March 17, 2003

I've received quite a bit of feedback from around the world on the story I recently sent out titled "What Will Be."

It ranged from assessments that the scenarios were as likely as aliens landing next week to comments from a Russian Buddhist that I had neglected to articulate the fate of the non-Westerners and non-Christians that Islamic fundamentalists target.

My favorite was along the lines of "due to the story, our family had an extensive discussion of these issues last night." That comment alone made it all worthwhile.

To answer some common questions:

1)      I have posted a copy of the story on the web at: www.hackneys.com/wwb. This will make it easier to distribute or reference in forums, weblogs, etc.

2)      Al-saffah, the name of the boat in San Diego bay, means "The Bloodletter."

3)      All the carriers stationed in San Diego were indeed in port simultaneously in Sept. 2002. Arrivals and departures of the ships are covered extensively in the local media.

4)      I had no advance knowledge of the so far untreatable killer pneumonia that has just hit the news. China just revealed yesterday that it began in Guangdong Province, which abuts Hong Kong, last November. Obviously, I had no way to predict that the infected Singaporean doctor would attend a medical conference in New York City, duplicating a portion of the plot. Unhappily, there are several candidates for the disease I depicted. Pneumonic Plague would be quite effective. The Soviets engineered several types of "super" variants of it, all incurable, and produced tons (literally) of weapons grade plague powder suitable for delivery and dispersal. We don't know how much is unaccounted for. Pneumonic Plague is transmitted from person to person via the air, contact, coughs and sneezes. The Black Death (Bubonic Plague), which is carried by fleas, killed 33 to 50% of the population of Europe in the Middle Ages. About 15 Americans die of it every year, most in the Southwest. The worldwide disease control community also feels a worldwide Influenza pandemic is overdue. The last one of 1918 killed more than 40 million, far more people than WWI (there's a great book on it, Flu, by Gina Kolata).

5)      The dirty bomb construction I outlined was my own, I did not copy it from any reports, intelligence analysis or other documents. The radiation component characteristics (half lives, fatal dosage, etc.) were all from scientific papers and other reputable sources. There are over 1,000 of the Soviet nuclear generators I referenced abandoned in the field and unaccounted for. Two were recently found in a forest, after the scrap metal dealers that had cut their shielding away died of radiation poisoning. These generators were given special note at the dirty bomb conference held last week. During my research of the dirty bomb weapon, I found most U.S. general media articles and coverage were written primarily to calm the fears of the populace, most denigrating dirty bombs as potential weapons. The media's single biggest argument against their possible use was that if someone built one, the builder would die of radiation poisoning. I don't think that is a credible deterrent factor with the enemies we've got in this conflict. 

6)      I have no special knowledge regarding the availability of, transport or placement of nuclear bombs. I do consider their widespread availability to terrorist groups imminent, and I consider our preparations inadequate. An article in today's Washington Post echoes my position: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35567-2003Mar16.html. To quote: "If a terrorist were to detonate a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb in Grand Central Station, about half a million people would die immediately -- roughly equivalent to the population of Washington, D.C. Much of Manhattan would be destroyed, and depending on the prevailing winds the rest of the island might have to be evacuated. Hundreds of thousands more would die of burns and exposure to radiation. The direct economic effects would surpass $1 trillion, or one-tenth of the nation's annual economic output. Indirect effects -- if, say, the terrorists threatened to destroy another city -- would be much higher." And "Officials would have to acknowledge that the dots had been connected long before the attack; that both the danger and the means to eliminate it had been well understood; and that the president and Congress had failed to do what was necessary. Those are the inescapable conclusions of a new report, "Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials," by Harvard University experts Matthew Bunn, Anthony Wier and John P. Holdren. The report was commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which is chaired by two politicians who have been trying for more than a decade to focus the nation's attention on this threat: Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who is also chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.)."

