Posted on 12/04/2005 3:24:00 PM PST by ncountylee
Furthermore the doctrine of mutually assured destruction requires that you be able clearly to identify the source of a strategic first strike. This was easy when we and the Soviets were the only one's on the planet with that capability. Proxy wars popped up all over the place, police actions, low intensity conflicts, and the occasional outright invasion in places where both sides could fight it out without risk of triggering a strategic response.
The confluence of proliferation and terrorism threw that equation totally out of balance. Everyone seemed to understand that "the world changed on 9/11" but now they don't seem to grasp what exactly it is that changed.
The bad guys are doing everything in their power to develop stealth first strike capability. A strike with no clear origin but with a devastating impact. This is the published strategy of the Jihadi's. As much as people like to beat their chests and say 'we will nuke Mecca' or 'we will turn Iran to glass', the Jihadi's know that it's just not that simple. Even under the gravest of circumstances it is unlikely that we or our allies will indiscriminately murder millions of people. It wouldn't stop the terrorists even if we did.
The world did, indeed, change on 9/11 but we have gone back to sleep. The rules we lived by in the past, such as not attacking unless there was an imminent threat, or placing the civil rights of non-citizens ahead of national security (not profiling people), have now become suicidal. They just won't work any longer.
There were two things that kept the Soviets from coming after us directly. There would be no way to hide the origin of the attack and their communist system lacked the economic power to win the global resources race and thereby starve away our ability to respond. (Note that Ronnie Reagan finally pushed them over the edge by out spending them and not by nuking their cities) The Jihadi's have adopted a strategy that bypasses both of those problems but ONLY if we sit back and wait for them to come to us. We have no choice but to go after them aggressively both at home and abroad.
Another rant. Sometimes I just can't stop myself.
The Islamofascists are completely different, they place absolutely no value whatsoever on human life, not even their own. A suicidal madman is something that was never even a consideration a few decades ago.
You forget the 'Divine Wind' that was ended by the use of atoms.
As "tempting" as it sounds, we are never going to nuke the Islamic world. However, I do think that we should make it known that if there is another terrorist attack on American soil that we will incinerate the mosque in Mecca and the entire city within twenty-four hours.
Able Danger Will Robinson!
While I also doubt that nukes would be used, a radical Islamic nation might force the issue.
But unlike with Hirohito, there is no Islamofascist whose "surrender" would signal the other jihadists that the war was over. It is an unfortunate fact that we will have to kill two and probably three generations of radical Islamofascists before the mindset of the Islamic world begins to change.
Better than losing our heads to these vermin.
Who's footing the bill?
There is a website and it shows the biggies that fund this. I believe one is Rockefeller Brothers....I think that's the name I saw.
"Oh, lookee here to see who's behind the America Prepared Campaign. One Steven Brill. This is gonna be good."
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Just a little side-note. This event continues to intrigue me:
Originally published on January 15, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/155031p-136286c.html
Summit is a real Brill ride
How does Steven Brill manage to maneuver himself into the white-hot center of nearly everything?
The answer is doubtless too grand and full of nuance for a mere gossip column.
Suffice it to say that that on Tuesday night the 53-year-old Brill - journalist, media mogul and national I.D. card entrepreneur - hosted a summit between Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and the major television network news divisions.
Sitting around the dinner table with Ridge at Brill's Fifth Ave. apartment - to hash over terrorism scenarios, government-to-media communications and other pressing issues - were NBC's Tom Brokaw, ABC's Peter Jennings (along with news President David Westin), CBS News President Andrew Heyward, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and CNN's Aaron Brown.
Dan Rather, recovering from facial surgery, couldn't make it, but Brill's wife, Cynthia, and two of their children listened and learned.
"The dinner was a wide-ranging discussion about international terrorism and domestic security," Jennings told me. "The topics included the challenge for the networks if, God forbid, there was ever another catastrophe similar to 9/11."
Fox News' Ailes said: "I think we got a little better understanding of their process and how they make their decisions of what they're going to announce to the public. Anytime you have conversations about homeland security, it's always interesting."
I'm told that Brill, who befriended Ridge while working on his post-9/11 book "After," engineered the off-the-record government-media exchange out of a belief that "thousands of lives can be saved depending on the kind of information that is on television in the first hour after an event."
Last year, Brill founded a nonprofit group to address the challenges of homeland security.
The dinner, said Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, was "one of a number of ongoing efforts to have a continuing dialogue with the media to determine how we can best work together to get timely and accurate information to the American people."
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