WHEN CHINA ACQUIRED deliverable nuclear weapons, William F. Buckley Jr. advocated a pre-emptive attack to destroy them. That was a dangerous move, but, Buckley argued, it would prevent the development of far greater dangers. We know, in retrospect, that such a "remedy" for international trouble would have delayed (if not prevented) the disengagement of China from its senior Communist ally -- a disengagement that sped along the ending of the Cold War.
Buckley could see only one twig in the thicket of activities, visible and invisible, all around him. Break off that twig, he argued, and you need not fear the sturdy branch it might grow into.
But breaking the twig could affect far more significant growths, reaching down to the very roots of the thicket. Buckley did not know or appreciate the extent of disaffection between Soviet and Chinese leaders. He could not foresee the new developments that would be encouraged by President Nixon, in moves Buckley also criticized.
The argument Buckley made over China is the one Israel acted on when it bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor. President Bush is adopting the same approach as he jockeys toward an attack on Iraq's current nuclear potential. We cannot know what future developments might be prevented along with production of Iraq's missiles. This kind of argument looks to nothing but one development's indefinite future extension along its present curve.
Buckley weighed whatever lives might be lost in a pre-emptive strike against the greater number of lives to be lost if his hypothesis were accurate -- which, as we know, it was not. That is always the problem when one weighs imminent and actual bloodshed against hypothetical blood that might be shed somewhere off in the future. One risks trading real lives for imagined ones.
BUCKLEY'S PROPOSAL IS ANALYTICALLY useful because it reveals the logic, such as it was, behind other acts that were less obvious "pre-emptive strikes" against the Communist bloc. Our wars in Korea and Vietnam were both meant to "stop communism" before its spread touched our vital interests. The popular form of this argument was: "If we do not stop them here, where will we do so -- in Japan, in the Philippines, in California? If it comes to these later stages, will we be able to stop them at all?"
Buried assumptions in our Korean and Vietnamese wars were not analyzed. We took for granted that Southeast Asian Communists were doing the will of China, and that China was doing the will of Russia. By acting on a conviction of that solidarity among Communist regimes, we helped to perpetuate what was potentially a very fractious alliance. Its cracks did not show precisely because we were putting so much pressure on the components, forcing them back together in order to confront our military assaults. Our effort at "self-defense" helped consolidate -- in some measure, to create -- our foe.
These aspects of the situation were not evident because we were so busy working out the tricky calculus of current losses against future losses. Since this is weighing the actual against the hypothetical, those dealing in the calculus do everything they can to make the hypothetical future look more substantial. The "Communist menace" as it might touch our own shore was invoked as a near-certainty if we did not "stop them somewhere."
Conversely, the actual losses undergone in Korea or Vietnam were made as vague as possible, masked in euphemism. Hard estimates of immediate loss were evaded. Casualty statistics were delayed, and downplayed, and placed over against inflated "kill-counts" of the enemy. We counted bodies of our foes over and over with spurious exactitude, while falling into indefinite language about our own dead.
In balancing today's hard numbers against tomorrow's mere possibilities, a double action is undertaken to make the different entities look commensurate. The hypothetical is reified, while the immediate is made insubstantial. To protest this process, I sent Buckley's magazine (in 1969) what I considered a conservative argument against the Vietnam War, stating that it served no good anti-communist purpose. The heart of that argument was presented in these words:
May we engage in actual bloodshed today to reduce (or avoid) hypothetical bloodshed tomorrow? Before we make that decision, we must weigh, to the best of our ability, a number of crucial matters. We must come to the reasoned conclusion that:
1) our prospective enemy will reach a position, unless we block him at this key point, from which it is possible to destroy us; and that
2) having reached that position, he will have and exercise the intention of destroying us; because
3) we shall be unable, at that point, to exercise an effective deterrent; and
4) being unable to defend ourselves, we shall not receive sufficient help from others.
Buckley refused to print the article. The war was not a subject open to criticism in his pages, no matter how conservative the grounds for that criticism.
I was asking for a certain agnosticism about the future, a conservative recognition that we do not understand everything that lies around the bend, either for good or ill. Obviously, one can deflect a blow about to be delivered. One does not have to wait for its impact in order to react. And one can legitimately speculate on the future configuration of forces if their present interplay continues in a somewhat expectable manner. But it is another thing to make that kind of risky speculation a hard enough prediction to start killing people at the moment in order to deal with the future one has imagined.
