The Ultimates

[Ed. note: the blogger server just ate a wonderful post that took me over an hour to compose. So if it eats this one, the scream you hear in the distance will be mine]

On Congressman Tom Tancredo's "nuke Mecca" comment earlier today, my take, just for giggles.

Here's what Tancredo said:

Talk show host Pat Campbell asked the Littleton Republican how the country should respond if terrorists struck several U.S. cities with nuclear weapons.

"Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered.

"You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.

"Yeah," Tancredo responded.

The congressman later said he was "just throwing out some ideas" and that an "ultimate threat" might have to be met with an "ultimate response."

Spokesman Will Adams said Sunday the four-term congressman doesn't support threatening holy Islamic sites but that Tancredo was grappling with the hypothetical situation of a terrorist strike deadlier than the September 11, 2001, attacks.

"We have an enemy with no uniform, no state, who looks like you and me and only emerges right before an attack. How do we go after someone like that?" Adams said.

"What is near and dear to them? They're willing to sacrifice everything in this world for the next one. What is the pressure point that would deter them from their murderous impulses?" he said.

Well. I think we can make a few observations from the above.

1) Tancredo broached the bombing of Mecca, not necessarily nuking it.

2) Professional politicians should know better than to "grapple with hypothetical" questions that have a high potential for getting them in deep doo-doo.

3) If the Islamists are willing to sacrifice everything else for their ideology, why would they view Mecca any differently? These are people who use mosques as ammuntion stockpiles and armed strong points. They were prepared to turn the Shiite holy city of Najaf in Iraq into a battleground. They don't care about their own lives, much less anybody else's. I don't think they can be deterred other than by the one thing that Tancredo's suggestion would make extraordinarly more difficult: failure.

Not that I'm down the line with either Hugh Hewitt's or Cap'n Ed's aghastness on this, though.

Double-H:

Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo's speculation about using nukes on Mecca following an act of nuclear terrorism in the United States is the most irresponsible statement any American official can make. It will be on al-Jazeera within the hour, and it will be used by jihadists against us. Such speculations send the message that we are at war with all of Islam. We are not. We are at war with a slice of Islam that is radical and violent. Statements like Tancredo's invite all of Islam to think they are our enemy.

Well, of course al-Jazeera will be all over Tancredo's "speculations" like ugly on Rosie O'Donnell. But, well, so what? Yeah, he shouldn't have said it, but I hardly consider the reaction of enemy propagandists who broadcast that and worse mendacities against us on a daily basis to be a legitimate consideration in the matter one way or the other.

More troubling to me is Hugh's startling naivete about the GWOT. Sorry to have to break it to him, but yes, we are at war with Islam. Have been for a millenium and a half, and certainly the last quarter-century. The enemies with which we are engaged are, by their own self-proclamation, Islamic fundamentalists. They are putting into practice the foundational tenets of their religion: imperialism, aggression, and permanent war until the entire world is under the domination of the Islamic Caliphate. Dar-al-Islam ("The House of Peace" - i.e. the Muslim-dominated portions of the world) vs. Dar-al-Haab (everywhere else - literally, "the abode of war."). That is Islam.

What we are not - technically - at war with is the entire Muslim world - not yet, anyway. And it is, indeed, in our interests to keep it that way in the hopes of transforming that part of the globe away from mullah-ism and bin Laden-ism toward the embryonic renaissance underway in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon. In effect, the subversion of Islam toward its apostasization. That is the applecart that Congressman Tancredo's ill-considered words threaten to rattle, if not overturn.

Whereas Hewitt is naive about the war in its current state, Mr. Morrissey is an even bigger babe in the woods in his perception of what conditions would be like in the wake of a successful terrorist nuclear strike against one or more American cities:

I think the "ultimate response" to Tancredo's apolcalyptic fantasy is that we don't nuke civilians in response to terrorist attacks, no matter how seductive such a response might seem. The idea that the US would retaliate in such a manner should be repulsive to any rational person, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. The war on terror targets the terrorists and the governments which fund and/or shelter them, not the civilians who happen to live there.

I'll leave aside the irritating tendency Ed has to reserve his bitterest venom for "friendly fire" to ask him one simple, straightforward question: Was he a Japanese in Hiroshima or Nagasaki sixty years ago? I rather think not. Nor was I, of course, or any other American, at the time or since. Consequently, we don't know what it's like to actually behold in stunned stupefaction one of our own cities, filled with our own people, go up in a towering mushroom-shaped pyre. We don't know the shock, the (yes) terror, and the mass, communal rage that would grip the American populace at this (yes) apocalyptic escalation, which would be "fantasy" no longer.

