Our highly esteemed staff of professional foreign policy experts here at Viewpoint have been cautioning us for over three years now that the biggest threat we face from our enemies may be a scenario something like this: A terrorist organization manages to smuggle a single suitcase nuke into a major American city. They publicly announce, falsely, that they have numerous such weapons planted in cities around the country and demand that we get out of the Middle East, abandon Israel, and impeach the current president or they will begin to detonate these bombs.
The nation is hurled into crisis. Everything shuts down because people are afraid to go into our cities. The economy begins to plummet and chaos reigns in our urban centers. The administration stands firm, however, and refuses to bend to the blackmail. The terrorists tell us that we asked for it, and set off their one bomb killing tens of thousands of Americans and destroying, say, Manhatten.
They then announce that we have one week to comply with their demands or they will detonate another. No one knows, of course, that there isn't another. So panic ensues. The pressure on the White House to capitulate would be irresistable. The United States would almost have to yield and the door would swing wide open to the Islamofascists who would sweep the world imposing Islam on every nation on earth.
That's the scenario that causes our greatest anxiety. Now Michael Crowley of the New York Times Magazine writes an article on former Senator Sam Nunn that says that his greatest nightmare is a scenario very similar to the one we've outlined above. It's really quite disconcerting.
Even moreso since despite the Islamists' stated determination to destroy us, the Democrats' biggest concern seems to be preventing the president from eavesdropping on terrorists' phone calls and otherwise acting as a president should when our very existence is under assault. For some of the president's opponents, the most frightening threat to our future is not the likelihood of nuclear terrorism on our shores, but rather that the average mean temperature of the planet has gone up almost a degree in the last century.
As if to illustrate the unseriousness that exists in some precincts of the left in the face of the most serious threat to our national survival since the Cuban Missile Crisis, a television person named America Ferrera recently delivered herself of the opinion that America won't be free until George Bush leaves office. This empty-headed nonsense was boffo with her audience, of course, but it's positively moronic given the nature of the real threats that face us.
RLC