7)      Li and Xang are Chinese, they are the "Confucians" that Mike refers to earlier in the story. Radical fundamental Islamists look at the world through a singular lens: religion, which is why they refer to the Chinese in this way. The briefing was chosen as a dramatic device to provide a quick close to the story, and to illustrate to Americans the following: 1) the U.S. is not the über super-power we are so often told 2) the West is no longer the unquestioned dominant civilization on the planet 3) geopolitics is a game in which other players get a turn and 4) other players in the game can change the rules and advance the clock. I also liked the dual ironies that they were able to achieve their goals without firing a shot and that the whole thing was about a demographic problem they had with 100 million unmarryable men. I saw an article about this looming demographic crisis in China a few months ago and that's what started this whole thing.

In addition, I'd like to pass along these comments that I wrote just after the story:

First, some things are inevitable. Regardless of whether we go to war with Iraq or not, there are thousands of trained and competent people here and abroad who have sworn to destroy our way of life. The only reason we haven't heard from them lately is that an attack now would weaken the position of those who oppose the U.S. on the world stage. The people who hate us are not stupid. They are not going to do anything now to create any sympathy for us. The threat level might as well be green, as nothing is going to happen prior to the beginning of the war, should it come. If a war happens, any attacks on America will be rationalized as a justified response and an inevitable outcome of the war.

Our enemies are very well educated, very techno-savvy, very competent with weapons of all types, capable of perfectly blending into our society, and know our weaknesses intimately.

Most importantly, these people are not going away. They nurse grudges for centuries. They are still working on paybacks for losing their last outpost in Spain in 1492. Unlike us, they don't get bored with a story after two thirty-minute news cycles. They will be gunning for us long after our children's children are gone. We either need to capitulate, put all the women in potato sacks, and start hitting our knees five times a day, or settle in for a very, very long struggle.

America has grown very complacent since 9/11. Our brief respite won't last much longer.

Second, as a nation, we need to face the fact that non-proliferation is dead. North Korea has nukes, could be one, could be five, we don't really know how many. Iran will have them soon, if they don't already. Of these two regimes, I trust the Iranians a lot more than I do the Koreans. The Koreans will sell their nukes to Osama, Inc. quicker than you can say "paid for with Saudi oil money." I believe the Iranians are more likely to leverage their nukes for regional dominance, and resist a quick sale to the Taliban. After all, the Iranians have a lot more to lose in a counterstrike than the North Koreans, and they need the money a lot less. Libya has just been voted "most likely to have nukes in North Africa." Doesn't the thought of Muammar Qadhafi with his hands on a few nukes help you sleep better at night?

The non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction situation is equally bleak. It is so easy to alter domestic production facilities to produce biological and chemical weapons; there are too many nations with this capability to count.

Bottom line: we will soon experience weapons of mass destruction on U.S. soil. And they will not come conveniently delivered via a ballistic missile that is easily traceable to its country of origin. It will show up unexpectedly, with little or no way to know who was behind it. We need to wake up to this reality and get ready for it. What was once unthinkable will soon be our destiny.

Third, we need to be realistic about what we are trying to do in the Middle East. In my opinion, about the stupidest thing we could do in the short term is install democracies. Who do you think is going to be elected? Radical fundamentalist Islamists will sweep every fair election in that region. See recent Algerian history for an example. Until you defuse the situation by ending nightly broadcasts of dead Palestinians, nothing can be done in this regard. Even then, it will take generations to overcome the distrust, hatred and beliefs about the West, and especially America. As an example, a 2002 survey showed that a majority of Arabs believe the Israeli secret police and the CIA executed the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11. This level of paranoia and subscription to conspiracy theories is not going to go away via magical applications of Western values and democracy. Like most other regions of the world, the peoples of the Middle East have their own cultures, which they believe to be vastly superior to ours. To quote Bernard Lewis, probably the foremost contemporary Western historian of the region, "Most Westerners no doubt share the belief that liberal democracy, with all its weaknesses, is the best instrument that any section of the human race has yet devised for the conduct of its political affairs. At the same time, they should remain aware of its local origin and character and try to avoid the primitive arrogance of making their own way of life the universal standard of political morality. 'He is a barbarian,' says Caesar of Britannus, the British slave, in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, 'and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.' Political democracy is a good custom. It has already spread far from its native land and in time will surely spread much farther. It is not, however, a law of nature and in some areas has been tried, found wanting, and abandoned." (The Shaping of the Modern Middle East, p59-60).

