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Congress Tom Tancredo was recently excoriated when he said the following . . .
Campbell: Worst case scenario, if they do have these nukes inside the borders and they were to use something like that — what would our response be?Tancredo: What would be the response? You know, there are things that you could threaten to do before something like that happens and then you may have to do afterwards that are quite draconian.
Campbell: Such as...
Tancredo: Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, um, you know, you could take out their holy sites . . .
Campbell: You're talking about bombing Mecca.
Tancredo: Yeah. What if you said — what if you said that we recognize that this is the ultimate threat to the United States — therefore this is the ultimate threat, this is the ultimate response.
I mean, I don't know, I'm just throwing out there some ideas because it seems to me . . . at that point in time you would be talking about taking the most draconian measures you could possibly imagine and because other than that all you could do is once again tighten up internally.
What would we or could we or should we do if terrorists get a nuke into this country and take out one of our cities? Who do you hit?
An attack like this could also start the big ball of string to unwind. China might decide that is a dandy time to take back Taiwan. North Korea might decide it was a good time to invade the south. Iran might think that a weakened U.S. could not respond to their invading Iraq.
U.S. power is a glue that holds certain parts of the world in their places. If our enemies see that power as weaker, who know what they might try.
The American people might demand someone’s head.
Another question is if we did promise to hit Mecca with a nuclear bomb every ten minutes for ten hours, would that serve as a deterrent to the terrorists? I don’t know and I don’t know if any one does.
There are precious few certainties in this world. Everything else is a probability function and we are rolling the dice. If we are well informed and make rational choices, we can replace many of the black choice with red ones.
But we cannot completely eliminate the black squares and we never really know how many of each are on the wheel. All we can do is spin the wheel and release the ball.
I hope our government is as well informed as they can be and have contingency plans for all of the above and things I haven’t thought about yet.
Its back to the cold war worries again.
Posted by The Vorlon at July 27, 2005 8:17 AM