Sleeping giant (5th excerpt from Mark Steyn's 'America Alone')

To see this imagine a scenario where we have hundreds of thousands dead in our cities from WMD attacks and the world's oil supplies have been taken over by islamic radicals who boast of bringing us to our knees. Under these conditions the American people will be willing to commit to total war.

Well, this is what I was thinking. I wish there were a way to do it short of this, as it would save us a lot of blood and heartache. I'm just an amateur historian and strategist and so make no claims as to any special insight or knowledge, but it seems to me that an effective strategy to defeat one's enemies decisively w/o the subsequent horror of total war would be a desirable goal. Trouble is, when we've tried "limited war", we seem to have "limited outcome", and, in the end, this might cost more.

And unlike WWII where we had to slug it out for years to achieve the objective of destroying the enemy's will to fight, with today's weapons we can destroy completely our enemy's will to fight in a matter of hours.

If preservation of Middle East petroleum resources are a goal, one would have to be concerned with collateral damage. Even a few moderate-yield nukes in places like Tehran and Qum and Mecca might have serious collateral effects. Plus, we'd have to be concerned with escalation from third parties. I'm not sure China or Russia would not use such a conflict as an excuse to hit us when we're occupied with another opponent.

"I'm not sure China or Russia would not use such a conflict as an excuse to hit us when we're occupied with another opponent."

China and Russia are the wild cards. It is not clear at this time how they would react to the scenario I described. But we can be assured that they will pursue their own self interests not ours. But that does not mean that they will necessarily side with the jihadists.

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