Nuclear holocaust: A risk too big even for martyrs?

International Herald Tribune, France
Oct 27 2006

Nuclear holocaust: A risk too big even for martyrs?
By Noah Feldman The New York Times

Published: October 27, 2006

For nearly 50 years, worries about a nuclear Middle East centered on
Israel. Arab leaders resented the fact that Israel was the only
atomic power in the region, a resentment heightened by America’s
tacit approval of the situation. But they were also pretty certain
that Israel (which has never explicitly acknowledged having nuclear
weapons) would not drop the bomb except as a very last resort. That
is why Egypt and Syria were unafraid to attack Israel during the
October 1973 Yom Kippur War. "Israel will not be the first country in
the region to use nuclear weapons," went the Israelis’ coy formula.
"Nor will it be the second."

Today the nuclear game in the region has changed. When the Arab
League’s secretary general, Amr Moussa, called for "a Middle East
free of nuclear weapons" this past May, it wasn’t Israel that
prompted his remarks. He was worried about Iran, whose self-declared
ambition to become a nuclear power has been steadily approaching
realization.

The anti-Israel statements of the Iranian president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, coupled with Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas,
might lead you to think that the Arab states would welcome Iran’s
nuclear program. After all, the call to wipe the Zionist regime from
the map is a longstanding cliché of Arab nationalist rhetoric. But
the interests of Shiite non-Arab Iran do not always coincide with
those of Arab leaders. A nuclear Iran means, at the very least, a
realignment of power dynamics in the Persian Gulf. It could
potentially mean much more: a historic shift in the position of the
long-subordinated Shiite minority relative to the power and prestige
of the Sunni majority, which traditionally dominated the Muslim
world. Many Arab Sunnis fear that the moment is ripe for a Shiite
rise. Iraq’s Shiite majority has been asserting the right to govern,
and the lesson has not been lost on the Shiite majority in Bahrain
and the large minorities in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah
of Jordan has warned of a "Shiite crescent" of power stretching from
Iran to Lebanon via Iraq and (by proxy) Syria.

But geopolitics is not the only reason Sunni Arab leaders are rattled
by the prospect of a nuclear Iran. They also seem to be worried that
the Iranians might actually use nuclear weapons if they get them. A
nuclear attack on Israel would engulf the whole region. But that is
not the only danger: Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere fear that
the Iranians might just use a nuclear bomb against them. Even as
Iran’s defiance of the United States and Israel wins support among
some Sunnis, extremist Sunnis have been engaging in the act of
takfir, condemning all Shiites as infidels. On the ground in Iraq,
Sunni takfiris are putting this theory into practice, aiming at
Shiite civilians and killing them indiscriminately. Shiite militias
have been responding in kind, and massacres of Sunni civilians are no
longer isolated events.

Adding the nuclear ingredient to this volatile mix will certainly
produce an arms race. If Iran is going to get the bomb, its neighbors
will have no choice but to keep up. North Korea, now protected by its
own bomb, has threatened proliferation – and in the Middle East it
would find a number of willing buyers. Small principalities with huge
U.S. Air Force bases, like Qatar, might choose to rely on an American
protective umbrella. But Saudi Arabia, which has always seen Iran as
a threatening competitor, will not be willing to place its nuclear
security entirely in American hands. Once the Saudis are in the hunt,
Egypt will need nuclear weapons to keep it from becoming irrelevant
to the regional power balance – and sure enough, last month Gamal
Mubarak, President Mubarak’s son and Egypt’s heir apparent, very
publicly announced that Egypt should pursue a nuclear program.

Given the increasing instability of the Middle East, nuclear
proliferation there is more worrisome than almost anywhere else on
earth. As nuclear technology spreads, terrorists will enjoy
increasing odds of getting their hands on nuclear weapons. States –
including North Korea – might sell bombs or give them to favored
proxy allies, the way Iran gave Hezbollah medium-range rockets that
Hezbollah used this summer during its war with Israel. Bombing
through an intermediary has its advantages: deniability is, after
all, the name of the game for a government trying to avoid nuclear
retaliation.

Proliferation could also happen in other ways. Imagine a succession
crisis in which the Saudi government fragments and control over
nuclear weapons, should the Saudis have acquired them, falls into the
hands of Saudi elites who are sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, or at
least to his ideas. Or Al Qaeda itself could purchase ready-made
bombs, a feat technically much less difficult than designing nuclear
weapons from scratch. So far, there are few nuclear powers from whom
such bombs can be directly bought: as of today, only nine nations in
the world belong to the nuclear club. But as more countries get the
bomb, tracing the seller will become harder and harder, and the
incentive to make a sale will increase.

II.

The prospect of not just one Islamic bomb, but many, inevitably
concentrates the mind on how Muslims – whether Shiite or Sunni –
might use their nuclear weapons. In the mid-1980’s, when Pakistan
became the first Islamic state to go nuclear, it was still possible
to avoid asking the awkward question of whether there was something
distinctive about Islamic belief or practice that made possession of
nuclear technology especially worrisome. Most observers assumed that
Islamic states could be deterred from using nuclear force just like
other states: by the threat of massive retaliation.

