War, Limited War, and Nuke War

Americans are being revved up for war on Iran. The strategy may be to increase pressure on Iran. Or it may be to see what kind of opposition develops. Or it may be for real.

As one example of many, Republican Senator Scott Brown returned from a Congressional tour of Israel and Jordan to tell journalists at a 9/11 gathering, according to The Boston Globe, that terrorists and Iran are the two big dangers. Iran with nuclear weapons would start a nuclear arms race similar to the U.S./U.S.S.R. Cold War race.

The Atlantic September edition carries a dramatic cover illustration with Jeffrey Goldberg’s article title, “Israel is Getting Ready to Bomb Iran.” Scarier yet is the piece that follows Goldberg’s, by the incendiary Robert D. Kaplan, “Living With Nuclear Iran.”

Kaplan starts out sounding like a cautious alternative to Goldberg, urging containment of a nuclear Iran. He goes on, though, to parade out Henry Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, and conclude, “We must be more willing, not only to accept the prospect of limited war but, as Kissinger does in his book a half century ago, to accept the prospect of a limited nuclear war between states.”

Wow, but what he is saying is that when Iran has nuclear weapons, nuclear war with Israel may follow, or that if Goldberg is right and Israel bombs Iran and follows that up as it would, by telling Iran, “Don’t retaliate for our bombing or we will nuke you,” the U.S. must be ready to accept the possibility of limited nuclear war.

Kaplan is a barn burner from way back. In City, Save Thyself! I quote this from Kaplan’s 2001 The Coming Anarchy: “Peace, as a primary goal, is dangerous because it implies that you will sacrifice any principle for the sake of it. A long period of peace in an advanced technological society like ours could lead to great evils, and the ideal of a world permanently at peace and governed benignly by a world organization is not an optimistic view of the future but a dark one.”

You won’t find the media, whether mainstream or other, permitting exploration of globally enforced law as the alternative to the war system, even as a new war draws closer. The threatened populations hear no constructive proposals, because the media keeps them off limits and anti-war protesters, who trumpet “Peace!” and “Out of Afghanistan!” seem afraid to voice the radical shifts that ending the war system must entail. Kaplan is left free to posit dark global enslavement as the only alternative to glorious war.