Twilight Of Deterrence

Mark Goldblatt posts a provocative theory at ASO today that I hadn't considered (or ever read anywhere) before: that our failure to incinerate Kabul, Afghanistan, then-seat of the Taliban government that hosted Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, after the 9/11 attacks, was a signal to rogue powers like North Korea and Iran that they had little or perhaps nothing to fear from any direct attack on America, no matter how brazen or large:

The idea that "9/11 changed everything" has become a cliche, but the truth behind it, as I've written before, is this: On the day they killed 3,000 Americans, Islamic terrorists effectively called our nuclear bluff. If you cannot grasp that basic concept, then, to be blunt, you cannot engage in intelligent debate about American foreign policy. From the end of World War II until 9/11, America's national security rested, first and foremost, on the belief that a direct attack on the United States would be answered by retaliation on an epic, unimaginable scale. But after Osama bin Laden hit us, and even after the Taliban government in Afghanistan refused to hand him over, we didn't incinerate Kabul. It was with a scalpel, not a terrible swift sword, that we deposed the Taliban and proceeded to hunt after Osama. The sheathing of America's terrible swift sword - or, rather, our enemies' perception of that sheathing, is the essential change in the international landscape since 9/11. It's the current against which we now swim.

Nevertheless, leading Democrats continue to speak and act as though our deterrence were undiminished. On Meet the Press last Sunday, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) nsisted that we can send a "real simple message" to the North Koreans to prevent their involvement in a direct or indirect nuclear attack on the United States: "You do something like that, we will annihilate you." He then added, to Tim Russert, "We have the complete capacity to annihilate them."

Well, yes, we have the capacity. But there's no longer reason to think we have the will, regardless the provocation. [emphasis added]

There's a lot of truth to that, especially after the relentless "anti-war war" waged against the Bush Administration by its domestic political enemies that has so worn it down that the President, in a bitterly ironic role reversal, has become the de facto lapdog of the EUnuchs on Iran and does nothing as the NoKos shoot ICBMs at our territory and bully and terrify our allies in East Asia. And we sure as hell know that were the Democrats running the show again, that weakness would intensify and metastasize like wildfire.

That's why a comment like Slow Joe's is such bad comedy and doubtless invokes roars of laughter in Tehran and Pyongyang (and Damascus and Moscow and Beijing). They know as well as he does that he doesn't mean a word he's saying, that's its nothing but empty bluster he'd never make good on if he were actually in a position to do so. Hell, remember what Bill Clinton said about the same topic back when North Korea was in Iran's current position twelve years ago? Paraphrased, "If they attacked us with nuclear weapons, it would mean the extinction of their country." A few months later he was giving them two nuclear reactors. Nothing but verbal fluff to be lost in the policy lint filter.

I don't know that we had to leave Afghanistan as a smoldering crater after 9/11 in order to rebuild our international "street cred." Fact is, our enemies' perception of our weakness and softness long pre-dates that bloody, late-summer morning five years ago. You can probably trace it back to Bush the Elder's failure to finish off Saddam Hussein in Gulf War I and subsequent abandonment of the Kurds and Shiites he encouraged to rise up against Cheeto-man after the premature cessation of hostilities. Bill Clinton took that baton and set the impression in cement with Mogadishu, invading Haiti instead of Cuba, his cowardly Balkan military adventures, and his serial ignoring of the rising al Qaeda threat - one that he dumped in his successor's lap.

The lesson the bad guys drew from our response to 9/11, and Saddam's fall, wasn't that we are totally bereft of national will, or that they should not risk hitting us again, but that they have to be prepared to up the destructive ante before taking us on. As in Preparation H(-bomb). The NoKos have them, thanks in large part to Mr. Bill, and they've sold several warheads to the Iranians, Pyongyang's best client, along with advanced ICBM technology (ultimate hat tip: Red China).

And that brings us back around to the notion of deterrence and whether the principle works with crazoid regimes that either have nothing to lose (like Kim jong-il) or believe that they're on a mission from God (the mullahs). With nukes, they believe themselves to be invulnerable from the devastating conventional warmaking capabilities we possess and which they could not withstand because we would be deterred from moving against them (*ahem*) no matter what the provocation. And this, in turn, gives them a free hand to pursue proxy wars, or direct wars, or even WMD wars in their targeted spheres of influence, confident that the Americans will not risk the annihilation of Los Angeles or Chicago (or an EMP attack that would fry our technological infrastructure and reduce us to Third World status in an instant). The principle, in short, has been turned on its head.

