| « | A Miasmic Mirage |
»
|
|
Friday, August 19, 2005
Five Fates
Gerard Van Der Leun's thoughtful, somber essay about the probability of a terrorist nuclear attack on an American city, and our probable response to it, has garnered a swarm of scathing denunciations from, ah, persons of other views. The comments are self-explanatory; if you have the stomach, they're worth the trip.
Your Curmudgeon is simply amazed at the number of persons incapable of reasoning from plain evidence who: 1) own computers, and: 2) are allowed to use them unsupervised. The United States is not merely the most heavily armed nation in the world; it's also the country of the greatest ferocity in war. All that's holding us back from taking Middle Eastern lives by the millions is our lingering belief that we're not really at war. That dream would be the first thing to dissolve in the light of a nuclear flash over Manhattan.
It is well known that terrorist organizations and states friendly to them seek nuclear weapons to use against us and our ally, Israel. The key component is a modest amount of fissionable metal: 1.1 kilograms of plutonium-239. The engineering knowledge required to fashion a fission-only weapon around that mass is easily available at any university library. Yet that weapon, were it to be set off in midtown Manhattan at noon on a working day, would take at least a million lives in "prompt" fatalities, and perhaps a million more in radiation effects, while wreaking at least two trillion dollars' damage to the businesses and residences situated on that island, the most valuable scrap of real estate on Earth.
We're making only the faintest pretense of protecting our borders, while al-Qaeda and its allies comb the globe for fissionables, or for a bomb already assembled. There are a lot of bombs out there. Present trends continuing, the death of Manhattan, or Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Miami -- of some large American port city -- is inevitable.
Five courses, and no others, wind forward from this moment in time:
- A nuclear atrocity occurs, after which the armed forces of the United States eliminate the entire population of every Islamic state.
- The terrorists strike Israel instead, after which the armed forces of the United States, in collaboration with whatever remains of those of Israel, eliminate the entire population of every Islamic state.
- The United States implements stringent border security measures, enforced by a large corps of military caliber, that include an absolute prohibition on entry or close approach to these shores by anyone from an Islamic state, by anyone who professes allegiance to Islam, and by anyone who is known to have consorted with any person in either of those groups. Israel would of course have to do the same.
- The United States implements a permanent cordon sanitaire around every Islamic nation, denying the residents of those nations the possibility of leaving their homelands.
- An unspecified miracle occurs that causes all terrorist forces to dissolve and terrorism to cease.
The above possibilities are listed in descending order of your Curmudgeon's assessment of their likelihood.
It's unthinkable, given a nuclear attack on an American city, that America would do anything but lay waste to the Islamic world. It would be the responsible thing for our government to do: of all possible responses, it would have the best chance of preventing a second attack on us for the foreseeable future. It would also be entirely moral. A nuclear atrocity would not be a "law and order" sort of affair, suitable for investigation, prosecution and trial. It would be world Islam's declaration of war against the United States, and war knows only two statuses: winners and losers. Even Americans who've sided with the enemy against their own countrymen would demand a bloodletting of Biblical scale.
The Islamic states have deliberately fomented the terrorist forces that seek to strike us. They teach the ideology that sustains those forces in the madrassas they fund so lavishly here and elsewhere. They provide material support and concealment to those forces between their sorties. They also use the "oil weapon," whenever possible, to deflect us from attending to them.
The protestations of the Left and the international multiculti notwithstanding, ours is not an aggressor nation. We don't owe anything to anyone -- particularly not to Dar al-Islam, which we've taken pains to conciliate since the end of World War II. Given the attitude of Muslims worldwide toward Black Tuesday and the American efforts that have followed it, should Islamic terrorists wield a weapon of mass destruction against this country, all we'll "owe" any Muslim is a quick, relatively clean death. Indeed, such would be the fury of this nation that Muslim survivors would envy the dead.
No such attack has yet occurred. Perhaps it won't. We can pray that it won't. But we can't change the probabilities, which flow from our flaccid self-defense and the ravening hatred the terrorists and their supporters feel toward us, without changing one of those two driving forces. To change the first would require a border lockdown; to change the second would require a terrifying degree of slaughter.
