The Sept. 11 Canon: Week 1
Right Makes Might
From: Geraldine Brooks
To: Christopher Caldwell, Judith Shulevitz, Chris Suellentrop, and Ted Widmer Posted Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2001, at 4:42 PM ET
Who are these people?
This week's reading.
But wait a minute, Judith: Nobody said stop working on the defensive side. Nobody said stop developing vaccines or (back to kicking the CIA around) become totally negligent in the spycraft that should have alerted us much sooner to the Russian and Iraqi threat. The defensive work was not sunk by 1960s idealism. It was sunk by the sharper, faster wheeler-dealers at the Pentagon bazaar who saw more bucks in shiny weapons systems than in vials of vaccine.
Don't underestimate the effect of the heroic, idealistic, moral gesture. Sometimes, right is might. I think it is entirely arguable that the reason the Russians and the Iraqis never unleashed their dreadful arsenals is that they were in some way "infected" by the rightness of the U.S. stance: The U.S. Renunciation created an atmosphere of dreadful consequence and condemnation in which it became internationally unacceptable to do it. And remember, as Germs points out, the Iraqis kicked their germ program into high gear after they witnessed the huge international shrug of indifference to their use of poison gas on Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians.
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States, even rogue ones, mostly act according to logic and self-interest. Free-lance fanatics are a different story, and that's why it's cults like Aum and the Rajneeshees who have actually done the unthinkable.
Right Makes Might
From: Geraldine Brooks
To: Christopher Caldwell, Judith Shulevitz, Chris Suellentrop, and Ted Widmer Posted Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2001, at 4:42 PM ETNotes From The Fray Editor:
Jamal Thalji calls for books by Arabic authors. ADAS says that "the charge of excessive attention to 'politics' is thrown at all established religions…[and] is, of course, usually true…To say that Islam's success is knotted to its politics is just to say that it was successful." BML looks at Islamic history here, while Uno Who is reading Tom Clancy, and wondering who else is.
Comments:
Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult, tried to use biological agents in a terror attack in some of Japan's most densely populated cities. The cult's membership included technicians and other people with graduate-school-level training in biochemistry, biology, etc. They were nonetheless unable to deliver their weapons, so they opted instead for sarin gas (which they also basically botched).
While I do believe that some of the biowar doomsday scenarios are plausible and worth taking extreme measures to guard against, I also think that it is perhaps more difficult to deliver these weapons than is popularly portrayed. During World War I, one of the earliest uses of chemical weapons backfired heavily when the wind shifted and the chlorine gas blew back toward the Germans.
Finally, I think that a suicide "bio-bomber" may be less of a threat than a hijacker for psychological and religious reasons. Dying in an instant of fire is a much more "religiously" appealing way to go. Dying slowly of a self-induced plague doesn't seem quite so, well, glamorous, and probably not as impressive to God.
--Ananda Gupta
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
The U.S. abandoned its biological warfare program because of its difficulty in use as a controllable weapons system and as a public relations exercise to improve the U.S.'s image during the Vietnam War. Nixon said at the time that he was unconcerned about the U.S. not having such weapons systems since they would nuke anyone that used such weapons against the U.S. During the Gulf War the U.S. government warned Iraq that it would retaliate massively (the implication being the use of nuclear weapons) if the Iraqis used chemical or biological weapons.
The tragedy of U.S. policy is that they have spent a tremendous amount of money on weapons systems for wars which it will probably never fight, but did so little to protect Americans from much more likely terrorist scenarios including biological terrorism. There are many clever, sophisticated, well-funded and ruthless people in the world who can and will develop the technology to use these weapons. New Missile Defense is a complete waste of money since it is beyond belief that any government will ever launch these weapons against the U.S., but horrific bio-terrorism is almost a certainty in the future.
--Martin Kannengieser
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
(11/8)
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Notes From The Fray Editor:
Jamal Thalji calls for books by Arabic authors. ADAS says that "the charge of excessive attention to 'politics' is thrown at all established religions…[and] is, of course, usually true…To say that Islam's success is knotted to its politics is just to say that it was successful." BML looks at Islamic history here, while Uno Who is reading Tom Clancy, and wondering who else is.
Comments:
Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult, tried to use biological agents in a terror attack in some of Japan's most densely populated cities. The cult's membership included technicians and other people with graduate-school-level training in biochemistry, biology, etc. They were nonetheless unable to deliver their weapons, so they opted instead for sarin gas (which they also basically botched).
While I do believe that some of the biowar doomsday scenarios are plausible and worth taking extreme measures to guard against, I also think that it is perhaps more difficult to deliver these weapons than is popularly portrayed. During World War I, one of the earliest uses of chemical weapons backfired heavily when the wind shifted and the chlorine gas blew back toward the Germans.
Finally, I think that a suicide "bio-bomber" may be less of a threat than a hijacker for psychological and religious reasons. Dying in an instant of fire is a much more "religiously" appealing way to go. Dying slowly of a self-induced plague doesn't seem quite so, well, glamorous, and probably not as impressive to God.
--Ananda Gupta
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
The U.S. abandoned its biological warfare program because of its difficulty in use as a controllable weapons system and as a public relations exercise to improve the U.S.'s image during the Vietnam War. Nixon said at the time that he was unconcerned about the U.S. not having such weapons systems since they would nuke anyone that used such weapons against the U.S. During the Gulf War the U.S. government warned Iraq that it would retaliate massively (the implication being the use of nuclear weapons) if the Iraqis used chemical or biological weapons.
The tragedy of U.S. policy is that they have spent a tremendous amount of money on weapons systems for wars which it will probably never fight, but did so little to protect Americans from much more likely terrorist scenarios including biological terrorism. There are many clever, sophisticated, well-funded and ruthless people in the world who can and will develop the technology to use these weapons. New Missile Defense is a complete waste of money since it is beyond belief that any government will ever launch these weapons against the U.S., but horrific bio-terrorism is almost a certainty in the future.
--Martin Kannengieser
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
(11/8)