During the last two decades, however, there has been a profound
change in the way violence is discussed and deployed in the Muslim
world. In particular, we have encountered the rise of suicide
bombing. In historic terms, this development is new and unexpected.
Suicide bombing has no traditional basis in Islam. As a technique, it
was totally absent from the successful Afghan jihad against the
Soviet Union. Although suicide bombing as a tool of stateless
terrorists was dreamed up a hundred years ago by the European
anarchists immortalized in Joseph Conrad’s "Secret Agent," it became
a tool of modern terrorist warfare only in 1983, when Shiite
militants blew up the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Since then, suicide bombing has spread through the Muslim world with
astonishing speed and on a surprising course. The vocabulary of
martyrdom and sacrifice, the formal videotaped preconfession of
faith, the technological tinkering to increase deadliness – all are
now instantly recognizable to every Muslim. And as suicide bombing
has penetrated Islamic cultural consciousness, its list of targets
has steadily expanded. First the targets were American soldiers, then
mostly Israelis, including women and children. From Lebanon and
Israel, the technique of suicide bombing moved to Iraq, where the
targets have included mosques and shrines, and the intended victims
have mostly been Shiite Iraqis. The newest testing ground is
Afghanistan, where both the perpetrators and the targets are orthodox
Sunni Muslims. Not long ago, a bombing in Lashkar Gah, the capital of
Helmand Province, killed Muslims, including women, who were applying
to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Overall, the trend is definitively in
the direction of Muslim-on-Muslim violence. By a conservative
accounting, more than three times as many Iraqis have been killed by
suicide bombings in the last 3 years as have Israelis in the last 10.
Suicide bombing has become the archetype of Muslim violence – not
just to frightened Westerners but also to Muslims themselves.

What makes suicide bombing especially relevant to the nuclear
question is that, by design, it unsettles the theory of deterrence.
When the suicide bomber dies in an attack, he means to send the
message "You cannot stop me, because I am already willing to die." To
make the challenge to deterrence even more stark, a suicide bomber
who blows up a market or a funeral gathering in Iraq or Afghanistan
is willing to kill innocent bystanders, including fellow Muslims.
According to the prevailing ideology of suicide bombing, these
victims are subjected to an involuntary martyrdom that is no less
glorious for being unintentional.

So far, the nonstate actors who favor suicide bombing have limited
their collateral damage to those standing in the way of their own
bombs. But the logic of sacrificing other Muslims against their own
wills could be extended to the national level. If an Islamic state or
Islamic terrorists used nuclear weapons against Israel, the United
States or other Western targets, like London or Madrid, the
guaranteed retaliation would cost the lives of thousands and maybe
millions of Muslims. But following the logic of suicide bombing, the
original bomber might reason that those Muslims would die in God’s
grace and that others would live on to fight the jihad. No state in
the Muslim world has openly embraced such a view. But after 9/11, we
can no longer treat the possibility as fanciful.

Raising the question of Islamic belief and the bomb, however, is not
a substitute for strategic analysis of the rational interests of
Islamic governments. Like other states, Islamic states act on the
basis of ordinary power politics as much as or more than on the basis
of religious motivation. Pakistan, which tested a series of warheads
in 1998, at the height of tensions with India, has not used its
atomic power as a tool of the faithful in a global jihad. The
proliferation operation spearheaded by the nuclear scientist – and
sometime Pakistani national hero – Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan appears to
have been based on a combination of national interest and greed, not
on religious fervor. Khan found buyers in Iran and Libya, but also in
decidedly non-Islamic North Korea. (In a twist much stranger than
fiction, Saddam Hussein apparently turned down the offer.)

Some observers think that Iran, too, wants the bomb primarily to
improve its regional position and protect itself against regime
change – not to annihilate Israel. According to this view, Iran’s
nuclear push reflects a drive to what is sometimes called national
greatness and might more accurately be defined as the ability of a
country to thumb its nose at the United States without fear of major
repercussions. A televised pageant hastily arranged to celebrate
Iran’s atomic program in April of this year featured traditional
Persian dancing and colorful local garb intermixed with make-believe
vials of enriched uranium. To an Iranian audience accustomed to
decoding official symbols, these references were nationalist, not
pan-Islamic. (They were also subtly subversive of the mullahs:
singing and dancing are not favored forms of expression in the
clerical enclave of Qom.)

But at the same time, Ahmadinejad has emphasized Iran’s pan-Islamic
aspirations to act on behalf of Muslims everywhere. An emerging
nuclear power needs friends. Right now Iran wants to reduce, not
promote, division between Sunnis and Shiites – and promoting broader
"Islamic" interests by going after Israel is one way to lessen Sunni
fears about Iran’s rise. Ahmadinejad has put his money where his
mouth is, providing Hezbollah with medium-range missiles – though
apparently not chemical warheads – to use against Israel. The
nationalist language he has sometimes used at home may be a cover for
sincerely held pan-Islamic ends – a version of the old revolutionary
strategy of making nationalist claims in order to attract the support
of those fellow Iranians who do not respond well to Islamist
ideology. That it is convenient for Iran to emphasize Islamic unity
does not mean that at least some of its leaders do not believe in it
as a motivating goal.