Should probability mature to actuality, the slaughter will not be long in following.
Comments
Your Curmudgeon is simply amazed at the number of persons incapable of reasoning from plain evidence who: 1) own computers, and: 2) are allowed to use them unsupervised.
What’s worse, they have the vote.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 08/19/2005 at 02:58 PMgiven a nuclear attack on an American city...Even Americans who’ve sided with the enemy against their own countrymen would demand a bloodletting of Biblical scale.
Somehow I kind of doubt that.
In the event an American city were nuked, half of the moonbat Left would be screeching their demands for the impeachment of George W. Bush for failing to protect the American people. Never mind the fact that they had previously railed against all the measures Bush could have taken to actually protect the American people. They would cheerfully ignore their own hypocrisy.
The other half would be screeching that Bush himself was responsible for the attack, murdering a million innocent Americans to justify being able to go off and murder a billion innocent Muslims. Never mind that such a scenario is so far beyond absolutely insane it doesn’t even belong in the same universe. They would cheerfully ignore their own lunacy.
Posted by Erbo on 08/19/2005 at 03:37 PMAlso consider the possibility of “plausible deniability”. If a nuke lays waste to Manhattan, but nobody claims responsibility (although many express delight) then who will be the target of retaliation? Was it the North Koreans? The Iranians? Al Qaida? Some other lower-profile group? I think it runs against the grain of even the most Jacksonian American to simply start indiscriminately slaughtering people who may not be involved.
Now I should hasten to add that men such as Osama Bin Laden, feeling what they think is God’s hand on their shoulder, would probably not hesitate to claim responsibility. They want to start an all-out war between Islam and everybody else. The more indiscriminate killing the better, because they are convinced that ultimately they would win. And if millions of their fellow Muslims will die, well, that’s just the price that must be paid. But what would the reaction be of the American government if OBL indeed released a video on Al Jazeera chortling about the stike against the Great Satan right.... NOW! Would we bathe North Africa, the Middle East, and maybe Indonesia for good measure in atomic fire? Or just parts of it? If so, which parts?
Posted by on 08/19/2005 at 06:20 PMI agree with Erbo. Democrat politicians would provide only mixed support to Bush, quibbling about the targets of a declaration of war.
“[a nuclear atrocity] would be world Islam’s declaration of war against the United States”
But precisely this is the point at debate already. I agree with you that Islam is toxic to human life, but it does not matter what you and I think, I don’t believe that the Bush White House, let alone the disloyal opposition, will ever see it that way. (I agree with Alex about the US public’s hesitance to indiscriminate slaughter.) That would give the America-hating Left and the [other] Democrats all the opening they need to delay and obfuscate the targets of counter-attack.
There would almost certainly be immediate retaliation against Iran and N. Korea, but unless more than one city in the U.S. is bombed, I predict little else. ObL does not need to attack more than one city to cause economic near-collapse and to greatly magnify embitterment between Right and Left here. Civil war in the US among the Right, the Left, and (briefly) Muslims would be very likely.Posted by on 08/19/2005 at 07:10 PMKilling every muslim on the planet? You can’t be serious. As a Catholic you should know that there are limits to what you can do to defend yourself. This is the kind of cosmic justice that you decried in this space not too long ago as being beyond human ability. It would damn your soul forver. I have a genuine love for America and Americans but such a course of action would be more abominable than the holocaust. Thankfully, I doubt it would fly. Any response will have to be proportionate, not unlimited.
Posted by on 08/19/2005 at 09:27 PMBZZZT! Wrong, Curt, but thank you for playing. You’ve mistaken the nature of a proportionate response, because you’ve mistaken the necessary basis for detemining the proportion. Think about it in these terms, if you please:
1. Imagine an unnamed cult whose creed explicitly espouses the subjugation of the entire world, by any means expedient. Let’s call it, oh, I don’t know, maybe Nazism. Imagine that this cult gains control of a country, perhaps Germany, and embarks on a series of aggressions that makes it plain that their conquer-the-world spiel isn’t just talk.
