Great post, Joe. These essays are required reading for everyone.

One question though:

The leading alternatives for an Atomic Ground Zero (Israel, India, Russia, Rome) come with horrific consequences of their own.

What makes you think that if al Qaeda or another Islamist group came into possession of nukes, that they would use them on India or Rome? I agree that Israel and Russia would be likely targets in the event that an American city couldn't be hit, but it seems far more plausible that they would seek to hit London or Paris instead.

I did have two of my articles adapted and posted by WSJ OpinionJournal, but the overview wasn't one of them.

India: see this June 2002 post. The logic remains sound.

Rome: I dismissed it too. At first. I figured they couldn't possibly be crazy enough to provoke what must come next. Then I was bantering with Dan one day and he showed me some stuff on Rantburg indicating that Rome and the Vatican is seen as a significant target by some Islamists. I suppose it makes sense if you still bear a grudge for the Crusades... and Dan has shown us Islamist groups whose goal is the reconquest of Spain.

Still, Rome is about the worst target in the entire world in term of the likely blowback consequences. It's low on my list because I believe that an organization sophisticated enough to get a nuke might realize this - but if AQ and Islamsm really ARE about a fantasy ideology first and foremost, then I CAN'T rule it out and it has to be on the list.

Sorry, Steven, I confused this WSJ article with the longer and more definitive explanation of the whole war that I linked above.

I prefer the item that I linked. Will fix the post, though.

Joe: Gratitude for this post-- I'm enough of a newbie that I had only read Three Conjectures before.
I prefer the item that you linked also, classic Den Beste. :)

Sigh.

You know, I'm getting to the point where I'm going to give up on this site. Which would be too bad, because there is quite a lot of information, and a valuable viewpoint on this site, but it is simply so one-sided, I wonder why I should bother?

Really quick - because my response is going to trigger some rather long-winded reactions - and I simply don't have the time to respond fully - too much work, not enough time.

Dan Beste:

Have anyone here (besides me) ever read Hegel? Hegel is actually very cool to read, and he's brilliant. Turgid, complex, and a great read. Unfortunately, his premise (rational Spirit is working itself out in history through dialectic) is insanely incorrect.

Has anyone here ever read (or skimmed through - I haven't read) some of the Freud-as-psychohistory? You know, the people who explain the Napoleonic wars, as sexual repression? And the books go on and on in this turgid, complex language, drawing
"connections" and "casuations" and "meaning" from history, and making a long-winded case about some various psycho-history theory?

Both of these share this method of brilliant, high-level abstraction, that have a haphazard relation to the facts of a situation.

Dan Beste, to me, strikes me as the same kind of writing, once he starts on his "explanation" of causes, in the political sense. Which is a shame, because I really get a lot out of his technical writings. For one example, I immediately switched to a Bayesian filter on my email, after reading his article about it, and it worked great for dealing with spam!

Back to the topic. So, that I am not doing the exact same thing, (high level abstract criticism), I'll get more specific:

Question 1: What is the root cause for the war?

There is no mention of US troops in Saudi Arabia. This fact should be the starting point of any article about "causes" of the terrorist - because to have a good theory, you must include all the factors.

Also, examing the economic role of oil, is paramount.

This is also missing.

This is all I have time for. Have to go. But this "high level causation/abstraction", usually lives, partially in the author's head - and has varying relationships to facts on the ground.

Maybe someone else can flesh this out a bit.

And of course, this small post is not meant as a complete repudiation of Dan Beste. That would be completely stupid, as he is clearly a very smart man.

But I wanted to comment on the similarity in writing styles - both positive and negative - in what I see reading Hegel or Dan Beste.

In a way that's a complement!

JC -

While I'm usually interested in what Den Beste has to say, and admire him - in part for the sheer work he puts into it - I agree that there's a level where massive abstraction combined with ironclad certainty gets kind of awkward.

But it's important to think big thoughts about this stuff, and even when wrong, it can be a useful springboard for thought and discussion.

A.L.

I should have been more specific when I said terrorist.

Bin Laden made it very clear, early on, that the US presence in Saudi Arabia was the reason the US came into his sights.

Now that clearly doesn't mean that at some point some other thing wouldn't have set him off - but not to even mention this in relationship with the declared war, and 9/11, in your explication of "causes" is bizarre.

Thanks, AL, you don't mind if I take the springboard first, do you?

"Collective failure of the nations and people in a large area which is predominately Arab and/or Islamic."

Umm, from my viewpoint Islam is hugely succesful. Consider the population genetics metrics: Islam is an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) with 1.3 to 1.5 billion reps and a relatively high reproductive fitness (both birthrate and conversion). I know I am changing the metrics by which Den Beste judges Islam a failure, but I think it is important to see one domain where Islam is definitely not failing.

A curious site, thanks for the link. I actually spent a couple of hours reading the stuff -- it's well written and to the point, gotta give credit to the guy.

Yet, that said, I haven't, on one hand, learned anything that I did not suspect myself, while, otoh, there's nothing there going beyond speculations -- and is it worth the time? I'm not sure. But! it would surely be a great read for some rabid "progressives" I keep bumping into online. 'course, I have a feeling they wouldn't bother. All in all, I don't know what to make of it :-) Well written -- clearly and logically: if only W could present things half as well... lol. And that's the problem: to explain away his obvious cretinism is an art form of course, but upon personal observation the king's bare ass is still unmistakable.

