pacifism

was just listening to an infuriating this american life episode that ran in the run up to the war in iraq. they were debating the reasons for and against. the scariest best argument for the war was that saddam hussein'd eventually get a nuke, and with that nuke he'd be able to take over the world. he'd bully other countries to bow to his will with the threat that he was crazy enough to nuke them if they didn't, damn the consequences. therefore, we had  to depose him before he'd have the craziness AND the nukes to deter us from intervening with his shit.

this is a powerful argument.

how much does it cost to produce a nuclear weapon from scratch and ignorance?

how many people would die in the war to overthrow him and its aftermath? (one interesting thing whenever one talks about nukes and war is that nuclear weapons are an instant, certain, horrifying calculation whereas a war can be the siege of stalingrad or a "cake walk")

the guy making the Crazy Saddam With Nukes argument invoked intelligence saying that saddam imagined himself filling the vacuum left by the soviet union, counterbalancing US power. this seems a strong argument for saddam being crazy, but a hilarious for US policy makers to freak out about, no? iraq in the run up to the war was a poor country with 30 million people and a pretty broken down army.

following the CSWN logic, saddam's not plausibly going to occupy these other countries with military might because he's got his own restive population to deal with—he's a dictator. rather, it posits a kind of bank hold-up scenario, no? "gimme this oil field and that port etc or i'll nuke you!" a la hitler with the czech republic, except very disproportionate and asymmetrical and trading almost entirely on craziness because apart from nuking somebody, or threatening to, there's oddly little he'd be able to do as pretty much every country in that region's got a respectable military, and even if they didn't, iraq just didn't have the resources to occupy its neighbors.

and i'd argue that if a country with evil ambitions DID have the resources that they're being provoked, a la japan and germany in world war two.

if the war was a "cake walk" and iraqis settled into beautiful democracy then there'd really be no argument. "freedom" and peaceable prosperity's clearly better for everybody than an evil dictator. but any halfway decent dictator has, by definition, totally messed up their country's prospects for returning to easy breezy liberty. dictatorships rely on empowering and thereby implicating a minority or two at the expense of everybody else, and then keeping everything else together with violence and terror. this is difficult to unravel, to bring back to liberated normalcy. think of the alawites in syria.

the dictatorships of poor countries devoting outrageous sums to military expenditures, or nuke development, are doing so to make it dangerous to topple them and to have a chip in negotiations for aid and the lifting of sanctions that've inevitably been imposed.