Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
Easy to forget
By Tom Smith

Krauthammer is right as usual:

Hunger is a scourge that has always been with us and that has not been a threat to humanity's existence for at least 1,000 years. Global warming might one day be, but not for decades, or even centuries, and with a gradualness that will leave years for countermeasures.

There is no gradualness and there are no countermeasures to a dozen nuclear warheads detonating simultaneously in U.S. cities. Think of what just two envelopes of anthrax did to paralyze the capital of the world's greatest superpower. A serious, coordinated attack on the United States using weapons of mass destruction could so shatter America as a functioning, advanced society that it would take generations to rebuild.

What is so dismaying is that such an obvious truth needs repeating. The passage of time, the propaganda of the anti-American left and the setbacks in Iraq have changed nothing of that truth. This is the first time in history that the knowledge of how to make society-destroying weapons has been democratized. Today small radical groups allied with small radical states can do the kind of damage to the world that in the past only a great, strategically located and industrialized power such as Germany or Japan could do.

It is puzzling that people credulous enough to believe or at least entertain the idea that Bush lied about WMDs in order to, what, make profits for oil companies or get advance bases for American empire, or whatever, find utterly unbelievable the idea that terrorists could get or have gotten their hands on WMDs either from Iraq or another terrorist sponsor state. Or, for that matter, in the deep black market. I think some on the left really want an American city to go up in flames, and to see the resulting fury of the American people, which could very well include martial law, mass deportations, and the like, because it would confirm their paranoid fantasies about American society. These people will disappear as fast as the pro-fascists did after Pearl Harbor if this happens, but by then the damage will have been done.

The idiots on the left have no idea what they are playing at. There is no Soviet Union to restrain the US anymore. In WWII, the US firebombed cities in Japan and Europe, nuked two cities in Japan, and mobilized itself to a degree unprecedented in world history. Now, the US is far more powerful than it was then, and in many ways far more democratic and responsive to popular whim. A catastrophic attack on US soil would create the will and the means to wreak havoc on our enemies and near-enemies on a scale never seen before. It might give US leftists some weird feeling of justification to see us wipe North Korea and Iran off the map (suppose the nuke that destroys Houston was manufactured in North Korea and passed through Iran -- we can find out these things), but there are a lot of Koreans and Iranians who deserve better. But those arguments will fall on deaf ears in the aftermath of a big enough attack.
posted by thomas at 7/09/2004 10:37:00 AM