I am afraid that Wretchard’s Third Conjecture may be overly optimistic.

That effort [the WoT] really consists of two separate aspects: a campaign to destroy the locus of militant Islam and prevent their acquisition of WMDs; and an attempt to awaken the world to the urgency of the threat. [emphasis mine]

Perhaps the task of denying terrorists the means to their diabolical ends requires us to color substantially outside the lines of the modern international order, as many claim. Or perhaps not, as many also claim, and not without reason. Yet what should be beyond argument is that without agreement on who the terrorists are, and the nature and urgency of the threat they present, no progress can be made.

We must reach a rough consensus about the Islamists terrorist enemy before we can take action to prevent that enemy from gaining the means of terrible provocation – provocation which will trigger a Jacksonian End Game. My own conjecture is that the only conditions which are sufficient to generate a consensus about the nature of the enemy are also sufficient to provoke that Jacksonian response. The Golden Hour will have expired, by definition.

Again we approach the terrible anniversary, again the new season brings yet another new horror, again the depraved depths of the terrorist imagination prove inexhaustible – yet we seem no closer to consensus about the enemy this Wednesday morning than we were on a Wednesday morning three years ago.

The fog is not lifting. Perhaps no storm will blow it away and expose the enemy, which will not also wreck havoc with our moral compass. This is a cyclic dependence, which must be broken – how? The seconds of our Golden Hour tick down.

>>That effort [the WoT] really consists of two separate aspects: a campaign to destroy the locus of militant Islam and prevent their acquisition of WMDs; and an attempt to awaken the world to the urgency of the threat.

If the CIA were competent, it would be buying up all the stray fissile material it can get its hands on. Now, I have great contempt for the CIA most days, but maybe, just maybe, they have made considerable progress on this front. Maybe that's why we haven't been hit yet.

For all the not-nice things said about the French and German governments these days, what do we know about their cooperation or lack thereof on intercepting loose nukage from the East Block post-9/11?

>>also sufficient to provoke that Jacksonian response.

It's amusing how something like the US-backed murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians with mass popular support gets the euphemism of "Jacksonianism." Why not something more descriptive, like "nuclear state terrorism?

Mercifully recent US leadership hasn't been this bloodthirsty. I'm thinking especially of Powell and Gen. Butler.

the US-backed murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians with mass popular support

So, you are right to say that there will be mass popular support in America for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Where do the hundreds of thousands of of dead Americans enter your calculus? How many nuclear blows must America absorb before it can be allowed to defend itself in kind?

In my mind, that is what the WoT is about, using as much conventional military effort up front, NOW, to push this nuclear disaster as far out as possible, and hopefully - hopefully - preclude it altogether.

This is precisely what the anti-war folks do not understand. If they prevail, we're going to get nuked, sooner rather than later. Looking at it in these terms, the situation in Iraq is going great, and the war in Iran will not look so bad either.

I'd like to nominate The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas P.M. Barnett as being required reading (pick up the longer, more in-depth book version if you can). It provides a strong framework for long-term thinking in global strategy.

It's a race.
Human Rights & democracy in oil-producing states BEFORE Islamofascists get nukes.

Or AFTERwards, after a terror nuke strike.

Here's a highly speculative Pleasant Nightmare:
Russia should declare war on Wahhabi Saudi Arabia

To Force Human Rights on Muslim clerics?
Russia has ballistic missiles, as does America. Assume Russia chooses to force regime change on Saudi Arabia and on Iran, in order to stop funding for Islamofascist terrorists.
Assume a Russian “War” with the Iranians and Saudis giving up, unconditional surrender.

What would be a just peace, one that reduces the support of terrorists?
Open financial records – who has been funding who, where has the Saudi money been going?
Require that both countries accept all negative UN Human Rights, free speech, free religion.
Require that all clerics who preach have all their public addresses taped, and a copy sent to Russia/ the UN/ the US, where it can be translated and published – support for jihad or terrorism will be forbidden, and be punishable by fines, and possibly mosque destruction.
Take oil revenue and, directly, put 50% into house buying accounts for the Saudis. The other 50% goes to security, both foreign and Saudi.

Rex, a good one indeed. Thanks! We have a top War on Terror articles piece too - and "The Pentagon's New Map" should be added to that right next to Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy".

But "The Pentagon's New Map" is a firm rejection of "The Coming Anarchy," is it not?

Barnett gets very agitated when people suggest that the ordering principle of the 21st century is "chaos." His argument is that we can transition the "gap states" from a Hobbesian existence to a rule-based one in concert with global norms.

I suppose the distinction is one of outlook; where Kaplan sees threat, Barnett sees opportunity.

JC: The Hegel/Den Beste comparison gave me a chuckle.

On a broader note, I think you're confusing symptoms and variables with causes and goals.

Den Beste seeks to create an overview of goals and causes at the highest level. It will never be ideal, but if people say things like "if only W could present things half as well", that's a pretty damn amazing feat for one retired engineer and probably all the overview can be.

OIL... Would have been nice for Den Beste to add a bit about "the oil curse" for maldeveloped societies as part of the why, because it does change one's perspective on the possible solutions. Agree.

In terms of fighting the war, oil-related goals revolve mostly around not totally screwing up the world energy system and making sure there's enough stability at any one time to avoid a total crash.

