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Madness walks the streets of America. We can defeat it.

Larry Kummer, Editor

Summary: The front pages of major American newspaper these days read like the community newsletter for a high-class asylum, written by and for educated but mentally dysfunctional people. Those of the far Right read like the Arkham Asylum newsletter, written for and by brilliant but deranged people. While a natural reaction, it’s wrong. They prey upon our fears because it works, and generates cash for their patrons.  Understanding that is the first step to reform. This post gives two unusually clear examples.   {2nd of 2 posts today}

Contents

  1. ISIS: a threat as big as the NAZIs!
  2. We must risk a nuclear war!
  3. For More Information.

(1)  The Islamic State poses a threat as serious as NAZI Germany

To our warmongers it’s always 1939. Threats are always like NAZI Germany. Negotiation always risks a repeat of Munich. Why don’t we laugh at the work of these people — such as “The Evil of our time” by Frederick W. Kagan at the American Enterprise Institute, 10 June 2015 — Excerpt…

The Islamic State (ISIS) is not a terrorist organization. It is an army of conquest destroying all traces of civilization in the lands that it holds. It has taken root in Iraq and Syria, but its evil threatens the whole world. The US must find an answer.

The greatest evil of our time has taken root in Iraq and Syria. … Comparing ISIS to the early Nazis is not hyperbole. … The threat of ISIS is more complex and insidious than that of Nazism.

… It is causing a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale not seen since World War II.

… There is no easy answer to the question: “What should we do?” But we must find the hard answer soon and gird ourselves for the pain and effort it will require. If not us, who? If not here, where? If not now, when?

Political rhetoric masquerading as analysis is the tool of choice for modern warmongers, and it has worked well. After 15 years of almost uniformly bad advice, the Kagan clan still has a prominent role in American geopolitics — a remarkable demonstration of our inability to learn from experience.

Needless to say, he doesn’t explain, let alone justify, the analogy with NAZI Germany or why ISIS poses a threat to the world. He appeals to American’s ignorance of history by saying ISIS “is causing a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale not seen since World War II.” The numbers are small on the list of horrors since WWII, even if you define “humanitarian catastrophe to exclude natural disasters…

(2)  We must risk a nuclear war!

Reviving the cold war is too modest a goal for our warmongerers. Let’s lay the foundation for a hot war proposes a new report: “A Competitive Strategies Approach to Defining U.S. Nuclear Strategy and Posture for 2025–2050“. It’s the result of an aptly named Project Atom, by the Stimson Center, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) — with the report produced by Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

It’s the kind of advice we’ve seen so many times since Hiroshima. The enemy is always at the door, risking nuclear war is the solution, which means more money for DoD and the defense industry.

The nuclear strategy being recommended here is called “Measured Response.” This is not a new strategy; it is grounded in the U.S. strategy of escalation control that evolved as the United States turned away from the “massive retaliation” strategy of the 1950s and adopted “flexible response.” It’s about ensuring that there are no gaps in U.S. nuclear response options that would prevent it from retaliating proportionately to any employment of a nuclear weapon against the United States and its allies. U.S. conventional superiority lowers the nuclear threshold because it tempts conventionally weaker adversaries to early (rather than as a last resort) employment of a nuclear weapon in order to avoid adverse results at the conventional level.

By having a robust set of proportionate nuclear responses, the United States raises the nuclear threshold because it reduces the attractiveness of nuclear escalation. This may seem paradoxical, to be sure, but paradoxes seem to be endemic to any nuclear age.

… As it shapes its nuclear forces for coping with 2025–2050 realities, the United States needs to address its inferiority (with Russia) in nonstrategic nuclear forces (NSNF, but also known as “tactical nuclear weapons” or TNWs) by developing a robust set of discriminate nuclear options and forward-deployable nuclear weapons.

ThinkProgress’ Justin Salhani quoted other experts’ responses. They’re mild, but what you would expect reasonable people to say.

Murdock’s proposed strategy would not act as a deterrent but instead renew a nuclear arms race between global powers, experts specializing in nuclear weapons and disarmament told ThinkProgress. “There’s a number of reasons why this idea doesn’t make sense,” Kingston Reif, the Director of Disarmament and Threat Reduction Policy at the Arms Control Association, said. “[I don’t think that] Russia and China would understand its use to control escalation and not part of a campaign to change regimes in those countries.”

Such a move would be seen as provocative by the Chinese and Russians, Dr. Barry Blechman, a political scientist and cofounder of the Stimson Center who coauthored the report, told ThinkProgress.

With the strongest conventional military in the world at the U.S.’ disposal, experts believe that the threat of retaliation by conventional means is enough to deter the prospect of a nuclear attack.

Murdock’s idea for the U.S. to expand its arsenal of low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons and deploy them to allied countries was “terrible on so many grounds,” Blechman said, because it would upset U.S. allies uncomfortable with hosting nuclear weapons and would be “a huge waste of money.”

As we saw in our post-9/11 wars, sound analysis has little ability to stop our war machine. Expect a large part of these recommendations to appear in future DoD spending. That is, after all, the goal of the Project Atom.

Alice in “Madness Returns”

For More Information

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