The Kennedy brothers tried to assassinate Fidel Castro, from their belief that this hemisphere would not indefinitely tolerate his existence in such close proximity to us. Yet we have survived the 30 years of his reign, which grows less menacing rather than more as time goes by. The Kennedys were so sure that Castro was evil, and the source of all evil in Cuba, that they gave little hard thought to what would succeed or replace him in the wake of an assassination.
This kind of "futurism" can keep only one or two factors in mind to make for neat formulae: "The Americas minus Castro = Free World vindicated." The removal of Castro was seen as a good not contaminated by our act of removing him -- with its consequences among Latinos long conditioned to resent "Yankee" dictation.
Pat Robertson, in his 1988 campaign, advocated sending troops into Poland to "help" Lech Walesa. He did not foresee the crumbling of Eastern Europe any more than Buckley foresaw the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s. But this error about the future should teach us not to start bombing or invading as if we do know in detail the consequences of such action.
THE DYNAMICS OF OUR PAST use of hypothetical evils is at work in President Bush's treatment of Iraq. The future evil is described with vivid precision -- a worse-than-Hitler wielding the nightmare of ultimate weapons. The hypothesis is made more probable if the foe can be diabolized. Thus any doubt about his acting in predictably destructive ways can be dismissed as "whitewashing" the foe. The Kennedys argued that Castro would get and use nuclear weapons if he could -- though that would invite the obliteration of his entire island. (Actually, Castro wanted nuclear weapons only as a deterrent to the kinds of assault the Kennedys had mounted, openly and covertly, by invading the Bay of Pigs, sabotaging his country, and plotting against his life.)
So urgent is the desire to inflate the enemy of the moment -- Castro or Khrushchev or Khomeini or Gadhafi or Ortega or Noriega or Saddam -- that all other evils sink to insignificance in the presence of the Designated Devil. We recruit lesser devils against the greater one, thus making the lesser devils greater themselves. So we used Stalin against Hitler, Noriega against Ortega, Saddam against Khomeini. We are already helping possible future devils, like Hafez Assad, just as, yesterday, we helped Saddam.
The nuclear threat of Iraq must be exaggerated to give the devil a convincing power to work ultimate evil. Thus the possibility of one untested weapon getting eventually produced and used (used as crazily and self-destructively as Castro was supposed to use his weapons) has become the reason for shedding thousands of lives in the concrete present.
Along with the substantializing of the future threat, we put the synchronous etherealizing of immediate peril -- we talk of air "hits" and surgical war, we use the euphemistic "take out" (as in "take out Saddam" or "take out" his nuclear weapon, as if this were an equation from which one removes an element by some act of higher accounting). Once again, there is little thought about what might succeed or replace Saddam, or the effects of our being the ones to shed Arab blood.
If Buckley had had his way, the idea of pre-emptive strikes against nuclear facilities would have to be vindicated as each new nuclear facility was added to any country. (Israel already has this compulsion to justify its strike against Iraq by applying the same logic to new situations.) Are we to start down that road now, acting first whenever a hypothetical threat arises? Iraq today, Pakistan tomorrow?
The future is something we are sure of to our peril. No one anticipated the collapse of communism. We had helped prop it up from outside with our certainty that it was a single thing to be compacted by isolation, pressure, and hostility. If the "rollback" and "liberation" types had had their way, we would have been in a series of wars long ago to bring about what time and many unforeseen events have accomplished.
"Buying time" is usually a way of putting oneself in readiness for the unexpected. It reflects a humility about anyone's capacity to control events by foreseeing them. Anticipations of Armageddon are the best friends war has ever had. President Bush is creating a devil to scare us into action -- as Harry Truman, following Sen. Vandenburg's advice, diabolized "godless communism" to scare us into the Cold War in the first place. Summoning devils from the "vasty deep" is a way of giving hostages to hell.
Garry Wills, a Sojourners contributing editor, was adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University in Chicago when this article appeared. He is the author of the book Under God: Religion and American Politics (Simon & Schuster).
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