It is common among foreign-policy realists to suppose that a country
acting on nationalist motives is easier to deter than a country moved
by religious ones. There is no especially strong evidence for this
assumption – plenty of nationalist regimes have done crazy things
when they logically should have been deterred – but the claim has a
common-sense ring to it. Nationalists care about peoples and states,
which need to be alive to prosper. It is a basic tenet of nationalism
that there is nothing higher than the nation-state itself, the
pinnacle of a people’s self-expression. Religious thinkers, on the
other hand, believe almost by definition that there is something in
heaven greater than government here on earth. Under the right
circumstances, they might sacrifice lives – including their own – to
serve the divine will as they interpret it.

III.

We urgently need to know, then, what Islam says about the bomb. Of
course there is no single answer to this question. The world’s
billion-plus Muslims differ regarding many aspects of their
1,400-year-old religious tradition. Furthermore, nuclear weapons are
a relatively new technology, unforeseen by the Prophet and
unmentioned in the Koran. Nevertheless, contemporary Muslims are
engaged in interpreting their tradition to ascertain how and when
nuclear power may be used. Their writings, contained in fatwas and
treatises that can be found on the Web and in print, tell a
fascinating and disturbing story.

The Islamic discussion of nuclear weapons is profoundly intertwined
with a parallel discussion of suicide bombing that is also taking
place in the Muslim world. Suicide bombing and nuclear weapons
typically kill without discrimination, murdering soldiers or
civilians, men or women or children. And using nuclear force against
another nuclear power can be suicidal, in the broad sense that
retaliation may destroy the nation that attacked first. Beyond these
commonalities is the fact that the rise of suicide bombing is driving
a historic reconsideration of what might be called the Islamic ethics
of violence. To consider Islam and the bomb today must thus
inevitably draw us into the complex legal and political thinking of
those Muslim authorities who justify the use of force.

The story starts with traditional Islamic law. The Shariah never
followed the Roman adage that in war the laws are silent. Because
jihad is a pillar of Islam, and because in Islam God’s word takes
legal form, the classical scholars devoted considerable care to
identifying the laws of jihad. In common with the just-war doctrine
developed in Christian Europe, the law of jihad governed when it was
permissible to fight and what means could lawfully be adopted once
warfare had begun. There were basic ground rules about who was fair
game. "A woman was found killed in one of the battles fought by the
Messenger of God," runs a report about the Prophet Muhammad
considered reliable and binding by the Muslim scholars. "So the
Messenger of God forbade the killing of women and children." This
report was universally understood to prohibit the deliberate killing
of noncombatant women and children. Some scholars interpreted it to
mean that anyone incapable of warfare should be protected and so
extended the ban to the elderly, the infirm and even male peasants,
who as a rule did not fight. Muslims living among the enemy were also
out of bounds. These rather progressive principles were broadly
accepted by the Islamic legal authorities, Sunni and Shiite alike.
For well over a thousand years, no one seriously questioned them.

Such black-and-white rules were well suited to the hand-to-hand or
horse-to-horse combat characteristic of limited medieval wars. A few
quirky challenges did arise, and the Muslim lawyers had to deal with
them. The great theologian and jurist al-Ghazali, who wrote in the
11th and 12th centuries and was widely noted for his revival of
religious piety and his skepticism of secular philosophy, dealt with
the problem of human shields. He ruled that if the enemy drove
captured Muslims before him, the Muslim army could still fight back,
even if it might mean killing some of those Muslims. The reason he
gave was that "we know that the law intends minimizing killing."
There was also the catapult – precursor of artillery and air power –
which was capable of sending a burning projectile into a populated
city, where the resulting fire might kill women or children.
Authorities differed on whether that tactic was permissible. Some
disallowed the catapult when children or Muslim captives were in the
city. In support, they cited a verse from the Koran that reads, "Had
they been separated clearly, then We would have chastised the
unbelievers among them with a painful chastisement." According to
this school of thought, the "separation" of permissible targets
(i.e., non-Muslim men) from impermissible targets is the precondition
for a general attack. Another school of thought, by contrast,
permitted the use of the catapult regardless of collateral damage in
order to serve the general interest of the Muslims.

No law can exist for a millennium without being broken, and there are
scattered historical reports, mostly from Christian chroniclers, of
Muslim forces acting outside the bounds of lawful jihad, without the
authorization of the scholars. Men were always considered legitimate
targets, and Muslim armies sometimes slaughtered them just as Muslims
could be slaughtered by their enemies. Remarkably enough, though, the
legal principles of jihad protecting women, children and fellow
Muslims survived well into the modern era, when the secular regimes
of the Muslim world began to fight according to secular ideas. The
World War I Armenian genocide, which took place in the last,
secularizing gasp of the declining Ottoman Empire, was the first
really substantial systematic violation of the ban on killing women
and children in recorded Islamic history. In the bloody 20th century,
when mass exterminations took place in Europe, Africa and Asia,
Muslim states had a relatively better record, marred of course by
Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds. And there have been the
genocidal killings in Darfur in this new century. Even these horrific
events, however, were not dignified by the claim that they were
permitted under the law of jihad.

IV.

The last two decades have seen a challenge to this Islamic tradition
of warfare under law, a challenge driven mostly by the attempt to
justify suicide bombing despite its evident inconsistency with
Islamic tradition. On the subject of suicide, the Koran could hardly
be clearer: "Do not kill yourselves; for surely God has been merciful
to you." Faced with this explicit text, the solution of the militant
Islamist ideologues has been to avoid the category of suicide
altogether and to treat the bomber as a martyr rather than as one who
has taken his own life. This interpretation is not very convincing in
historical terms: martyrdom classically meant that another person
killed the Muslim warrior, not that he pushed the button himself.
Nevertheless, many Muslims now seem to find the argument convincing.
Even among rather secular Muslims, it has become standard to refer to
suicide bombers as martyrs.

