Annihilation from Within by Fred Iklé (best interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

clear”—an answer that turned out to be absolutely wrong. Such utterly wrong forecasts have been all too common when the U.S. administration urged Congress to adopt a new immigration law.

More serious is the well-established fact that the current asylum procedures undermine the security of democracies. It has been amply documented in news reports and by government commissions that dozens of terrorists who participated in the attacks in Europe and the United States—before 9/11, during 9/11, and since then—have been able to do so by taking advantage of the flawed asylum system. The fatuity of it all has no limits. Recall that after 9/11, British and Dutch soldiers fought in Afghanistan with their American allies to root out the cruelly oppressive Taliban regime. Yet a couple of years later, a Taliban soldier who had fought against the British liberators fled from the new Afghanistan and was granted asylum in England. He was not the only Taliban whose asylum claim was being processed by the British authorities. Why grant them asylum? Incredibly, the rationale was that they feared persecution by the new, democratic Afghan authorities. In addition, more than two thousand asylum applicants from Afghanistan reached the Netherlands in 2003 and 2004. In accordance with the UN Asylum Convention, they had to be processed, and after years of protracted legal wrangling the chances were good for hundreds of them to remain in the Netherlands. Since NATO forces had liberated Afghanistan by that time and worked to restore democracy, one wonders how many of these applicants were Taliban soldiers or sympathizers, that is to say, not the politically oppressed but the oppressors.14 Would England or the Netherlands in 1947 have granted asylum to members of the Waffen-SS who feared persecution by the new, democratic government in Bonn? As the scolds in ancient Greece and Rome used to say: quod Deus perdere vult, dementat prius (whom God wants to destroy, He first disables with stupidity).

5. NATIONAL UNITY Of all the ingredients needed to defeat an attempted annihilation from within, perhaps the most important is national unity. This holds true for the United States, England, Japan, Germany, France, indeed for any democracy that might be attacked. A shining example for all was the Churchill-Attlee government created in May 1940. Following the German invasion of Holland and Belgium, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain realized that he ought to step down, and Churchill was called to form a new government—the National Coalition Government. At first, Churchill came under considerable pressure to purge ministers who had been responsible for the Munich agreement with Hitler and for Britain’s inadequate war preparations. But he would not join “the would-be heresy-hunters.” As he explains in his memoirs: “Official responsibility rested upon the Government of the time. But moral responsibilities were more widely spread…. No one had more right than I to pass a sponge across the past.” Throughout the war, Attlee and his Labor Party loyally supported the National Coalition Government. “It was a proud thought,” Churchill recalls, “that the Parliamentary Democracy … can endure, surmount, and survive all trials. Even the threat of annihilation did not daunt our Members, but this fortunately did not pass.”15

David Reynolds, in his masterful and probing study of Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War, adds a thought-provoking enrichment to Churchill’s own account of his struggles to maintain national unity and also lead the nation’s fight for survival. “Both struggles absorbed a huge amount of time and emotional energy. Churchill recognized the bleakness of Britain’s predicament—whatever his public bravado, there were moments of private doubt—and he had to adduce plausible reasons for fighting on…. To see the whole picture makes Churchill a more impressive figure than the almost blindly pugnacious bulldog of popular stereotype.”16

It is an edifying story to this day. National unity was essential for that success. It was also essential for the United States—during the war as well as afterward, when the time came to establish democracy in Japan and Germany. Thanks to Franklin Roosevelt’s and Harry Truman’s ability to maintain bipartisan support on many foreign policy issues, America could play a predominant and constructive role in shaping the new world order. Both presidents enlisted the support of Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg to prepare the Senate’s acceptance of the United Nations, and Truman asked the Republican statesman John Foster Dulles to negotiate the Japanese peace treaty. To end America’s isolationism, Roosevelt and Truman had the political sophistication that Woodrow Wilson lacked. Yet many academics describe that successful American engagement in world affairs as “Wilsonian.” Given the global havoc that Woodrow Wilson caused, one wonders whether academics revere Wilson merely because he was one of them.

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RESTORATION

THE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE is a saga with many sad endings. Down through the centuries, a new beginning has followed each demise and new civilizations have been built on the ruins of the old. Whenever a nation or an empire had lost its power, pride, and glory, the waning societies have been replenished by a new influx of people—or alas, have been superseded by multitudes of barbarians. In any event, the decline and fall of great cultures rarely erased the memories of their splendorous past. We still treasure the literature and philosophy of the Roman Empire, long after the sack of Rome in the fifth century and the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

But new Great Destroyers are now arriving on stage—the spread of mass destruction weapons beyond national control, and technologies that can invade the sanctuary of the human mind. These trends will make possible a nuclear power-grab by aspiring tyrants, and in the more distant future might set off an international competition among nations to build a system with superhuman intelligence.

The morning after a nuclear power-grab, fear of follow-on attacks will grip the populace and preoccupy government leaders in many countries. Responding to these deep-felt anxieties, many prominent politicians and academics will clamor for utopian solutions. If biological weapons had been used in