| #3 "...it is unfortunately easy for a highly trained terrorist, by genetic manipulation, to create a super-virulent pathogen with a nearly 100% rate of mortality." Sounds easy, doesn't it! But how many "highly trained terrorists" do applied research in modern genetic weapons labs? And novelist Helprin doesn't even recognize that a pathogen with 100% mortality is useless as a weapon unless it produces a very slowly-developing illness. [Anybody in your neighborhood had ebola recently?] And if these highly-trained bio-chemist-genetic expert terrorists did manage to build such a superbug, it would take less than a day for it to fly on airplanes to their side of the world. So the point would be...? Mr. Helprin, like the global warming crowd, has seized on a tabloid-grade non-issue that gains him print-space and fame from the science-ignorant MSM and will probably get grant money for researchers and bureaucrats too desperate and lame to tackle real problems. |
| Posted by: Tom 2005-01-24 1:56:59 PM |
| #2 The best hospitals and researchers are in the industrialized world. I think the third world would be the ones to truly suffer if such a pandemic were unleased. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2005-01-24 1:27:15 PM |
| #1 He's right on target re the biological threat. Any truly intelligent islamofascist has to be thinking of how to genetically engineer viruses that could wipe out millions of infidels in short order. |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-24 11:13:12 AM |