Dec 13, 2005

Slow Pearl Harbors

Reacting to a sudden attack, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, is one thing, but what about the slow Pearl Harbors? James Johnson and Robert Zarate look at Roberta Wohlstetter's concept of disasters in the making, first unveiled in a 1979 essay in the Washington Quarterly, "The Pleasures of Self-Deception."
Wohlstetter saw a slow Pearl Harbor in Britain's reluctance during the 1930s to recognize that Nazi Germany was using arms control agreements not to avoid what Hitler had called "an unlimited arms race," but to slow Britain's rearmament while using ambiguous violations of these agreements to accelerate its own.

Today, the problems posed by nuclear proliferation may be best understood as potential slow Pearl Harbors. Despite prolonged negotiations in the 1990s--in particular, the establishment of the Agreed Framework in 1994--North Korea successfully used a series of ambiguous violations to test American, Western, and international resolve while accumulating plutonium for several nuclear explosives. Lingering uncertainty about North Korea's intentions dissipated in 2003, when Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and declared its possession of nuclear weapons.

In 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, became aware of undeclared Iranian nuclear activities. But today Iran--claiming an intention to comply with IAEA safeguards while nevertheless reasserting its "inalienable right" to practically any nuclear activity short of inserting fissile material into a nuclear explosive's core--is repeatedly testing American, Western, and international resolve.

One could also argue that Saddam Hussein was a slow Pearl Harbor in the making.
Saddam invaded Kuwait, remember? And Bush 41 assembled a by-the-UN-book coalition and expelled him. And in the intervening 13 years Saddam flaunted nearly a score of UN resolutions and conditions imposed as conditions of his first war; it was only the resolve of the United States along with the support of allies like Great Britain that ended the filling of the mass graves in Iraq.

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