The killing of women, children and Muslim men, however, has proved
harder to explain away as a permissible exercise of jihad. The
reaction to 9/11, which has (so far) been the high-water mark of
suicide bombing, illustrates the nature of the difficulty of
reconciling suicide bombing with Islamic law. One problem concerns
the offensive nature of the attack at a time when the United States
was not at war with any Muslim entity. Offensive jihad requires the
authorization of a legitimate Muslim leader, absent on 9/11. A more
serious concern was the obvious reality that the 9/11 attacks were
certain to kill – and did kill – women, children and Muslims, all in
direct contravention of classical jihad principles. Since the whole
point of 9/11 was to announce and embody jihad on the international
stage, the attacks quickly became the centerpiece of a high-stakes
debate about whether they did or did not qualify as legitimate acts
of jihad.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was sometimes asserted in the
West that there were no Muslim voices condemning the attacks. This
was never true. Prominent Muslim scholars expressed their
disapprobation in public arenas like television and the Internet.
These included senior Sunni scholars like the grand mufti of Saudi
Arabia and the head of Al-Azhar, in Egypt, nominally the flagship
institution of Sunni higher learning – who gave a news conference.
More popular figures, like Al Jazeera’s resident cleric, Sheik Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, explained that Islam "considers the attack on innocent
human beings a grave sin." Shiite scholars also spoke out, including
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran.

The position of the Muslim scholars and observers who condemned the
9/11 attacks was simple and consistent across the Sunni-Shiite
divide: this was not jihad but an unlawful use of violence. Offensive
jihad was prohibited in the absence of formal authorization by a
Muslim leader. But even if the attacks could somehow be construed as
defensive, the perpetrators of 9/11 broke the rules with their
willingness to kill women and children. In confident and insistent
tones, these critics cited the classical scholars and insisted that
nothing in Islamic law could justify the tactics used by Al Qaeda.
Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the Lebanese cleric whose
spiritual authority is recognized by Hezbollah, gave an interview to
the Beirut newspaper Al Safir in which he asserted that given their
impermissible choice of targets, the 9/11 bombers were not martyrs
but "merely suicides."

At the same time, it is important to note that in 2001 few prominent
Muslim scholars – the Saudi grand mufti was the main exception –
condemned the use of suicide bombings in all circumstances. Fadlallah
approved the attack on the U.S. Marines in 1983 and, according to the
United States, played a role in ordering it. Qaradawi, whose
television presence gives him reason to stay within the Islamist
mainstream, distinguished the 9/11 attacks from the permissible
defensive jihad of the Palestinians. He was happy to praise a God who
"through his infinite wisdom has given the weak a weapon the strong
do not have, and that is their ability to turn their bodies into
bombs as Palestinians do." Qaradawi has also repeated the common view
that the killing of Israeli women is justified on the grounds that
all Israelis must serve in the military, and so no Israeli is a true
noncombatant: "An Israeli woman is not like women in our societies,
because she is a soldier."

The equivocation by Muslim scholars with respect to the technique of
suicide bombing reflected the reality that throughout the Muslim
world, Palestinian suicide bombers were by 2001 identified as martyrs
dying in a just cause. This, in turn, was the natural outgrowth of
the decades before suicide bombing, when Palestinian terrorists were
applauded for killing Israeli civilians, including women and
children. Given that embracing Palestinian suicide bombing had become
a widespread social norm, it would have been essentially unthinkable
for an important Muslim scholar to condemn the practice without
losing his standing among Muslims worldwide. In the Islamic world, as
in the U.S. Supreme Court, the legal authorities cannot get too far
away from their public constituency without paying a price.

What happened, in other words, is that without the scholars paying
too much attention to the question, the killing of Israeli women and
children had become a kind of exception to the ordinary laws of
jihad. Opportunists like bin Laden then began to widen the loophole
to include new victims. With respect to the unauthorized nature of
his offensive jihad, bin Laden asserted that in fact the attacks were
defensive, since in his mind the U.S. was occupying the sacred soil
of Saudi Arabia – just as Israel was occupying the Muslim land of
Palestine. Once all of Saudi Arabia was placed on a par with the holy
cities of Mecca and Medina, traditionally closed to non-Muslims, the
presence of American soldiers anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula (even
if their presence was with the permission of the Saudi government)
could be depicted as a profanation, a violation of the Prophet’s
deathbed directive to "banish the pagans from the Arabian Peninsula."

Bin Laden was embroidering on the theories of his onetime mentor
Abdullah Azzam, the intellectual godfather of Al Qaeda. Azzam was a
Palestinian Islamist who made his way to Afghanistan via Saudi Arabia
and established the so-called Bureau of Services to channel Arab
youth into the Afghan jihad. As Azzam trod his personal path from
Palestinian militancy to universal pan-Islamic jihadism, he wrote an
influential treatise called "Defense of Muslim Lands." In it, Azzam
argued that not a single hand span of Muslim territory anywhere could
ever be ceded to the enemy "because the land belongs to Allah and to
Islam." Though Azzam would never have acknowledged it, his account of
the divine ownership of Muslim lands was probably influenced –
unconsciously, to be sure – by religious-Zionist claims about the
holiness of the Land of Israel.