This should arguably be included in SDB's overview, but even this goal might be sacrificed if a threat was serious enough, or the benefits from a course of action were big enough and energy instability was a possible side effect. I'll also point out that there's no desired final state for the oil market as part of this war's objectives.

That's a clue that oil may be a second or even third-order goal in the war, or maybe even just a variable. If so, Den Beste has a case for its exclusion as he tries to pare the overview down to a manageable level. I still would have liked to have seen it, but Den Beste is trying to boil the whole ocean here and so I have lots of sympathy and understanding for his include/exclude decisions.

RE: American troops in Saudi Arabia... that is NOT a cause. It isn't even a symptom. It may be a trigger, but that's a different thing and doesn't belong in a strategic overview. Bin Laden also cites Andalus, which happened before there were any American troops in America - and Islamism did not begin with bin Laden.

Besides, invading Iraq has allowed the USA to leave Saudi Arabia and remove that irritant. Net effect? Zero. Nada. Zip. That's a clue, too.

A bigot's stated complaint is never his real issue, and if you remove it he'll always find another. Same deal here - look deeper.

Bin Laden's ideology (Islamism) and goals (a worldwide jihadi network working toward a global Islamic Khalifa run on Talibanist principles) cannot co-exist peacefully with globalization and modernity, and the USA is the poster child for both of these things. Conflict was a matter of when, not if. Accept that, and you have to look for the CAUSE in the roots and development of that ideology, and in asking what gives that kind of ideology such fertile soil.

Bernard Lewis is one of our greatest living scholars on the Muslim world and Muslim history, and Den Beste's causes draw heavily from his work. Reading Lewis, one understands that the collision of Islam and the West, Islam's balked sense of divinely-given supremacism, its various reactions to that situation, and its difficulty in adapting generally, have been a slo-motion crash extending over hundreds of years. Lewis clearly has a great love for Muslim history and culture, and the depth of his scholarship is awe-inspiring, but he also sees his subject clearly.

Here's a link that will get you to Lewis' The Roots of Muslim Rage article in The Atlantic magazine - not a blog post so not included in this post proper, but relevant to your questions and so I'm throwing it in here.

Hope this helps some.

I'll add to the endorsements of 'New Map.' If any of the leftish persuasion have been put off by the title, don't be. It's the best strategic framework I've yet seen for a principled combination of humanitarian and armed responses to the Islamists. An optimistic combination of the Wilsonian and Jacksonian impulses.

Let me also suggest that while a focus on loose nukes and fissiles is necessary, it isn't sufficient. As a sometime futurist, one of the tricks I use in 'horizoning' a future possibility is to look backwards for a similar sequence of events. So let me offer the following:

- The polymerase chain reaction (PCR), key to all manner of genotyping and other biotech activities, was invented in 1983. At the time it was a laboratory tour de force.

- As of today, you can buy a cookbook kit to perform PCR in a school laboratory. That learning curve took 20 years, more or less, from high science to triviality.

- In 2002, bio-entrepreneur Craig Venter's team synthesized a virus from raw genomic material.

You can do the math as well as I.

Creation of nuclear materials has had a rather modest learning curve, due to limited demand. It's no longer high science, but still requires a substantial industrial base. Biological methods have an aggressive learning curve, with very compelling dual uses (that is, we mostly want to live longer). And we are now proliferating the basic industrial technology - fermenters, PCR, etc. - around the world in the name of reducing drug costs. So our time is measured.

Prakitike,

I saw it this way: Kaplan's article defines the danger. Barnett's briefing sets this threat in a larger context via The Gap/Core concept, and gives us a wider perspective by including states that have not failed yet.

I see their views on the manageability of the problems as intrinsic to the authors, not Barnett's framework. It works whether you think the problems are manageable or not.

What might throw an interesting spanner into the works is looking at things like rapid aquifer depletion in key food-producing areas of India and China, and how things like a foodstuff supply crash, or a really huge oil shock (say, $90/barrel, the present-day equivalent of the OPEC crisis heights) might affect the map. That would give us a different take on the Gap zone itself and potential flash points within, and would probably create a "shadow zone" of states that could be pushed into the Gap if some of these "ecolonomics" based scenarios materialized.

I will note that while I see Barnett's hypothesis as useful in the present war to some extent, it comes into its own and shines most brightly AFTER the war against Islamist terror in Islam's heartland begins winding down. That's when we'll need to look around at where the next most serious threat of 4th Generation Warfare and/or SPECTRE style terrorism might come from - and I'll be hoping like hell that Barnett's map has been kept up to date.

Tim's comments are a great segue into tomorrow's article. Tim, you win an official Winds of Change.NET Karnak Award.

This comment will also be linked in tomorrow's article. Do you want to put it up on your own blog as well and then notify me via email?

[JK: Here's the article I was talking about, as we look at the 5th Pillar of the Bush Doctrine and the long-term scenarios in the context of Tim's words.]

On the Oil question, all serious scholars should prolly be supporting higher and higher gas taxes. The higher tax revenue reduces the deficit/ or other taxes, and will (slowly) reduce consumption, but will also have two important long term effects.
First, it will encourage substitution sooner -- hybrids relatively cheaper, sooner; more production and learning sooner.
Second, it will provide an economic cushion available to gov't to reduce a big oil shock -- merely reduce, temporarily, the gas tax to reduce pump shock.
Steady, 1 penny a gallon tax increase, each month, until the War on Terror is won. (It would be 36 cents by now...)