Well, actually, we did have the tiniest taste, come to think of it. We call it 9/11. After which the page one headline of no less a left-wing rag than the San Francisco Chronicle read, "BASTARDS!!!" After Chicago went up in atomic flames, call me skeptical that the public reaction, after seeing post-9/11-like Middle East "celebrations," wouldn't put the words "NUKE THE" in front of the "B" word.

Not Mecca and/or Medina, certainly. I think the targets would be any and all WMD-related assets in Iran, probably with low-yield tactical warheads, since the mullahs are already actively aiding al Qaeda and, assuming the latter don't have those half-dozen stolen Russian suitcase nukes, they could hardly get nuclear weapons from anywhere else.

But let us not be so very-very and to-to as to think that such an antiseptic view of war as Morrissey sniffingly tosses out could survive on the other side of the nuclear Rubicon. If we're hit with a biological or chemical attack, we invade Iran and Syria all-out, perhaps all-conventional, perhaps not, depending on the circumstances. If we're nuked, the retaliation will be in-kind, swift, and let's just say "decisive."

The alternative would be the end of our country as we have known it.

I understand the disinclination of most people to think about, much less publicly discuss, such doomsday scenarios. Heck, anybody college-age or older can remember what daily life was like during the Cold War, when we had ten thousand warheads aimed at the Russkies and they had twice that many aimed at us and Armageddon was, theoretically, always as little as thirty minutes away. You knew it intellectually, but you didn't focus on it much, because you figured that as long as we kept our deterrent in place and at the ready they wouldn't take the chance. And if they did through deliberation or miscalculation, well, there wasn't much you could do except say goodbye to your loved ones, put your head between your knees, and kiss your ass goodbye.

The difference now is that our enemy is not right in front of us and steeped in demented rationality. He is diffuse as a handful of air, able to slip across our borders at will, perhaps only armed with conventional explosives, but perhaps also with far worse "toys," and utterly willing, eager, to kill himself if it means he can take a five- or six-figure total of "infidels" with him.

And there is the heart of our discomfort. Deterrence meant being so powerful in doomsday machines that we would never have to use them. Now we face an enemy that cannot be deterred - and the possibility of having to "unleash the genie" in response.

Our enemies will be counting on just that reluctance if they ever manage to pull off Representative Tancredo's "apocalyptic fantasy."

Far better that that scenario is never allowed to happen, and avoiding such rhetorical belches is part and parcel of that effort.

But if it did, I think I'd rather have a Tancredo at the helm than a Hewitt or a Morrissey.

Thank God that in reality, we have the best of both worlds.

UPDATE: Fair is fair, and the Cap'n does go on to add this:

Here's what we should make clear will happen if we suffer another major attack in the US, especially one that uses WMD or causes significant losses:

1. Take out the air forces of the two nations we know to support terrorists - Syria and Iran.

2. Destroy all nuclear facilities in Iran, to the best of our intelligence.

3. Bomb all known militarily-related manufacturing facilities.

That response not only provides a significant deterrent, but actually addresses the threats arrayed against the West. Without any air defenses and with their production capabilities reduced to rubble, we will leave them in a position where we can easily pick them off at our leisure. It also will give them something to do with their money other than handing it to terrorists for the next decade or so.

Of course, it has been and remains my opinion that we should have done the above already (conventionally, in case there was any doubt). By dithering we make a WMD attack here exponentially more likely. But it appears that Morrissey and I do agree that retaliatory action would have to be taken, and that including Mecca on the target list would be like suffering a mafia hit and then firebombing the local Godfather's Pizza emporium.

But the scenario Tancredo was examining was post-nuclear 9/11, and the psychology likely to exist in that situation would make use of nuclear weapons in response well-nigh irresistible.

Hopefully we'll never have to find out. But if the worst does happen, count on political correctness and reactionary pacifism being the first, and deadest, of our casualties.

'NOTHER UPDATE: Many thanks to the Cap'n for the acknowledgement (hey, if they blew up my local Godfather's, even a good German like I would be erzürnt) annnnnnd the link, and welcome to any fellow CQ'rs who make the trek over here.

Don't worry about shedding your shoes or wiping your feet - the space motif covers up the dirt anyway....