When it came to the killing of civilians, bin Laden’s thought
developed more gradually. In early pronouncements, before 9/11, he
spoke as if the killing of women and children was inherently an
atrocity. "Nor should one forget," he admonished an interviewer in
1996, "the deliberate, premeditated dropping of the H bombs [sic] on
cities with their entire populations of children, elderly and women,
as was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki." After 9/11, however,
the argument changed. Now bin Laden began to suggest that American
civilians were fair game. He could not argue that like Israelis, all
Americans were subject to mandatory military service. Instead he
proposed that because "the American people are the ones who choose
their government by their own free will," and because they "have the
ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government,"
attacks on American civilians were justified. Voting was now playing
the role for Americans that military service played in the case of
Israelis: the active step transforming civilians into fair game.

Such an appeal to collective responsibility was, however, pretty weak
in Islamic legal terms. It might suffice for bin Laden’s videotaped
self-justifications, and it might salve the consciences of potential
jihadis hoping to join the rank and file of Al Qaeda. But it would
never satisfy serious students of classical Islamic law, who found
the 9/11 attacks problematic from an Islamic legal perspective.

In Saudi Arabia in particular, radical Muslim scholars with much more
learning than bin Laden have sought to develop legally persuasive
justifications for civilian killings. Probably the most sophisticated
effort from a legal standpoint is a document titled "A Treatise on
the Law of the Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction Against the
Unbelievers," written in 2003 by a brilliant Saudi dissident named
Sheik Nasir bin Hamad al-Fahd. (Fahd, a theorist rather than an
activist, is currently back in prison, as he has been off and on for
almost a decade.) The treatise begins with the assumption that the
world’s Muslims are under attack. But how are today’s Muslims
supposed to defend themselves, given their military inferiority?
Fahd’s response is that, if they have no other choice, they may use
any means necessary – including methods that would otherwise violate
the laws of jihad. "If the unbelievers can be repelled . . . only by
using" weapons of mass destruction, then "their use is permissible,
even if you kill them without exception."

Lest his argument prove too much, Fahd tempers it by the claim that
the Muslims fighting the jihad may not inflict disproportionately
more harm on the enemy than the enemy has inflicted on them. That
raises the question of the extent of American guilt. "Some Brothers
have added up the number of Muslims killed directly or indirectly by
[American] weapons and come up with a figure of nearly ten million,"
the treatise states. This total, Fahd concludes, would authorize the
use of weapons of mass destruction to kill 10 million Americans:
indeed, "it would be permissible with no need for further [legal]
argument." (The number is never explained or analyzed, and you might
assume that it was meant to correspond very roughly to the population
of New York.)

Fahd’s arguments sit uneasily with the classical Islamic discussions
of the laws of jihad. The classical Islamic law never explicitly says
that women and children may be intentional targets if it is the only
way to win the jihad. It does not allow violations of the law just
because the enemy has broken the rules or killed many Muslims. So the
treatise must fall back on whatever evidence it can muster from the
classical sources that seems to modify the basic rules. The catapult
rears its head and is cited as precedent for nonspecific killing. The
right to fight even when Muslim hostages may be killed is brought out
as proof of the permissibility of collateral damage when there is no
other choice.

The legal arguments in use here are stronger than bin Laden’s
makeweights, but they, too, would probably not be sufficient on their
own to justify the deviation from the legal traditions of jihad
wrought by today’s jihadis. The notion that it’s right because it’s
necessary is doing the real work, and old-fashioned legal arguments
are following along. It is no accident that the argument from
necessity has been so prominent in modern Western writing about
modern warfare in general and the nuclear bomb in particular. If the
technology of mass destruction can be exported, why not the
justification that comes with it?

Within the world of radical Islam, there are those who believe that
the erosion of the laws of jihad has gone too far. There are reports
of difficulty recruiting foreign candidates for suicide missions
directed at Iraqi civilians. The debate about how jihad may be
prosecuted is not over by any means. But it is an unavoidable fact
that the classic restrictions on the killing of women, children and
Muslims in jihad have been deeply undermined in the last decade.

If the Islamic laws of war are under revision, or at least the
subject of intense debate, what does that mean for the question of
the Islamic bomb? The answer is that the expanding religious sanction
for violence once thought unacceptable opens the way for new kinds of
violence to be introduced and seen as legitimate in turn. First
Israeli women and children became acceptable targets; then Americans;
then Shiites; and now Sunnis of unstinting orthodoxy. It would seem
that no one is out of bounds.

It is therefore now possible to imagine that the classical Islamic
principles governing war would not be applied even by a
self-consciously Islamic regime deciding when and if to detonate a
nuclear device. The traditional ban on killing women, children and
fellow Muslims would have gone a long way toward banning most
potential uses of nuclear power by a sincerely Islamic state actor.
As those prohibitions have eroded, the reassurance that might be
afforded by a state’s Islamic commitments has waned.