Of course, the deterrence principle still only works if the deteree believes that the deterer would actually follow through on its threat of nuclear retaliation. Conventional wisdom, that quaint abstraction, holds that "Surely the Iranians and/or North Koreans know that we would obliterate every square inch of their territories if they dropped a hydrogen bomb on Honolulu. So we know that they're just bluffing. We can be confident that Kim jong-il was just rattling his sabres and trying to extort more foreign aid a few weeks ago when he lobbed short-range missiles at Japan and his prized Taepodong-II ICBM in the general direction of Hawaii. And besides, they all failed before even clearing the Sea of Japan, so his vaunted arsenal probably doesn't even work anyway."

Onto this comforting rationalization is poured this chilling rhetorical shower by the redoubtable John Batchelor:

The North Korea test (and there may be a second test) was a full scale exercise in wartime conditions....[O]n Tuesday, July 4, North Korea stunned its East Asian neighbors and rocked the U.N. Security Council by firing not only the Taepodong-2 missile that had been displayed on its launch pad for two weeks but also by launching up to nine more smaller missiles from its rocket brigades' arsenals....The salve to the crisis was that the Taepodong missile had failed within a minute of its launch and fell haphazardly into the Sea of Japan along with the smaller missiles. The press smirked that Kim Jong Il needed more smarts before he was ready to be the big bad wolf of Asia.

Unfortunately, the missile firings were not a failure. The confirmed fact from American observers is that the exercise was a complete success. Up till now, North Korea has had a first-strike policy where it, as the intended aggressor, gets to prepare for a sneak attack by prepositioning, fueling and firing its missiles against multiple targets. The July 4th exercise was instead a rapid response test to a simulated American air attack.

Prior to the launch, the North Korean rocket brigades dispersed into the countryside as if under air attack. The military maintained radio silence to simulate the confusion after America's first and second waves took down the communications grids, as well as to practice the necessary communication security under American surveillance. Then the Taepodong-2 was fired, simulating a strategic weapon missile launch, followed by tactical weapons chosen randomly from the mobile brigades. The missiles landed in the Sea of Japan, but not ineptly. North Korean trawlers were prepositioned at the landing sites to observe the exercise. The Taepodong-2 missile performed correctly, simulating a nuclear weapon strike on American allies or assets.

Crucially, observing this exercise were 11 Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers, including among them members of the elite command and control group, the Partisans of the Mahdi (the Ayatollah Khomeini). The Iranians had in part paid for the North Korean exercise, because Iran is a North Korean arms client. The Iranians were on hand because their own strategic and tactical missile system is based upon the designs of, and built by, North Korean technicians (from Chinese plans proliferated in the early 1990s). The Iranians were preparing for the expected American air attacks against Iran's strategic assets now being provoked in the proxy war on Israel. [emphases added]

Offhand, I'd say that doesn't sound all that much like either the North Koreans or the mullahgarchy can be deterred by our vastly superior doomsday capabilities. Rather, it sounds like they recognize that Osama bin Laden's mistake was not attacking the United States on its own soil, but not making the attack decisive. al Qaeda only succeeded in bloodying our collective nose and pissing us off (temporarily). What they needed to do was decapitate us with multiple WMD strikes, including a nuclear attack. Only then would we recognize the futility of trying to stop their aggressive ambitions, lose our "arrogance" and "swagger" and "cowboy bravado," and run away with our irradiated tail between our legs, leaving the world for them to conquer and plunder.

This one fact bears repeating ad nauseum: Our enemies know they can't beat us in our kind of war. So they have decided to fight the kind of war we don't like: messy "insurgencies" like in Iraq, and terrorism - in this case, on the ultimate scale. And it looks increasingly foolish to believe that they are bluffing. The sobering reality is that Iran and North Korea are determined to provoke us and provoke us and provoke us until we either totally capitulate without a fight or give them the fight they want as a pretext for conflagrating our cities one by one.

This is the terrible dilemma that years and years of idiotic "diplomacy" with genocidal maniacs has bequeathed us. Like Britain in the late 1930s, all we can do now is hope and pray that we can weather the storm that needn't have befallen us at all.