Oh, the War on Terror will be won -- when the last dictatorship ruled country changes and holds free elections.

Democracy cannot survive in the absence of a thriving middle class, or in the absence of a free marketplace of ideas. Liberalize the thinking in the societies of the middle east first, otherwise you will inevitably have one man, one vote, one time, with another dictatorship replacing the short-lived "democracy."

This means a liberalized economic system, free of religious interference, and a vastly liberalized access to ideas, likewise free of religious interference. The middle east has a small proportion of people who are up for that. The rest are primitive beyond words.

Tom Grey (6:25pm),

Petroleum is indeed the neglected element in these analyses. Here are two statements at the poles of a spectrum:

1. Alternative sources and conservation could, relatively painlessly, transition the US economy to a post-oil future.

2. Oil isn't like other ores; it's essential and irreplaceable. Alternatives and conservation can reduce the oil consumption of a post-industrial society, but only to a relatively small extent without triggering economic dislocation on the scale of the Great Depression.

Most of the planet's oil reserves are in the Middle East. What percentage, exactly, depends on what price per barrel you are willing to pay to extract it (most Mideast oil is extremely cheap to produce). Combine that with Bin Laden's stated goal of forcing the infidels to pay a 'fair' price, around $144/bbl (cf. ~$45 today) to the ummah for its oil, and the answer to "which statement best describes our society's relationship to oil?" becomes crucial.

For example, Anonymous' prescription in Imperial Hubris assumes, perhaps glibly, that #1 is correct.

Den Beste has published a long series of technically-based treatises explaining why he bases his analysis on the truth of #2. Start here and work backwards through the links if you're interested.

To the extent #2 describes reality, the US--and Europe, China, and India--can't walk away from the Troubles of the Arab world. Like it or not, addiction or tragic necessity, our fates are inextricably linked. And "linked" is a concept with very different meanings to Dar-al-Islam and to the rest of us (Dar-al-harb). This is one more prism through which to view Wretchard's Three Conjectures.

Speaking of China and India, I'm going to give Dr. Barnett some further publicity and point to another article of his which originally appeared in the WaPo: Forget Europe. How About These Allies? China, India, and Russia are all very slowly coming around to the realizationt hat they have just as much a vested interest in stabilizing the Middle East as the US does, and could be a tremendous help if only through sheer manpower.

And what the hell, while I'm on a Barnett-a-thon, these two are reccommended as supplementary reading: Global Transaction Strategy and Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Our Iraq Strategy.

First off, thanks for pooling the links. I've discussed Wretchard's conjectures (and SDB's work) with my cousins in the Sufi half of the family, and the discussions always crash on the sheer variety of the Muslim world. For example, at what point would it make any sense at all to nuke the (allied, relatively democratic, pro-US, mostly Sufi) Kurds? The (allied, largely secular, semi-democratic) Turks? The beer drinking, mini-skirt wearing Subud communities in Indonesia (who make Unitarians seem practically conservative by comparison!), The nomadic or pre-industrial villages of Anywhere, Dar-Al-Islam?

I tend to agree with War Nerd that after, say, the second US city goes up, we'd elect somebody who made Patton look like Gandhi, and with Armed Liberal (and I'm paraphrasing, so I hope this is accurate enough), that in a certain sense, we're fighting to prevent militant extremists in the Arab World from forcing us to kill them all, but even at that point, I can't really reconcile US geopolitical security interests with the sort of unfocused large scale nuclear genocide that Wretchard's Second Conjecture calls for. It seems unimaginable - that said, arguing from Limits of Imagination is a fairly weak position, hm?.

The US government would have to be pretty insane, I think, to carry out this sort of horror, but it's possible that a sufficient provocation (multiple nuclear strikes against the US and a successful decapitation strike?), or the prolonged dehumanization of war could make it possible.

>> How many nuclear blows must America absorb before it can be allowed to defend itself in kind?

How will nuclear retaliation be "defense" exactly? Say the USG retaliates by nuking, say, Mecca? How many of the terrorists involved in the nuking will be hit? How many innocent civilians will be killed? How many more people will turn to terrorism as a result of the nuclear reprisal? The numbers don't add up.

This was the conclusion Powell and Butler reached when they were thinking through nuclear contingencies before and during Gulf War I. Even if Saddam had and used WMD against US forces or civilians, they concluded that nuking Baghdad simply wouldn't help, and would in fact make things much worse.

Retaliation with nuclear weapons has nothing to do with "defense" and everything to do with primal rage. "Somebody's got to pay" and since the real culprits are hard to find, why not just attack whoever appears to be vulnerable? Sound familiar?

Retaliation with nuclear weapons has nothing to do with "defense" and everything to do with primal rage.

T.J., for such a misanthrope, you have a very odd understanding of human nature.

Wars end when the opposing party loses hope, or is cowed to the point of submission. This is sometimes necessary in human affairs, humans being what they are.

Powell could say this about Saddam because (a) battlefield WMD use is not the same as, say, San Francisco going up in a mushroom cloud; and (b) Saddam's regime was a specific and identifiable target that could be defeated quickly anyway, thus ending the threat. Baghdad may not have been nuked back in 1991, but had Saddam gassed American troops in Kuwait, his regime would have been history 12 years earlier. Problem solved... and America wouldn't have to clean up a nuked Baghdad afterward.

Now, imagine that San Francisco goes up in a mushroom cloud tomorrow. No missile was obvious, and the eipcenter seems to have been somewhere in the Bay. Oakland is also uninhabitable, of course, and Silicon Valley has just come to a complete stop.

