[A Jovial Cad]

What always amuses me is those who think Clancy has ever been "conservative" in any meaningful sense. With only one exception--*Red Storm Rising*--his novels have always been about how to appease America's enemies without admitting to it publicly within the context of the work. For instance, in "The Sum of All Fears" a radical Islamo-fascist dictator takes out an American city with a low-grade nuke that misfires in Colorado somewhere (if I'm remembering correctly), and *only* (think about that) kills or injures 20,000 Americans, more or less. Clancy's protagonist, Ryan, refuses, in the climax of the book, to authorize in conjunction with the sitting President of the United States a retaliatory strike on the capital city of the guilty party. The novel ends with a lot of improbable pinpoint strike spook stuff on the offending Mullah (clouded in reams of techno-jargon in the telling, which is Clancy's stock-in-trade), interspersed with thinly-veiled sermons about how awful it would be if we ever again stooped to fighting a *real* war again--i.e., a war to destroy large numbers of our sworn enemies. I've had little respect for anything Clancy has had to offer since I finished that novel, though I've continued to follow his work. But not with dollars: every book of his I've read since then has been checked out of the library. And returned on time, if not a good deal before.

[Atlantic Friend]

Are you sure you read the book ? The nuclear strike Ryan opposes in "The Sum of All Fears" is not against the guilty party's capital, since the guilty party is not Iran in this book but a terrorist group more reminiscent of the PLO (and also since Qom, the targeted city is not the Iranian capital).