This means that a nuclear Islamic state would be at least as willing
to use its weapons as a comparable non-Islamic state. But would an
Islamic state be prepared to take the jihad to the enemy even if it
would result in what amounts to collective suicide through the
destruction of the state and its citizens? If the leaders of Iran or
some future leaders of a radicalized, nuclear Saudi Arabia shared the
aspiration to martyrdom of so many young jihadis around the world,
might they be prepared to attack Israel or the United States, even if
the inevitable result were the martyrdom of their entire people?

The answer depends to a large degree on whether you consider Islam
susceptible to the kind of apocalyptic, millennial thought that might
lead whole peoples, rather than just individuals, into suicidal
behavior. It is important to note that for all his talk of the war
between civilizations, bin Laden has never spoken of the end of days.
For him, the battle between the Muslims and the infidels is part of
earthly human life, and has indeed been with us since the days of the
Prophet himself. The war intensifies and lessens with time, but it is
not something that occurs out of time or with the expectation that
time itself will stop. Bin Laden and his sympathizers want to
re-establish the caliphate and rule the Muslim world, but unlike some
earlier revivalist movements within Sunni Islam, they do not declare
their leader as the mahdi, or guided one, whose appearance will usher
in a golden age of justice and peace to be followed by the Day of
Judgment.

>From this perspective, the utter destruction of civilization would be
a mistake, not the fulfillment of the divine plan. Even the most
radical Sunni theorists of jihad invoke a passage from the Koran
according to which civilization itself – "the crops and the cattle" –
must not and cannot be destroyed completely. Bin Laden might seem to
have few qualms about killing millions of Americans or other
Westerners. He might well use a nuclear device if he gambled that
there would be no enemy for the United States to bomb in retaliation.
But even he might not be prepared to unleash a global nuclear
conflagration on the expectation that a better order would emerge
once many millions of Muslims and infidels died. (Bin Laden has
called for Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons, and in the 1990’s
reportedly tried to acquire them himself – but there is little hard
evidence that he has made subsequent efforts in that direction.)

With respect to Shiite eschatology, there is greater reason for
concern. Iran’s Shiism is of the "Twelver" variety, so called because
the 12th imam in the line of succession from the Prophet disappeared
into a state of occultation – or being hidden – from which he is
expected to return as the mahdi. Ayatollah Khomeini played on the
messianic overtones of this belief during the Iranian revolution, in
which some of his followers went so far as to hint that he might be
the returning imam. Moktada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia in Iraq is
called Army of the Mahdi. Recently, Iran’s president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, contributed to renewed focus on the mahdi, by saying
publicly that the mission of the Islamic revolution in Iran is to
pave the way for the mahdi’s return, and by visiting the mosque at
Jamkaran, on the outskirts of Qom, where, according to one tradition,
the vanished imam was last seen. Some reports suggest that youth
religion in Iran in increasingly focused on veneration of the
vanished imam.

Islam has a vision of the end of days, with wars between the faithful
and the tribes of Gog and Magog (Yuj and Majuj in their Arabic
incarnation). Twelver Shiism is, at its core, an eschatological
faith, focused on the ultimate return of the imam-mahdi, who will
restore the Shiites to their rightful place and redeem their
generations of suffering. Since the vanished imam is by tradition a
human who has never died, but remains in occultation, he is also
believed to affect the course of events even from his hidden place.
And Shiite tradition fills in the picture of the mahdi’s return with
an elaborate account of signs that will herald the event, including
advance messengers, earthquakes and bloodshed.

But belief in redemption – even accompanied by wars and death and the
defeat of the infidels – need not translate into a present impulse to
create a violent crisis that would precipitate the messianic
situation. Like their Jewish counterparts, Shiite religious
authorities have traditionally sought to resist speculation about the
imminence of a messianic return. Shiite messianic thought is less
focused than its messianic Christian counterpart on generating global
crisis and letting God sort things out. Khomeini himself believed
that the mahdi’s advent could be hastened – but by social justice,
not by provoking war. This put him on the activist side of Shiite
teaching about the mahdi, much as he was also an activist about the
exercise of worldly power by the mullahs. A popular revolutionary
slogan urged the imam’s coming but asserted that Khomeini would
govern alongside him.

Other Shiite thinkers, by contrast, take a more fatalist stance, and
prefer to believe that the mahdi’s coming cannot be hastened by human
activity – a view that corresponds loosely to Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani’s belief, with regard to Iraq and elsewhere, that the
clerics should not themselves govern. One small, semi-secret Iranian
organization, the Hojjatiya Society, was banned and persecuted by
Khomeini’s government in part for its quiescent view that the mahdi’s
arrival could not be hastened.