Put aside revenge.

[1] This is not the same as weapons use on the battlefield. This is not even a declaration of Total War (which all terrorism is) - but of Genocidal War (which some terrorism becomes).

[2] The perpetrators come from a limited possible subset, but exactly who they are probably won't be clear.

[3] How do you get to the same point as the Iraq 1991 scenario above, where you know the threat is ended? Because given #1, nothing less is an option.

Den Beste & Caerdroia's escalation scenarios are linked in our 3 Conjectures post. Both involve nuclear strikes in return at those who might be responsible, followed by the most rigorous and broad ultimatums that will be followed by further and wider nuclear strikes if not met immediately. These responses would be far more likely than nuking Mecca (a bad idea for so many reasons, and a lunatic first response), but they would be maximum responses and could escalate much futrther if our enemies decided the USA was not serious and resolved to test the proposition or weasel.

Why? Not revenge. Because nothing less puts the USA in a position to satisfy condition #3 and end the threat.

And yes, many people will die. In a Genocidal or even a Total War scenario, once the game is called the conditions are set. It will be a war of populations, until support for the war's continuation is destroyed on one side or the other and a peace acceptable to the winning side is enacted.

Revenge or malice sometimes becomes part of that (Dresden, Rotterdam), but the rest (Tokyo, Hiroshima, London et. al.) is simply an intrinsic part of the Total War framework of the conflict and part of the process of achieving goal #3. One side or the other will find the threat to it ended - and ended not only militarily, but ended in the minds of its adversaries (because that aspect is necessary to ensure no Carthaginian Wars or WW2 scenario of repeated conflict).

I wish people were different. The lessons of history indicate that they are not. I thought you were an empiricist?

Retaliation with nuclear weapons has nothing to do with "defense" and everything to do with primal rage.

On the contrary. Utter destruction of the enemy, noncombatants and all, is the most basic and historically the first form of defense. If you're at war, killing all the enemy's people WILL end the war. You're right that it is primitive - it goes back to before homo sapiens existed - but that does not make it irrational, nor does it take it out of the realm of "defense".

The sweep of military history can in some ways be read as a succession of war-ending strategies that do less and less damage to the enemy. From total destruction, to the Carthaginian solution (which destroys the enemy as a people, without actually killing them all), to permanent political subjugation of the enemy, to restructuring the enemy's society to prevent further attacks. But it would be a mistake to forget that we can slip backward. In these times, we can do it in an hour and a half with some people pushing buttons.

Our effort now, and I agree completely with Wretchard on this, is to somehow stop the sequence of attacks before it becomes so unbearable that someone pushes the panic button on these people, and solves our problem that way.

>>On the contrary. Utter destruction of the enemy, noncombatants and all, is the most basic and historically the first form of defense. If you're at war, killing all the enemy's people WILL end the war.

The problem here is that nuking all the Muslims isn't even efficient from a US-casualty minimization standpoint. Let's say the US eats a nuke. A well placed 10kt nuke will kill maybe 100K people. (It will be a LONG while before Al-Qaeda can manufacture fusion weapons)

Case I: The US does nothing. Next year the US eats another nuke, killing another 100K people. And the year after that. And the year after that.

Case II: The US goes for the Final Solution and Ends the Muslim Problem with waves of nukes.

What do the US body count curves look like for these two cases? At first glance Case II looks better. The problem is that the US has ~5 million Muslims. How will they react to the nuking of 1 Billion of their co-religionists? I would expect very poorly. Sooner or later, and likely sooner, they would all have to be killed too. So the cost of Case II is really 5.1 million US fatalities up front, whereas Case I is 100k/yr ongoing.

These calculations assume that the lives of the rest of the world's Muslims are worth absolutely nothing.

Use of nukes at levels less than total annihilation are even less useful. The terrorist threat is rather dispersed. Nuking a Muslim city won't kill more that a tiny fraction of the terrorists, a fraction that will likely be replaced almost immediately as a result of the rage inspired by the nuking. State sponsors of terrorism can be eliminated conventionally.

>That's a clue that oil may be a second or even
>third-order goal in the war, or maybe even just >a variable.

Joe,

Nope. Oil is very much in play here.

Al-Qaeda with cash and nation-state support is a WMD threat.

It is vitally important that all Arab states, all Arab Fantasy Ideology infected states (see Pakistan and Chechnya) and those that supply them be denied access to large unearned income streams.

The only way for that to happen is for America to physically take control of that income stream, AKA the oil.

"large unearned income streams"

There's something very suspicious about this phrase.

I make money off of my intelligence (and sometimes lose money off my lack thereof). A big chunk of that intelligence I was born with -- it's a natural resource I started out with. So is it fair to say that much of my money comes from an "unearned income stream?" Should this be a factor in whether or not my resources are confiscated?

Let's put it another way. Say the Arab States made all their money in computer programming rather than oil, but a small fraction of their population still engaged in terrorism. Would it make sense to EMP all their computer gear, or kidnap their best programmers to deprive the nations of their income? Maybe it would, but I can't see how the fact that their income stream is "unearned" has anything to do with the necessary actions.

>>Now, imagine that San Francisco goes up in a mushroom cloud tomorrow. No missile was obvious, and the eipcenter seems to have been somewhere in the Bay. Oakland is also uninhabitable, of course, and Silicon Valley has just come to a complete stop.

