Remora

Paul Krugman makes the case, in his latest column, that the Bush administration's fumbled strategy for containing North Korean military capability contravenes basic game theory. Krugman's canned explanation of game theory goes like this:
"During the cold war, the U.S. government employed experts in game theory to analyze strategies of nuclear deterrence. Men with Ph.D.'s in economics, like Daniel Ellsberg, wrote background papers with titles like "The Theory and Practice of Blackmail." The intellectual quality of these analyses was impressive, but their main conclusion was simple: Deterrence requires a credible commitment to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior."

One of Krugman's quirks is to show, at every opportunity, a vocational reverence for "men with Ph.D's in economics." He can't help himself. His larger point, however, is plausible: American power is not increased by the increase in belligerence of American rhetoric. That rhetoric, LI is convinced, is strictly for home consumption. In the case of North Korea, the belligerence has been met with an increase of belligerence on the North Korean side. Belatedly, we are discovering that we have upped the stakes without having any serious cards.

As any anti-war activist will tell you, our sudden mildness and benignity vis a vis North Korea calls into question the premises of "infinite justice," our war on Iraq, or, uh, on terrorism. In December, as we passed the stage of Iraq's 12,000 page weapons inventory, obligingly censored by the UN -- and with that censorship acceded to by the supine press, which did not question the national security imperative for disguising who sold what to Iraq -- the U.S. claimed, in a bout of heroic speed reading, that it was all a mockery. Of course, the press echoed this sentiment. But the press didn't tell us why it was a mockery. For all the disparaging noises emanating from D.C., nobody has pointed to some specific instance of a tabu weapon in S.H.'s arsenal. Rather, we are fighting the potential tabu weapon. This is an almost infinitely plastic casus belli. Thomas Friedman, another NYT op-eder, pretty much concedes this in his Sunday column. He takes on the anti-war slogan that the war against Iraq is about oil, not justice. It is, Friedman thinks, about oil. And so what? But he backs up and gives two conditions for saying that the war, if it happens, is immoral. Or, as he rather disgustingly puts it, is "seen to be immoral':

"I have no problem with a war for oil � if we accompany it with a real program for energy conservation. But when we tell the world that we couldn't care less about climate change, that we feel entitled to drive whatever big cars we feel like, that we feel entitled to consume however much oil we like, the message we send is that a war for oil in the gulf is not a war to protect the world's right to economic survival � but our right to indulge. Now that will be seen as immoral."

What this means is beyond our comprehension. If Friedman seriously thinks that the Bush administration is about to curb SUV use in the USA, he is definitely living on another planet, earth minus Cheney. What it really means is that we have to gear up a lot of meaningless rhetoric about energy consumption. In other words, boiler plate Democratic presidential candidate rhetoric. Meaningless attacks on the administration, unsupported by any desire to really act on the words in any significant way.

His second condition is that we not impose another dictator on Iraq:

"And that leads to my second point. If we occupy Iraq and simply install a more pro-U.S. autocrat to run the Iraqi gas station (as we have in other Arab oil states), then this war partly for oil would also be immoral.If, on the other hand, the Bush team, and the American people, prove willing to stay in Iraq and pay the full price, in money and manpower, needed to help Iraqis build a more progressive, democratizing Arab state � one that would use its oil income for the benefit of all its people and serve as a model for its neighbors � then a war partly over oil would be quite legitimate. It would be a critical step toward building a better Middle East."

This is the crux of the matter. An anti-war stance doesn't have to be a pro-S.H. stance, pace Hitchens ... The more general anti-war point is that Friedman's liberal imperialism is not in the American interest. It simply isn't a good idea to install an American force in Iraq for the next two or three years. It is an invitation to disaster, a la Beirut, 1983. And if the idea is that the implementation of democracy requires such a force -- and that is what the Wolfowitz/Friedman line is all about -- then we are back to a Vietnam era mistake. That is, we justify intervention by making a well intentioned goal that requires more intervention, and that increased intervention subverts our well intentioned goal. Notice that we are conceding that our goal is well intentioned. Actually, we don't believe that the Bush administration does have good intentions -- we believe that they want to use the war for domestic political ends.

So ... war is gently drifting upon us, like bad weather. The headline in the WP today is about massing 100,000 American troops -- although where they are to be staged from is unclear:


"The U.S. military is assembling a ground force for a possible invasion of Iraq that could exceed 100,000 troops and include three to four heavy Army divisions, an airborne division, a Marine division and an assortment of Special Operations forces, according to defense officials and analysts."