Ahmadinejad is not the only or even the most important player in
Iran’s nuclear game. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, still
makes the ultimate decisions on armaments and other matters, and
there are numerous factions in the country with opposed interests and
ideology and goals. Nevertheless, Ahmadinejad has in some respects
succeeded in making the nuclear issue his own, and as a result his
personal views about the end of days have been the subject of much
speculation and innuendo, inside Iran and out. The Mideast scholar
Bernard Lewis, in a recent Wall Street Journal column, hinted darkly
and without much evidence that Ahmadinejad might be planning a
nuclear attack on Israel for the Night of Power (this year it fell on
Aug. 22), when the Prophet Muhammad made his mystical journey to the
Furthest Mosque, associated in tradition with al-Aqsa in Jerusalem.
Rumors, possibly spread by Ahmadinejad’s enemies, have tied him to
the outlawed Hojjatiya – a link mistakenly interpreted outside Iran
as evidence that he might want to bring back the imam by violence,
rather than that he might prefer to wait piously and prepare for the
imam’s eventual return on his own schedule. It is of course
impossible to gauge the man’s religious sensibilities perfectly. Yet
the relative absence of a contemporary Shiite trend to messianic
brinkmanship suggests that Ahmadinejad’s recent emphasis on the mahdi
may be interpreted more in terms of an attempt to summon Khomeini’s
legacy and Iran’s revolutionary moment than as a desperate
willingness to bring the nation to the edge of war. When Ahmadinejad
invoked the mahdi in his now-famous letter to George Bush, he seemed
to be using the doctrine in ecumenical terms, emphasizing the Islamic
tradition that Jesus – revered as a prophet, though not as the Son of
God – will return alongside the mahdi and govern in tandem with him.

So although a renewed Shiite messianism does create some cause for
concern about the potential uses of an Iranian bomb – in particular
because it suggests that Ahmadinejad may be more a utopian than a
realist – it is almost certainly a mistake to anticipate that Iran
would use its nuclear power in a way that would provoke large-scale
retaliation and assured self-destruction. Iranian leaders have been
more than ready to sacrifice their own citizens in large numbers.
During the Iran-Iraq war, major efforts went into recruiting young
boys to the Basij militias, which were then sent to the front lines
on what were essentially suicide missions. Religion played the
central part in motivating the teenage soldiers, and it is reasonable
to believe that religion helped salve the consciences of those who
ordered these children into battle. Yet even this discounting of the
value of human life – in a war started by Saddam Hussein, not by Iran
– fell short of voluntarily putting an entire nation at risk.
Ahmadinejad surely understands the consequences of using a nuclear
bomb, and Shiite Islam, even in its messianic incarnation, still
falls short of inviting nuclear retaliation and engendering
collective suicide.

VI.

These worries about an Islamic bomb raise the question of why we
trust any nation with the power that a nuclear capacity confers. Why,
for instance, do we trust ourselves, given that we remain the only
nation actually to have used nuclear weapons? The standard answer to
why we keep our nuclear bombs – a response developed during the cold
war – is that we must have the capability to deter anyone who might
attack us first. The promise of mutually assured destruction was its
own kind of collective suicide pact, albeit one supposed to scare
both sides out of pushing the button. That is why, throughout the
heyday of the unilateral disarmament movement, critics of this
justification pointed out that our threat was only credible if we
were, in fact, prepared to kill millions of civilians in a rapid act
of retaliation. If this kind of killing was morally unjustified, went
their argument, then the threat to use it was also immoral.

The truth is that we hold on to our nuclear capability not only as a
matter of deterrence but also to maintain our own global strategic
position. If we do not want Islamic states – or anyone else for that
matter – to have a nuclear capability, it is not necessarily because
we consider them especially likely to bring on their own destruction
by using it. It is, rather, that we do not want to cede some
substantial chunk of our own global power to them. This principle –
if it is a principle – lies behind the general strategy that is
embedded in the international nuclear-nonproliferation treaty.
Everybody involved understands that if any government got a chance to
acquire nuclear power before the other treaty members had a chance to
notice and impose sanctions, it would jump at the opportunity.

So the nonproliferation regime is not and could never be based on
some principle of international fairness. But it does not follow that
the United States and its allies should simply accept the development
of nuclear technology by just anyone. It should be relevant to our
deliberations that a particular candidate is our enemy. When it comes
to Islamic states, there is serious reason to worry that, both now
and in the immediately foreseeable future, popular anti-American
sentiment is especially likely to play an important role in the
shaping of foreign policy. Over the next quarter-century, it is
conceivable and certainly desirable that Islamism and
anti-Americanism may be unlinked. But we must be honest and
acknowledge that in the short term at least, the U.S. democratization
strategy has done almost nothing to reduce Islamist anti-Americanism,
whether Shiite or Sunni – this despite the fact that the same
strategy has benefited Islamists across the region by allowing them
to run for office and enter government.

Much of the reason for this close linkage between Islamism and
anti-Americanism comes from Iran. As an enemy of the United States,
which has worked consistently against American interests, Iran is in
a category by itself, most nearly matched by North Korea, the other
still-standing member of President Bush’s axis of evil. In this,
Iran’s motives have been primarily Islamic-ideological, not
pragmatic.

For many years under the shah, Iran was a natural American ally –
precisely because it was Shiite and non-Arab, and uncomfortably close
to the Soviet Union and its fantasy of a warm-water port. Even after
the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis, it is possible that the
United States would have eventually reopened relations with an
avowedly Islamic Iran had the government softened its
anti-Americanism. The United States has never made secularism a
condition of friendship. It has been fully prepared to support
Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, and even used religion to cement
the anti-Communist alliance during the cold war. The Iraqi Shiite
Islamists have been willing to work alongside the Americans, and the
United States has in return treated them as its allies,
democratically chosen by the Iraqi electorate.

Islamist anti-Americanism is the direct legacy of Ayatollah
Khomeini’s success in marrying Islamic faith to anti-imperialism –
making "Death to America" into a religious chant, not just a
political slogan. Of course the United States was hardly blameless.
It did everything it could to open itself to the imperialist charge,
including, in Iran, backing the famous 1953 countercoup that removed
from power Iran’s first democratically legitimate prime minister,
Mohammed Mossadegh. Contemporary Islamists can also point to
America’s continuing hypocritical support of regional authoritarian
regimes.