First, some physics. Nukes are scary, but not quite as scary as most people think, especially crude fission weapons. The terrorists probably won't be able to obtain a functioning fusion weapon (>>100kt) and if they do they'll have problems maintaining it long enough to deploy it. A more realistic scenario is a 10kt weapon (1/3 of a Hiroshima). Detonating a 10kt weapon in the middle of the Bay would be very sloppy -- it's doubtful much land area would be in the primary radius. Central Park at High Noon would be much more reasonable, and might get close to 100k fatalities.

>>³ How do you get to the same point as the Iraq 1991 scenario above, where you know the threat is ended? Because given #1, nothing less is an option.

The basic problem is this: if those responsible are state actors, nuclear retaliation is unnecessary. The USG simply dismantles those states responsible with convential weapons and executes those officials responsible, saving hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.

If those responsible are non-state actors, nuclear retaliation short of total annihilation of all Muslims is insufficient. And total annihilation is Real Hard and takes a LOT of nukes. Let's say the USG decides to cleanse Afghanistan of all terrorists using nuclear weapons. Consider the terrain, and the fact that terrorists can disperse throughout the countryside. It's unlikely that even a 25 MT warhead will get more than 1 terrorist camp. And if we have the intel to find the camp in the first place, a conventional strike can take it out. Using nukes would just be dumb.

Now I'm not saying that nukes won't be used if the US gets hit. They most certainly will. But it won't have anything to do with "neutralizing the threat," "ending the conflict," etc. It will just be revenge.

And once the WMD manufacturing process were commoditized and grasped by terrorists, all control over WMD manufacture and use would be lost to governments, even the one that gave it to the terrorist organization in the first place

They bought twelve tractors and trailers. They made WMD on delivery. Delivery cancelled WMD destroyed. NO WMD.

"How will nuclear retaliation be "defense" exactly?"

The mind staggers to understand the reasoning that led to that question.

"Say the USG retaliates by nuking, say, Mecca?"

Still reeling. I'm reminded of an episode of 'The West Wing' in which the President angrily asks the joint chiefs to draw up a plan of war with Syria, and the best that they can come up with is bombing the Damascus airport. He - rather than firing the idiots for incompetance - decides that nothing really can be done, because bombing the airport would be too horrible to comtemplate. In actuality, the problem with the plan wasn't its ruthlessness, but its ineffectiveness.

"How many of the terrorists involved in the nuking will be hit?"

Persumably, as low as zero. It's entirely possible that all or almost all of them will be dead prior to any retaliatory strike, and it's entirely possible that - since such strikes would not really be targeted on individuals (whom we might not know the location of anyway) that the most proximately guilty would escape the initial counter-attack.

"How many innocent civilians will be killed?"

Hundreds of millions. I agree that killing merely 100,000's of civilians would be pointless. If you are going to use nukes, it must be for something for which only nukes would do. We can kill mere 100,000's of people with less fuss. If it reaches the point of total war, then those nukes should be used for incapacitating Islamic manufacturing capacity on a global scale. There would have to remain nowhere in which significant manufacturing effort could be undertaken, and no intersection of ability with resources. The population must be rendered to busy with mere survival to even contemplate or attempt further war.

"How many more people will turn to terrorism as a result of the nuclear reprisal?"

Presumably, as low as zero. There might be no one left. There might be no one left with the will or ability to turn to terrorism. There certainly need be no net increase in the number of people turning to terrorism, even if we leave aside the question of whether acts of terrorism are really even possible once the war state has become total. Terrorism depends on the stronger side not escalating to its level in order to be effective at all. There is no indication that terrorism is much of a threat at all once the stronger side escalates to the same degree of violence.

"The numbers don't add up."

Yes, they do. What doesn't add up is your war fighting logic. Blow up enough people, and even the Japanese will lose thier taste for war. Anger can only carry most people through so much grief.

"What do the US body count curves look like for these two cases? At first glance Case II looks better. The problem is that the US has ~5 million Muslims. How will they react to the nuking of 1 Billion of their co-religionists? I would expect very poorly. Sooner or later, and likely sooner, they would all have to be killed too."

How did the Japanese American population respond to incarceration and us killing ~5,000,000 of thier fellows? For the most part, by rationalizing that they had always been more American than Japanese. In some cases this was quite true. In other cases it became true after events forced them change thier outlook in order to mentally cope. Remember, the Japanese people themselves - perfectly willingly strapping themselves to bombs in the service of their God-Emporer - came to honestly believe that they had always been a peaceful nation, that Shintoism was a peaceful religion, and they (and the Emporer) had merely been led in a national misadventure by a few short-sighted militants. It's amazing what sort of lie you are willing to tell yourself after you've been utterly defeated.

And believe it our not, the gloves hadn't even completely come off when the Japanese surrendered. Potential War plans at the time called for detonating 7 nukes virtually simulataneously, to be followed with the gassing of virtually the entire island if surrender didn't follow shortly. The great fear is that the Islamists won't come to understand the logic of Claustwitzian escalation in the undertaking of war before it's too late. If they think that they can shock the American people into submission by the extremity of thier violence, then the Islamic world is in big trouble.

How will nuclear retaliation be "defense" exactly? Say the USG retaliates by nuking, say, Mecca? How many of the terrorists involved in the nuking will be hit? How many innocent civilians will be killed? How many more people will turn to terrorism as a result of the nuclear reprisal? The numbers don't add up.