Fourth, we need to be realistic about a post-war Iraq. Remember Yugoslavia? After Tito, the communist strongman who held it together through brutal repression, disappeared, it descended into inter-clan, inter-religious and inter-secular warfare for twenty years. Iraq could easily be Yugoslavia, take two. Iraq was not a country before some British and French functionaries drew arbitrary lines on a map in London and Paris during WWI. It did not arise out of the wishes of its own peoples, its own aspirations, natural borders, traditional tribal boundaries, or in response to the overthrow of a foreign power. It arose due to the angle of the rulers on a drawing room map, beneath the swirling smoke of cigars, to the tune of clinking brandy glasses. As such, it is extremely unlikely that an illegitimate country born of colonial foreign meddling can be successfully sustained by idealistic concepts of a pluralistic democracy. Blood is thicker than water, and tribal, religious and economic loyalties are much thicker than any government that America, the West, or the U.N. can impose. We must address the lack of a nation for the world's 20 million Kurds, who the West has repeatedly screwed over the last century, most recently after the Gulf War. We also must face the fact that Iraq will probably need to Balkanize back into its native constituent parts of Kurd, Shia and Sunni to have any shot at stable peace in the region. This will anger Turkey, who is loathe to see any self-determination for the Kurds, lest it inspire the 12 million Kurds who live in Southeast Turkey. It will anger the Saudi's, who want their fellow Sunnis, the minority in Iraq, to continue their domination over the majority Shias. And it will anger Iran, who shares Turkey's paranoia of Kurdish independence, and who desire an Iraq dominated by their fellow Shias. This is why the only thing every one of the players in the area can agree on is that "Iraq should retain its current borders and constituencies." This is ripe with irony, considering the Colonial Imperialist origins of the borders and social structures the neighboring countries are so adamant about retaining, even while their daily political rhetoric rings with cries to crush Colonial Imperialism. I think the war will be relatively easy and the peace will be tough. I pray our armies are marching to Baghdad, and not to a metaphorical Mogadishu or Belgrade. 

Fifth, we need to update the U.N. How can anyone explain or justify Great Britain and France having permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council? WWII ended over 55 years ago. We are trying to manage today's world with yesterday's "to the winner goes the spoils" political structure. Permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council should be reserved for the dominant nations from each major civilization, such as China, India, Russia and the U.S. The Islamic world, Africa and Latin America would probably have to use a rotating seat, as there are structural and cultural difficulties in assigning a permanent seat to Iran (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslim) or Indonesia (Asian, and too far from the Islamic holy sites), South Africa (apartheid hangover) and Brazil (Portuguese speaking vs. Spanish speaking) respectively. Due to the changing demographic profile of the U.S., and our diverging political systems (capitalism vs. socialism), Europe is becoming very separate from America in the civilizational sense. Consequently, you could make a strong case for a representative on the council from the E.U. government. In my view, considering the ongoing political and economic consolidation of Europe, it would be entirely inappropriate to seat an individual European country. The old world is dead and gone, we need to update the structure of the U.N. to reflect today's realities, or I fear it will not survive much longer as an institution useful for anything beyond meaningless debate and humanitarian relief.

Lastly, we need to beware of extremists. We have seen the Islamic world hijacked by fundamentalists with a worldview rooted in 1200 A.D. We need to pay attention to who gets our attention and support here at home. People who are divisive, who seek to polarize, who draw their power base from the extreme ends of the political spectrum, who play partisan politics at the expense of our national interest, who care more about the next life than they do for the consequences of their actions in this one, all deserve close and enduring scrutiny. As we undergo the attacks to come, some more horrific than we can possibly now imagine, it will be easy to fall under the spell of people offering simple solutions to complex problems. Let us learn from history in this regard, so as to not repeat those mistakes.