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Maginot-Line Thinking in the War on Terrorism Barry Farber If you had a bad habit, could you break it if your life depended on it? Don't answer too quickly. Look how many people still smoke, overeat, overdrink, practice dangerous sex, and ride motorcycles and bikes without helmets. America's life may depend on breaking a habit right away. And, oddly enough, it's not a bad habit. Until recently it was a good habit. Let's call it the habit of curling up inside the morality of the old Western movie. The morality of the Western movie demanded that the bad guy shoot first. Then, and only then, was the good guy allowed to draw and shoot and, of course, invariably win. We can't blame ourselves for a character lapse for falling into that morality and locking ourselves inside it with pride. We would have had to be superhuman to avoid it. From 1949 until 1991 we lived with a sworn enemy whose weapons were as terrifying as our own, maybe more so. Once the Soviet Union got the A-bomb and shortly thereafter the H-bomb, we knew we could be the victims of a nuclear attack at any moment. But did we worry about it? Not really. We knew that even the "Godless Communists" wanted to live, too, and they were smart enough to know that their chances of doing so would shrink to zero if they were to strike. Even if their nukes destroyed every square inch of the United States, our Strategic Air Command, with loaded bombers in the air at all times and land-based bombers encircling the Soviet Union, and our nuclear submarines would return the annihilation to the Soviet Union. That comfort was afforded by the doctrine known as MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction. So, when the Kremlin displayed what Vice President and later presidential candidate Walter Mondale called "those god-awful weapons" on May Day and the anniversary of the October Revolution, we yawned at the display on TV and slept soundly night after night. The realization that a successful attempt on the life of Pakistani ruler Pervez Musharraf could deliver Pakistan's formidable arsenal of nuclear bombs to Islamic terrorists should induce more sweaty, breath-shortening fear in American hearts than all of Moscow's military parades put together. But it doesn't. We never think of it.
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Just as the unwritten taboos of a dinner party censor out discussion of certain topics, our own minds censor things from ourselves. It's obviously bad taste to bring up certain topics over the endive salad with that elegant dressing the hostess keeps bragging about. Likewise, our own minds tell us it's bad taste to contemplate an al-Qaida coup in Pakistan, where over 65 percent of the people admire Osama bin Laden and multiple assassination attempts against Musharraf have already occurred. Those protective little minds of ours even shelter us from the full implications of a nuclear Iran and a nuclear North Korea. We've simply grown up with the notion corkscrewed into our innermost thinking that sure, our enemies have everything they need to destroy us, BUT THEY'LL NEVER DARE USE IT! At least this is one national failing we can acknowledge without feeling guilty. We were conditioned. History bent our national twig in the direction of complacency. Did you ever see a Seminole Indian hypnotize an alligator by holding his jaw shut with one hand and gently massaging his white belly with the other? History worked our belly just right for those 42 years of effective deterrence. So, the change we must make is to convert our thinking from "They have it but they'll never use it" all the way over to "They'll use it the minute they get it!" President Bush has undoubtedly already arrived at this point but fears the American public would gag at any open repudiation of the old "Bad Guys Must Shoot First" doctrine. We should thank Norman Podhoretz for reminding us in a recent writing of President Bush's comments to the effect that he will not stand idly by as the perils to America mount. There's an interesting parallel between our conceptual gap today and the one that sank France in World War II. France mounted the most impressive defensive belt of fortifications in history, the Maginot Line, from the point in the east where France and Germany met at the Swiss border clear over to – no, NOT the Atlantic Ocean. That never occurred to the French. They thought extending that defensive line to the Belgian border was quite sufficient. After all, France had nothing to fear from Belgium.
The idea that Nazi Germany could swiftly overrun Belgium and pour across into France where there was no Maginot Line was apparently "bad taste" to France's military planners. America is now being awfully "French" in persisting in the massaged-belly assumption that "Any country that uses the nuclear bomb against America will be obliterated." Perhaps yes; but what if it's not a country? What if it's a band of terrorists who decide which of 12 different ways to smuggle a nuclear device into America suits them best and detonates on American soil, whereupon every country in the world – the good and the guilty – cup their hands to their lips and yell through the radioactive cloud, "Oh, what a terrible thing some awful people have done to you, America!" Here's the philosophical homework for Americans. We know we have nothing to fear from Norway, Paraguay, Zambia, Nepal, and literally over 100 other countries. We know exactly which countries support the prime Nuke-America wannabes. Americans rallied so exquisitely after the British grabbed American seaman, triggering the War of 1812, and after Mexican bandits marauded across the U.S. border, triggering the Mexican War, and after Spain blew up the American battleship Maine in Havana harbor, triggering the Spanish-American War (Spain may have gotten a bad rap!), and after Germany sank the Lusitania, triggering America's entry into World War I, and after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, triggering America's entry into World War II. In every one of those conflicts America was the "good guy" who shot last. If the good guy shoots first, can he still be the good guy? And if the good guy shoots last in today's world, can he still be the surviving guy?
Editor's note:
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