i still don't want to comment much on the presidential primary, other than to make the occasional joke at some candidate's expense. as i said at one people earlier, my attempts to avoid commenting on the campaign here is a one-man and completely ineffective protest against how early the primary season has started this year.
but sometimes i just can't resist. i'm getting increasingly worried that the democratic candidates will fall into the i-will-threaten-more-violence-than-you trap. for years the republican leadership has been confusing threatening violence with seriousness. i really don't want the same affliction to infect the democrats.
i mean, in my opinion, using a nuclear weapon, even to kill osama bin laden, is a worse crime against humanity than 9/11 was. such a strike would kill a lot more people then bin laden ever dreamed of--the vast majority of those victims not terrorists, and condemn another huge number of human beings to illness and suffering for decades to come. it's a sad state of affairs that we're even debating this. for obama to rule out such a strike does not show inexperience, it shows common sense.
look, i don't think nuclear weapons have that much of a point, but to the extent they are useful at all, it is as deterrence against someone else's nuclear arsenal. ruling out a first strike doesn't undermine nuclear deterrence at all. deterrence requires that you not rule out a retaliatory strike. you can still have deterrence and vow never to strike first. by ruling out using nukes to strike terrorist camps in pakistan, obama is clearly not talking about retaliation for someone else's nuclear attack. he's talking about striking the people "holed up in the mountains" on the pakistani-afghan border "who murdered 3,000 Americans." in other words, he's talking about striking al qaeda for what happened in 2001. if he went nuclear with that strike, that would be a first nuclear strike. and that would be a horrible crime.