2. Now imagine further that a group that shares the creed strikes the United States, causing millions or billions of dollars of damage and thousands of deaths.
3. Upon investigation of the thing, the group is proved to be under the protection of the German Nazi government, which grants it shelter and sustenance, and defies the United States when we demand the group’s extradition.
4. We declare war on said nation, topple its government, expunge all the members of the group we can find, and set about rebuilding its economy. You know, the stuff Americans always do after we kick some nasty-ass country’s nasty ass.
5. It then develops that the group is worldwide in scope, that it’s united by the very ideology that animated the Nazi government, and that it receives continuing shelter and sustenance from millions upon millions of other people who subscribe to the Nazi creed and think what the group did is entirely in accord with its tenets. And that group strikes again, and again, and again.
As you must be aware, all of this actually happened, except for step 5. If we change “Nazism” to “Islam,” all of it has happened, including step 5. Had Nazism actually been a worldwide cult rather than just a mental disease confined to Germany, Italy, and Japan, we would have pursued it in all its manifestations until we were certain we had extirpated it completely. Would you dare to say that it would have been wrong to do so? Given that Muslims subscribe to exactly the same subjugate-or-kill creed, why should they be let off?
My Catholicism is no barrier to holding that a man who’s pledged his allegiance to a creed that demands my subjugation or death is my enemy. Nor is it a barrier to holding that if one of us must die, I have a perfect right to make it him, rather than me. Of course, if he’s willing to renounce his murderous creed, can satisfy me that he’s truly done so, and is willing to denounce anyone who attempts violence against me, that’s a different story. But history gives us little reason to believe that the devotees of Islam would be as willing to do so as, say, the (former) devotees of Nazism. Creeds that claim the sanction and direction of God are like that. We have only one real prospect for preventing a nuclear terrorist assault on an American city: persuading world Islam that we really, truly will do our best to exterminate them all if such a thing comes to pass.
From here, I yield the floor to another devout Catholic, Robert Spencer, and his recent book The Politically Incorrect Guide To Islam And The Crusades, which I heartily recommend to you.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 08/19/2005 at 10:26 PM"he armed forces of the United States eliminate the entire population of every Islamic state.”
is not the same as
“We declare war on said nation, topple its government, expunge all the members of the group we can find, and set about rebuilding its economy”
The first statement is diabolical, the second is not. The first makes no effort to protect people who may ALSO be victims of the religious ideology you oppose. Kill’em all just won’t fly with being a Catholic. You must remember that the Arabs are made in God’s image as well as you or I. That is not to say that we have to take it. We have innocents to defend here as well.
I know this issue to close your heart Francis, so I will try to make this my last comment. I don’t want to beat a dead horse. If you chose #1 above, it’ll be the first time I have ever seriously, seriously, found one of your posts to be off. You’re a terrific read and I hope you meant option #2.
Being Catholic - being Christian - cannot mean survival at all costs. To do so is to display a critical lack of faith in Providence, which happens to be tied into the first commandment.
On the plus side, your post on abortion was terrific.
Goodnight to you.
Posted by on 08/19/2005 at 11:59 PMEbro,
will say/vote in ways that will get them reelected. I think Ted Kennedy would have trouble not being very hawkish, Boston also has a harbor.And the middle, ie most of america, wou
Many/most politicians are oppertunists would support the idea of “lets make a desert and call it peace”. America when it gets angry is not an “eye for an eye” country its more of “you took my eye I will take your head, and any of your friends heads that I want” kind of place.Posted by on 08/20/2005 at 11:20 AMretype of #8:
Politicians will say/vote in ways that will get them reelected. I think Ted Kennedy would have trouble not being very hawkish, Boston also has a harbor.
And the middle, ie most of america, would support the idea of “lets make a desert and call it peace”. America when it gets angry is not an “eye for an eye” country its more of “you took my eye I will take your head, and any of your friends heads that I want” kind of place.
Posted by on 08/20/2005 at 11:25 AM
