Have A Nice Armageddon, Smerky

This latest piece of right-wing bloviation from Michael Smerconish appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News on Thursday November 30th (I've been in an out of "sick bay" for the last few days and I'm trying to get "back into the saddle" - virus bouncing around our house hitting everybody, hot and cold running chicken soup, antibiotics...you know the drill).

I would like to know of a book that someone has written that actually advocates an INTELLIGENT approach to the legitimate terrorist threat that we face advocating diplomacy, shared information among the few allies we have left who haven't been totally pissed off by John Bolton (as noted here by Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker; lots of important info about Dubya's "bipartisanship" here, by the way) and obeying the rule of law, but I don't know of one at the moment, and if it existed, I'm sure Smerky wouldn't promote it (actually, it probably does exist, and it has probably been written by Richard Clarke, but that's just my guess).

DO WE need a nuclear deterrent to terrorism?

Nelson DeMille makes the suggestion in his new book, "Wild Fire," whose sales are spreading like, well, its title. It debuted at No. 2 on the Times bestseller list, No. 1 at the Wall Street Journal and No. 1 at Publishers Weekly.

It's another work of fiction by the man who already has more than 30 million books in print. But this one has people talking about a very real subject: How to stop Islamic extremists from attacking American cities.

"It sounds radical, but what we're trying to do is keep Washington, D.C., and midtown Manhattan from being nuked. We're not trying to obliterate another part of world because we don't like them. But we have between 10-20,000 nuclear weapons, we're the most powerful nation on the planet, and, in the history of mankind, and we're being bogged down by guys with AK-47s and plastic explosives. We've got to rattle nuclear sabers. Not because we're bad guys, but because we're good guys," DeMille told me.

Remember MAD? Mutually assured destruction was the cold war policy that if either the United States or the Soviets launched a nuclear strike, the other would respond in kind. That secured the peace.

Wild Fire, the plan that the book is named for, is a version of MAD for the new millennium.

Like MAD, Wild Fire eliminates a president's need for moral choices. If there were to be a nuclear strike against an American city, it would prompt an automatic response. The weapons once trained on the USSR would thunder down on the Arab world.

"Wild Fire is a pro-active response. It is a gun to the heads of Islamic countries - a gun that will go off if they fail to keep their terrorist friends from going nuclear," DeMille writes.

"This is a great deterrent because nobody wants to end the world as we know it," he told me.

"In 'Wild Fire,' I pose that we have something very similar to MAD. Meaning, that if a nuclear bomb went off in America, the presumption of guilt against Islamic terrorists would be very strong; we wouldn't need the proof, we'd never have the proof.

"We would automatically launch against the nation of Islam, specifically against the cities of Mecca and Medina, and other places like Damascus where we don't care for the government, and this would be a deterrent against a nuclear bomb going off in America."

Under what circumstances?

"It would almost have to be nuclear. Chemical and biological attacks are scary and will kill a lot of people but don't rise to the level of nuclear. It's the 800,000-pound gorilla that would obliterate midtown Manhattan or Washington, D.C., even a small suitcase nuke.

"In the book, I mention that there are 67 Soviet suitcase nukes missing from Soviet arsenals... What happened to them, we don't know. Maybe it was just bad record-keeping by the Soviets."

In the book, DeMille explores the possibility that suitcase nukes end up in hands of Islamic terrorists, and if they do, why wouldn't they use them? Well, maybe because Wild Fire threatens to blow up their holy shrines.

"Even the most radical Islamic terrorist would not want to see the revered holy city of Medina go up. It would be like losing the Vatican in Rome," he told me.
As he says in his author's note, "As for the secret government plan called Wild Fire, this is based on some information I've come across, mostly online, and can be taken as rumor, fact, pure fiction, or some blend thereof. I personally believe that some variation of Wild Fire (by another code name) actually exists, and if it doesn't, it should."

I told him that sounds like the stuff of his alter ego, former NYPD detective John Corey.

"I was there on 9/11. Every New Yorker was there in a sense. My suburban town lost 11 people, and I was in Manhattan the first time, in February of 1993, when the towers were attacked.

"As a citizen of this country and the world, we are trying to keep it from happening, and the only way is to say, 'If it happens, we will retaliate in a nuclear way.' What else can we do, say we will launch an investigation and find out who blew up midtown Manhattan?

"That is a game we have played for too long. We never played that with the Russians, why play the same silly game with Islamic terrorists? Some say they don't have a country, but that is not true, they know where their homeland is and so do we."

I don't know if something like "Wild Fire" exists in our government or it doesn't (it wouldn't surprise me if it did under Bushco). But the notion that we could hold terrorists at bay somehow by threatening to blow up a holy Islamic shrine in their "homeland" is ridiculous. Would we give up if (God forbid) they took out St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City? Of course not - it would make us fight even harder, and the terrorist crazies who want to take out as many people as possible would do the same thing. Besides, al Qaeda and their brethren are spread out all over the world. Would DeMille advocate nuking the whole planet?

The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction applied when we were dealing with nation states, but despite the "good graces" of Iran and Syria in the unholy terrorist cause, that really isn't the case here.

No, what we're fighting here is a multi-pronged threat that requires a multi-pronged solution realized by people in our government of intelligence, compassion, resolve, and foresight. And sadly, we don't have many people like that at the moment, and we have no people like that at all in our executive branch.

Every time we're backed into a corner against a foe in a third-world country, we try to bomb our way out more often that not. And any success realized by that approach is temporary at best. Sometimes it's required, but more often than not, it isn't. And the people in these countries know enough to know that that's what we'll do first.

I usually leaver Smerky and his crowd alone when it comes to their saber-rattling and wingnut suppositions and conspiracy theories, but when they start talking about casually lobbing around nukes, that tends to evoke my concern, as it should for everyone. In response, I think that we should focus on more common-sense measures of deterrence such as those proposed by the 9/11 Commission that the Repugs failed to implement. Let's focus on that before we start talking about mass incineration, shall we?