A frightening future

Charles Krauthammer:

There is no gradualness and there are no countermeasures to a dozen nuclear warheads detonating simultaneously in American 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 WMDs could so shatter the United States as a functioning advanced industrialized 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 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 industrialized power like Germany or Japan could do.

It is a new world and exceedingly dangerous. Everything is at stake. We are now deeply engaged in a breastbeating exercise for not having connected the dots before 9/11. And yet here we are three years after 9/11, the dots already connected themselves, and we are under a powerful urge to ignore them completely.

It is only a matter of time.

We are staring at the unthinkable world of nuclear terrorism, but we prefer to watch the Scott Peterson trial. We watch as Iran develops the bomb, taking advantage of a nuclear black market that we are doing little to prevent, and our response is half-hearted and muddled.

In twenty years, people will question why we did not act sooner and more forcefully.

Modern American liberalism, which views war as an anachronism and terrorism as a law enforcement issue, will be extinguished. And we will, as a nation, commit genocide on a massive scale.

I would do anything to prevent that.

But it seems that the political will is not there.

- posted by total @ 7/09/2004 09:41:00 PM .