The mullahs and their friends could not have phrased it any better.

Indeed, for the decadent enemy, whether that enemy be the US, Europe, Israel, India, Australia, all resistance is ultimately futile; for in this war to end all wars (even if it takes hundreds of years), they will not---they cannot---dare to do what is necessary to protect their decadent, godless societies.

One might be heedful of the solemn words of the late Dr. Rantisi.

TJ -- if the perception is that the US can be hit with nuclear weapons with impunity, it will be done again and again. We can sadly absorb 9/11 style attacks as horrific as they were. Nuclear destruction of the economic basis of say San Diego and Los Angeles cannot be replicated by the loss of Dallas and Atlanta later on. The American People themselves will demand a truly massive scale retaliation on the order of hundreds of millions dead to forestall JUST SUCH AN ATTACK.

That is the horrible logic of nuclear weapons. Once both sides have them and one uses them the other MUST go into overkill or be destroyed. Powell and Butler dealt with ONLY in-theater chemical weapons (and it was implied strongly to Saddam that WMD use in theater would result in a US nuclear response). It's like the Old West; once the guns leave the holster and you're shot to survive you MUST kill the shooter AT ONCE.

I will point out that the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Coventry were answered by the complete firebombing of Japanese and German cities. Dresden and Tokyo were leveled. Curtis LeMay after his European campaign turned to leveling most of Japan, and had the bombs not been dropped had plans for 10,000 plane raids (using all the aircraft from Europe plus the Pacific bombers) to kill every Japanese he could.

Losing San Diego and Los Angeles to a Hiroshima style attack (300K dead or so) would require a very clear demonstration of the idiocy of that attack on us. We would see the occupation of Saudi Arabia (and likely a lot of dead Saudis). Iran as a nation would simply cease to exist. And yes we'd probably have at best concentration camps for Muslims in the US that make Manzanar look like Mayberry. We might also take out Pakistan (with ICBMs and cruise missiles). Very likely 1 billion Muslims would soon be 700-600 million Muslims, with the threat of further reductions if required.

Hulagu Khan demanded the surrender of Baghdad. When he did not get it he killed basically everyone (about 300K people, with swords). Tamerlane came back about 50 years later and repeated that slaughter with about the same dead. The Mongol solution to Muslim terrorism was simply to kill every Muslim in the land. Soon, no more terrorism.

It is for this reason that I support ANYTHING that will keep the situation from escalating to the point where the guns have left the holster and the US is shot, forced to kill or be killed. Because we will kill. On a scale that would horrify Hulagu Khan. The guns must be kept in the holster.

I agree with much of Jim's post, except that part about Muslims in the USA.

I very much doubt that we would see what he describes, even in a worst-case scenario. Muslims' social contract within the USA would change, an end to any fence-sitting and strong professions of firm loyalty would be demanded in the firmest terms, and the tolerance level for supporters of terror like CAIR, the MSA, AMC et. al. would not only vanish but shift into active full-scale attack with strong legal teeth (to which I say: why wait?). Immigration and travel visas to and from from Arab/Islamic countries would probably be kissed goodbye except in special circumstances, too. All of this has ample historical precedent, even into the Cold War. But a Muslim living in Dearborn isn't going to face forcible removal from their home.

Americans will, properly, nuke those who threaten them strongly enough as a last resort. But if a Muslim can be rounded up just for being Muslim, then the same thing can happen to you or me for other reasons. I think that lesson sunk in, and is unlikely to be repeated. Personally, however, I'd prefer never to test that particular theory via the situations described in the linked posts above.

I'll add that Foreign Policy Magazine did an article by Stephen Krasner a while ago called The Day After that said if something like that ever happened, you could basically kiss the concept of nation-state sovereignty as a bulwark against "outside interference" goodbye. Logical, and true. Folks like Lee Harris, who talk of neo-sovereignty, are simply looking ahead and jumping ahead of that curve to try to forestall the worst case. Why wait before moving to prevent? And that is still the great question of our age.

_Most of the planet's oil reserves are in the Middle East. _ [AMac #25]

Unmitigated nonsense. Oil sands (Alberta) and oil shale (US Rocky Mountains) alone surpass the entire reserves of the Middle East, most of which were brazenly inflated by a factor of at least two in the '80s because OPEC allocates its pumping quotas on the basis of stated reserves. The oil sands/shales issue doesn't even count the massive deep (unproven) deposits in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

all serious scholars should prolly be supporting higher and higher gas taxes. [Tom Grey #23]

More unmitigated nonsense. Even in this period of allegedly 'obscene' oil company profits, those profits work out to about 10 cents per gallon. Taxes are currently in the 40 cent per gallon range. High and rising market prices will indeed encourage conservation, as well as throttle down economic growth.

If the price rise is in the form of taxes it will be squandered as it passes through the entropy sink that is government. Oil companies use it for additional exploration. We are nowhere near out of oil, only cheap oil. Oil sands/shales are in the money with reliable $40 oil and much work is under way in both these area (eg Suncor and Shell).

Oil companies use profits to build refineries -- if we can get environmental obstructionists out of the way. Maybe even refineries that can handle the heavier crudes coming out of oil sands/shales. Our only heavy oil refinery is Citgo in Houston, owned by Venezuela in order to process the gunk that comes out of their holes in the ground.

