McFreedom

Eugene Volokh has a very thoughtful post on nuclear deterrence. It underscores the fallacy behind most reliance on nuclear deterrence (as opposed to intervention with conventional weapons) to prevent an attack on the US with a weapon of mass destruction: The moral obligation of one who has power is to go to great lengths to avoid using it. "Never kill when you can maim, never main when you can injure, never injure when you can walk away." Deterrence is not a goal. It is an effect. A detterent is successful only if you never use it, but not using it requires a lot of work.

With great destructive power comes great responsibility. Not just to be judicious using that power, but to be judicious about when you should use lesser power to prevent eventually having to pull the trigger. A lesson I think many of us have forgotten is in the use of negative sanctions (sanctions of course being a general term here; invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein is a "negative sanction") as part of communicating intent. I've made mistakes in the past where I was extremely forgiving of someone's errors and faults, and eventually let it slip until that person did something so terrible I had to drop a "nuclear weapon." As a manager, for instance, my first instinct with people was to stand way back. When someone made a mistake, I'd point it out gently, but take no sanction, write no report, threaten no action. Unfortunately, inevitably, some major error would occur - or the person would be directly insubordinate - because my lack of sanction was taken as tacit approval of poor work. At that point, my only recourse was to "drop the bomb" and fire them. This happened to me a couple of times, and I think both people were extremely surprised to discover that, while I rarely give direct, "top down" orders, disobeying one is completely unacceptable. Had I made more clear my displeasure - via sanctions - with more minor transgressions, they might have understood better that, while I prefer to simply trust the people in my organization, I do expect high standards of quality and conduct, and violations of those standards will not be tolerated. While I had told these people that I expected them to follow the few orders they received, I don't think they believe I'd actually use the threatened deterrence, because my previous "nice guy" behavior had led them to believe I was a pushover.

From a management perspective, firing someone is almost always a failure not of the person fired but of the manager; your job is to get people to accomplish a task, and if you fire them it is because they were unable to accomplish them, which means that you were unable to accomplish your job. I've always felt awful about every employee I've fired, and after a few times, I learned that, in fact, providing sanctions to the early mistakes is the nice thing to do. Because otherwise you may have to fire them, later, and neither of you want that. If the application of the final deterrent becomes necessary, you want to be able to ask yourself, "Did I do everything I could have to avoid that?" and have the answer clearly be "yes." And we're just talking about firing someone, here - if we are forced to destroy a city, how much greater our obligation to do everything we can to avoid it is!

One of my favorite scenes from the movie Star Wars is when Obi-Wan Kenobi is in the cantina at the beginning. A thug is harassing the farmboy Obi-Wan is with, for no real reason. Rather than intimidating the thug, Obi-Wan puts his hand on the thug's arm, and says, "This little one's not worth the effort. Come, let me get you something." Obi-Wan knows what his deterrent is - it's maining the guy with his lightsaber. The guy doesn't know what's going to happen to him if he continues down the path he's on, so Obi-Wan's only deterrent isn't useful. Instead, recognizing the moral responsibility he has to try to prevent this guy's arm getting cut off, Obi-Wan tries to buy him a drink. He'd rather buy him a drink than cut his arm off, even though he's an apparently awful man who claims to have the "death penalty in twelve systems." When his entreaties are refused and the man threatens Obi-Wan, of course, he is forced to cut the man's arm off. But he can sleep soundly at night because he knows he did everything he could - in the brief time he had - to prevent cutting his arm off.

Our application of force now will let Mr. Hussein (and, since he won't be in power after this, other would-be threats) know that we are serious about this and will not tolerate someone releasing a weapon of mass destruction on our soil. It is the nice thing to do, because if we don't, we'll eventually have to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. If we have to do that, it will be the biggest failure America has ever had.