Why I Love Derbyshire, #52 in an Occassional Series

As a patriotic American who truly believes all that stuff about liberty and freedom, I really, really wish I could disagree with the following post (a reply to NRO's Andy McCarthy) by John Derbyshire. As they said back in those crazy Goldwater days, though, in my heart I know he is right:

Andy: You are of course right that open societies are fertile soil for terrorism. The War on Terror, though, is not really a war to stamp out terrorism, a thing that probably can't be done, as our leaders very likely know. It is a war on terrorists getting nukes. ("WMD" if you like, but that is really just a synonym for nukes. Chemical and biological terrorism, in the present state of the dark arts, are minor threats by comparison.) Nukes can only be made by biggish, stable--whether under dictatorship or law--well-organized nations. Any such nation friendly to terrorists, hostile to us, and looking as if it is on the way to getting nukes, demands action.

The question is: What action? My answer would be, has always been: Attack them, smash up their assets, kill their leaders if you can, cripple their military. Then leave them in rubble and chaos. They're not going to be making any nukes in that condition. Mission accomplished. That was what I hoped we would do to Iraq, and why I supported the war. It is what I believe we should now do to Iran. The reduced-to-rubble nation might indeed "breed terrorists"; but then, as you pointed out, so might New Zealand or Spain. Rubble nations are not a threat to us. Africa has a score of them; none threatens us.

The administration has taken another course, one of "spreading American values," "building democracy," and so on. This won't work. It will end in tears. Any leaders of Iraq installed under any system we set up will be lynched by ululating mobs within a month of our departure. We can't export our system, even to small, cheap, near places like Haiti (where we have been trying for nigh on a century).

This is bad news for the many people living in the sphere of barbarism who would like a quiet, middle-class, law-governed, Western style of life, but it's not especially bad news for **us**, if we can just acknowledge it frankly and act accordingly.

Incidentally, the best argument for the proposition that democracies don't make war on each other is Spencer Weart's Never at War. Weart patiently chronicles every counterexample you could come up with, trying to prove that proposition, mainly by slicing'n'dicing the definition of "democracy" to make it fit. I wasn't 100 percent convinced; but it is clear at any rate that free nations go to war with each other only grudgingly, under exceptional circumstances, and never with the annihilatory total-war mindset.

Sigh. I'm more and more afraid he is right on this point the more I think about it. What do you think?