Iranian-rooted Islamist anti-Americanism has worked far better than
its designers might have imagined, spreading to Sunni Islamists who
have little love to lose for Iran. The marriage of Islamism and
anti-Americanism will probably be considered by history as the most
significant consequence of the Iranian revolution. Anti-Americanism
has become a staple of Islamist sermons and Web postings, an
effective tool for drawing to the movement angry young people who
might not naturally be drawn to religion. Bin Ladenism, in this
sense, owes much to the Iranian revolution even though Al Qaeda was
never Iran’s direct ally. United States support for Israel has always
been an important part of the argument for Islamist anti-Americanism,
but today it is by no means a necessary component. If U.S. support of
Israel were to weaken, the American presence in Iraq and elsewhere in
the gulf would easily substitute as a basis for hatred.

The United States therefore has strong reason to block its enemy Iran
from acquiring nuclear weapons – not simply because Iran will seek to
become a greater regional power, as any nation might do, but because
the Islamic Republic of Iran as currently constituted is
definitionally anti-American. There need not be a direct threat of
Iranian first use against either the United States or Israel for this
reason to weigh heavily. A nuclear Iran will be a stronger and more
effective enemy in pursuing anti-American policies under the banner
of Islam. That will not change until the Iranian state abandons
either its Islamic identity or its association between Islam and
anti-Americanism. Iran’s eagerness to acquire nuclear capacity need
not be a result of a particularly Islamic motivation, but if and when
Iran does have the bomb, its enhanced power and prestige will
certainly be lent to policies that it conceives as promoting the
Islamic interest.

Whether force, negotiation or some combination is the right path to
take to keep Iran from going nuclear is of course a hugely important
question. It turns on many uncertain facts, like the true progress of
Iran’s nuclear program and how much it can be affected by air attack;
Iran’s capacity and will to retaliate against an attack; whether
there is any chance Iran would respond to negotiations; and the
ability of the United States to withstand any retaliation while
150,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq. As we have recently learned in Iraq,
it is not enough to think you have a good reason to go to war – you
must also have a realistic understanding of the practical and moral
costs of things going horribly wrong. Any choice, though, must be
made against the backdrop of the reality that the Islamic government
of Iran is not only unlikely to collapse soon – it is also very
unlikely to become less anti-American in the near future.

The same, unfortunately, is true of the world’s Islamist movements,
for whom anti-Americanism remains a rallying cry and a principle of
belief. Perhaps the promotion of democracy in the region, pursued
consistently by the United States over the long term, might someday
allow the rise of leaders whose Islamism is tempered by the need to
satisfy their constituents’ domestic needs – and who eschew
anti-Americanism as wasteful and misguided. Iraq was the test case of
whether this change could occur in the short term. But we failed to
make the experiment work and gave Iraq’s Islamist politicians, Shiite
and Sunni alike, ample grounds to continue the anti-American rhetoric
that comes so easily to them. In the wake of our tragic mismanagement
of Iraq, we are certainly a generation or more from any such
unlinking of Islamism and anti-Americanism, if it is to occur at all.
And Islamism itself shows no signs of being on the wane as a social
or political force.

That means that the best we can hope for in nuclear Islamic states in
the near term is a rational dictator like Pervez Musharraf of
Pakistan, who sees his bread buttered on the side of an alliance with
the West. Such rulers can be very strong and can bring stability, but
we also know that their rule (or reign) promotes Islamist opposition,
with its often violent overtones. When such rulers die or otherwise
fall from power, the Islamists will be poised to use the
international power conferred by nuclear weapons to pursue their own
ends – ends for now overwhelmingly likely to be anti-American.

None of this is inherent in the structure of Islam itself. Islam
contains a rich and multivocal set of traditions and ideas,
susceptible to being used for good or ill, for restraint or
destruction. This interpretive flexibility – equally characteristic
of the other great world religions – does not rob Islam of its
distinctiveness. An Islamic bomb would not be just the same as the
nationalist bomb of a majority-Muslim state, nor would it be the same
as a Christian bomb or a Jewish one. But its role in history will
depend, ultimately, on the meaning Muslims give it, and the uses to
which they put their faith and their capabilities. In confronting the
possibility of the Islamic bomb, we – Muslims and non-Muslims alike –
need to remember that Islam exists both as an ideal system of morals
and values and as a force that motivates actual people living today,
with all the frailties and imperfections that make us human.

Noah Feldman is a law professor at New York University and adjunct
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
For nearly 50 years, worries about a nuclear Middle East centered on
Israel. Arab leaders resented the fact that Israel was the only
atomic power in the region, a resentment heightened by America’s
tacit approval of the situation. But they were also pretty certain
that Israel (which has never explicitly acknowledged having nuclear
weapons) would not drop the bomb except as a very last resort. That
is why Egypt and Syria were unafraid to attack Israel during the
October 1973 Yom Kippur War. "Israel will not be the first country in
the region to use nuclear weapons," went the Israelis’ coy formula.
"Nor will it be the second."

II.

III.

IV.

VI.

Noah Feldman is a law professor at New York University and adjunct
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.