Read Why Are We at War? for Free Online

subtext, and there lies the horror to its n th power. What made deterrence possible in the Cold War was not only that there was everything to lose for both sides, but there was also the built-in inability on either side to be certain it could count on any particular human being to flip the apocalyptic switch over to world domination. In that sense, no final plan could be counted on. How could either of the superpowers be certain that the up-to-now wholly reliable humanselected to push the button would actually prove reliable enough to obliterate the other half of the world? A dark cloud might come over him at the last moment. He could fall to the ground before he could do the deed.
    This human unreliability does not apply, however, to a terrorist. If he is ready to kill himself, he can also be ready to destroy the world. The wars we have known until this era, no matter how horrible, could offer at least the knowledge that they would come to an end. Terrorism, however, is not attracted to negotiation. Rather, it would insist on no termination short of victory. Since the terrorist cannot triumph, he cannot cease being a terrorist. They are a true enemy, far more basic, indeed, than Third World countries with nuclear capability that invariably appear on the scene prepared to live with deterrence and its in-built outcome—agreements after years or decades of passive confrontation and hard bargaining.
    If much of what has been argued so far has been restricted to neocon mentality, there is a wing ofthe flag conservatives’ campaign to invade Iraq that does have liberal support. Part of the liberal media, columnists at The New Yorker and The Washington Post and some at The New York Times , is joined with Senators Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry, in acceptance of the idea that perhaps we can bring democracy to Iraq by invasion. In a carefully measured appraisal of what the possibilities might be, Bill Keller speaks on The New York Times op-ed page on February 8 of a war that might go quickly and well:
Let’s imagine that the regime of Saddam Hussein begins to crumble under the first torrent of cruise missiles. The tank columns rumbling in from Kuwait are not beset by chemical warheads. There is no civilian carnage. [Even so] a victory in Iraq will not resolve the great questions of what we intend to be in the world. It will lay them open.
[Is] our aim to promote secular democracy, or stability? Some, probably including somein Mr. Bush’s cabinet, will argue that it was all about disarmament. Once that is done, they will say, once Saddam’s Republican Guard is purged, we can turn the country over to a contingent of Sunni generals and bring our troops home in 18 months.
    Or perhaps, argues Keller, we will fashion a real democracy in Iraq after all, and the Middle East will benefit. It is as if these liberal voices have decided that Bush cannot be stopped and so he must be joined. To commit to a stand against fighting the war would guarantee the relative absence of Democrats at the administration tables that will work on the future of Iraq. It is an argument that can be sustained up to a point, but the point depends on many eventualities, the first of which is that the war is quick and not horrendous.
    The old Bill Clinton version of overseas presumption is present. The argument that we succeeded in building democracy in Japan and Germanyand therefore can build it anywhere does not necessarily hold. Japan and Germany were countries with a homogeneous population and a long existence as nations. They each were steeped in guilt at the depredations of their soldiers in other lands. They were near to totally destroyed but had the people and the skills to rebuild their cities. The Americans who worked to create their democracy were veterans of Roosevelt’s New Deal and, mark of the period, were effective idealists.
    Iraq, in contrast, was never a true nation. Put together by the British, it was a