Assertive Disarmament

Josey1

Assertive DisarmamentFrontPageMagazine.com | February 13, 2002WHAT MOTIVES LURK BEHIND LEFT-WING POLITICS? Today's typical Leftist, for example, wants forcibly to confiscate every American man's .22 rifle and woman's .25 caliber self-protection handgun. Such things, say the Nanny Statists, are intolerably dangerous. Make Comments View Comments Printable Article Email Article But these same gun grabbers condemn any suggestion that the United States should snatch nuclear weapons potential out of the hands of terror regimes in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.At the end of World War II, longtime British pacifist Bertrand Russell startled many by calling for a military attack. The United States, he said, should preemptively destroy the incipient nuclear program of the Soviet Union and impose what he called a "Pax Americana," an American peace like the Pax Romana imposed by Roman Legions of Emperor Augustus two millennia earlier. Such enforced peace would be far better, wrote Lord Russell, than proliferation of such weapons and its risk of global nuclear war.Such "action for peace" could be summed up in a euphemistic phrase coined by my mentor in the U.S. intelligence community - "Assertive Disarmament."If puny private-citizen firearms are too dangerous to tolerate, how much more so are nuclear weapons in the hands of a Marxist madman in Pyongyang, fanatical Ayatollahs in Teheran, or a megalomaniac in Baghdad who fancies himself the reincarnation of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar?Should we "bomb the bomb" of these "Axis of Evil" rogue nations before it sprouts from a radioactive seed into a global Pox Fanatica spread by missile and terrorist delivery systems? (Perhaps left-wing feminists could be persuaded if we call the preemption of this nightmare a "Pro-choice Abortion of an Unviable Almost-critical Nuclear Mass.")Advanced nations have voiced support for President George W. Bush's world war against terrorism. Many have been less enthusiastic about his targeting of three "Axis of Evil" nations. Our erstwhile allies pursue their own national self-interests and see their own power diminishing in a world under America's however-benign hegemony."If one country must be so dominant militarily, then it is probably better that it is the United States..," said Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Director of Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs, to the Left-of-center The Observer in an unconscious faint echo of Lord Russell. "However," he continued, "history suggests that such dominance leads to abuse and it is incumbent on the rest of the world to find ways of restraining the United States through international law, countervailing power and dialogue. The European Union, which has achieved parity with the United States in trade and investment, has a major responsibility in this endeavor. Plans for a European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) therefore need to be accelerated and EU governments need to commit adequate resources to it." From Marshall Plan to martial plans, Europeans have rarely been too modest or grateful to bite the hands that fed them. Among those currently most critical of the U.S. is France, whose Osirak reactor provided to Iraq would already have given Saddam Hussein - and perhaps Osama bin Laden - nuclear weapons more than a decade ago had Israel not preemptively bombed it into oblivion in 1980 while still under construction.France, speaking with the bitterness of a waning cultural, military, and geopolitical power, has dubbed the United States not a superpower but a "hyperpower." As the Washington Post's Jim Hoagland recently noted, "The increase that [President] Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seek for next year at the Pentagon is $48 billion - an amount that is 150 percent of the annual defense budget of France, the second largest spender in NATO. The proposed defense budget of $379 billion will lift U.S. defense spending to about 40 percent of the total that all nations in the world spend on their militaries.. Friend as well as foe will be left behind on another military planet if the new U.S. dollars translate into new defense capability.." "The implications of a unipolar world are bad for everyone concerned," former Foreign Office advisor David Clark told The Observer. "If America stands aloof from global problems, it is accused of isolationism. If it intervenes, it is accused of imperialism. Either way, it becomes a target of resentment and violence." Clark, too, wants to offset American hegemony with a stronger Europe. "It's either that or [gasp!] another American century." [My emphasis and gasp.]Imprisoned as a pacifist during World War I, Bertrand Russell had chats with his jailer. One day the jailer asked, "Lord Russell, what religion are you?" "I'm an agnostic," the great mathematician and philosopher answered. Puzzled by the unfamiliar word, the jailer said: "Well, that's all right, Lord Russell. We all believe in the same God."Most Americans still think of Europe as the motherland of our language, culture, and values. We appear to believe in the same God. But in deciding whether and when to assertively - and if need be, unilaterally - de-fang the Axis of Evil, we must understand that our Leftist European allies' self-interests in this fight are not entirely identical to our own. Europe nearly ruled the world several times and would like to try again, beginning with the power to shape and veto our decisions. http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/columnists/ponte/2002/ponte02-13-02.htm