And what’s really galling is that we all know if President Bush were to miss such an opportunity and we got hit for it later, the first person to criticize his lack of foresight would be Ted Kennedy. But if he went ahead and seized the opportunity, the fist person to criticize his warmongering would be Ted Kennedy. Talk about darned if you don’t and danged if you do.

September 11 was a terrible tragedy, but one infinitely smaller in comparison to the detonation of a nuclear weapon in D.C. or New York. If Osama bin Laden had been able to detonate a nuclear weapon, he obviously would have done so. Any president has to do everything he can to avoid the loss of life, property, and prestige that such an attack would cause. At the same time no president can spend too much time talking about that particular danger because of the fear and unrest it would cause. Anyone concerned with the loss of life among American military men should compare it to the loss such an attack would cause. Anyone concerned with the threat to civil liberties after 9/11 should compare it to the state of civil liberties after such an attack.

The only good arguments against the war in Iraq are those which suggest that a nuclear attack is more, rather than less, likely as a result. There are some good arguments along that line and I respect those making them; as we move forward in formulating foreign policy we should remain focused on that nightmare scenario and ensure that we are lessening rather than increasing the odds that it will happen. We are playing for very high stakes and can’t allow partisanship or a collection of resentments, even valid ones, to shift us off the topic.

I’ve never really understood the importance applied to temporal imminence, to tell you the truth, although I respect its position in the just war tradition as wiser than myself. Still though, if I knew an atom bomb was ticking on a long clock it would seem immoral NOT to defuse it sooner rather than later. Certainty seems to be a different class of criteria than imminence (assuming that the only valid construal of imminance is “a short time away”). If a threat is reasonably certain then waiting for temporal imminence seems *immoral*. Maybe the right construal of imminence is that imminence can make up for some lack of certainty.

I think the proposition that Islamic terrorists will detonate a nuclear weapon on American soil if they get the chance is, for all practical purposes, certain. What I don’t know - and I really don’t, I am quite glad to not be the king - is what that particular certainty justifies.

While we’re praising “the magnificent job [Perle] did in the 1980s in elucidating and defending President Reagan’s Cold War policies,” let’s remember that the Reagan administration condemned the Israeli attack on the Iraqi reactor. That kind of pre-emptive strike was the kind of thing that our country had refused to do in our own defense (whether in the late 40s when people like Bertrand Russell were urging us to strike against the Soviets, or in the late 60s and early 70s when people like Leonid Brezhnev were suggesting a joint U.S.-Soviet strike against the Chinese), so we weren’t about to condone it when done by the Israelis.

The Reagan administration for diplomatic reasons issued a pro-forma condemnation of the attack, even as the administration let it be known unofficially that it backed Israel’s action.

Furthermore, Seamus, like so many people on the antiwar side, seems not to have taken in the changed circumstances of the world since 9/11, and the reasonable position President Bush has taken (whether one agrees with it or not) that deterrence is not an adequate safeguard in a world of stateless terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda seeking to inflict devastating harm on this country.

Seamus wrote,

” […] (whether in the late 40s when people like Bertrand Russell were urging us to strike against the Soviets, […]”

I don’t think Bertrand Russell was urging us to actually strike the Soviets. What he was urging was that we, having a monopoly on nuclear weapons (or, “nucular weapons,” President Bush’s preferred spelling of that term), should *threaten to strike* the Soviet Union unless they totally disarmed. Then, once their disarmament had been accomplished in that way, the plan was that we would totally disarm in turn, bringing about world disarmament.

No, folks, I am not making this up, and yes, he was a brilliant man. It’s not for nothing that Malcolm Muggeridge said Russell might have been a great mathematical logician (which he of course was) but had no political common sense whatsoever. The sort of idea Russell was expressing there was on about the same level of reasonableness as that which undoubtedly motivates these Israeli peaceniks who are forming a protective human chain around Yassir Arafat. (Maybe those guys should read more Muggeridge and less Russell.)