It is Europe and Asia that are largely dependent on 'muslim' oil, not the Americas. Sub-Saharan Africa is a toss-up. There is oil in the southern areas of Sudan, Chad, and CAR -- all 'black' areas under rising pressure from an arab north trying to seize those reserves. Two million dead in Sudan alone over the last 15 years or so.

This is not an 'American' oil problem, it is an 'islamist' oil problem because they seem pathologically incapable of producing any real wealth on their own. Our oil imports from places like Saudi Arabia have been declining in both percentage and absolute terms.

The real question is whether or not we abandon Europe and Japan to their own devices. Personally I don't think that's such a good idea, especially in the case of Europe.

Thanks to WoC for resurfacing this interesting topic and the thoughtful comments here.

First off, I should state my base assumptions. I am an extreme hawk with respect to the GWOT. I believe that 9/11 gave the US the casus belli to invade, blockade, bomb, assassinate, incarcerate, physically/psychologically abuse any nation, group or person as necessary in order to pursue, disrupt and destroy those involved and associated with 9/11 style terrorists. The rest, in my view, is simply tactics.

Tactically, it may be smart to refrain from actions that described by the unfriendly media as torture. But in the cruel calculus of war, would not a few abused terrorist be a morally superior choice to a 9/11 times 10 or times 100 attack?

So tactically speaking would a nuclear attack against the terrorist make sense?

• Targeting
  -- Can we identify a target that requires a nuclear weapon?
  
• Collateral Damage
  -- Is the expected value of the attack greater than the collateral damage expected?
  -- Is the negative reaction from allies, non-aligned states and enemy civilians greater than the expected value of the attack?

I must admit that I'm not convinced that that nuclear weapons have much value in actual use. Consider a the situation in Tora Bora when it was thought that OBL was there. If we had used nuclear munitions on that area would that have achieved our goal better than a carpet bombing campaign? I suspect that equal or greater military value can be had by simply using excessive amounts of conventional bombs rather than nuclear weapons.

If we assume that a nuclear terrorist strike in the USA has changed our current tactical thinking by reducing the sensitivity to civilian casualties then I suspect that the military could achieve its objectives without going nuclear. Can someone posit a situation to contradict my assertion? Perhaps going after the military industrial complex in Iran?

I see zero value in killing civilians for the sake of reducing the enemy civilian population. I do not follow the arguments that this will change the enemy's mindset. I believe that the analogy to Japan does not hold; the gov't ultimately surrendered -- the people would have gone on. We don't need to nuke Saudi Arabia to get them to surrender.

I do understand that there will be some domestic political pressure to reply in kind to a nuclear strike on the US. I also see some deterrent potential in a 100% certain retaliatory policy. Given this posture, it is quite unclear upon whom we would bomb if struck by terrorists.

Bart Hall (#41): a while back, I wrote (#25):

Most of the planet's oil reserves are in the Middle East. [and also] What percentage, exactly, depends on what price per barrel you are willing to pay to extract it (most Mideast oil is extremely cheap to produce).

A range of estimates of worldwide petroleum reserves are at this page. They run from about 1,000 to 1,500 billion barrels. The US DOE published a 2004 compilation of country-by-country estimates .
Mideast oil reserves: ~700 billion bbl
Worldwide oil reserves: ~1,100 billion bbl
Mideast gas reserves: ~400 billion bbl (equiv)
Worldwide gas reserves: ~1,100 billion bbl (equiv)

A 205 Denver Post article lists:
Canadian West's oil sands: 1,600 billion bbl, 10% considered recoverable.
U.S. West's oil shale: more than 1,000 billion bbl

To free oil from shale, heat the ground to 650 F for 4 to 5 years, then extract. I recall an estimate that recovering 2 bbl will require burning more than one bbl. 10% recoverable? Seems like a disruptive and expensive way to get petroleum.

hegel is underestimated.

His abstract ideas are powerfully applied by neohegelians like Konoviev (sp?) and Fukuyama.

i meant Kojeve, of course, not konoviev.

"is to liberate individual Arabs. This is a humanist reform, but it isn't a Christian reform. There will be no attempt to eradicate Islam as a religion. Rather, Islamism as a political movement, and as a body of law, and as a form of government must be eliminated, leaving Islam as a religion largely untouched except to the extent that it will be forced to be tolerant. "

Eliminate as a body of law? Surely, Mr. Katzman, you would agree with me that eliminating Sharia for Islam is not necessary, and is probably not possible. I suspect neither Den Beste nor Tigerhawk are intimately familiar with religions based heavily on a system of law, and like many in the blogosphere equate such a system (mistakenly) with the linkage of religion and state.

this sure doesn't hold up well ---

To "nation build". After making the "Arab Street" truly face its own failure, to show the "Arab Street" a better way by creating a secularized, liberated, cosmopolitan society in a core Arab nation."

Basically, we're not getting a lot of a and b therefore c from Den Beste in this piece. Lots of a ... c and a pony!

this is unfortunate ...

"Saddam had been providing immense support for terrorist groups, both monetarily and in other ways. There were known terrorist training bases in Iraq and he had been providing money and arms. It appears that little of that support went to al Qaeda. Most of it went to various Palestinian groups such as Hizbollah."

Hmmm. Lebanese.

Eliminate as a body of law? Surely, Mr. Katzman, you would agree with me that eliminating Sharia for Islam is not necessary, and is probably not possible.

Sharia can be as benign as the unofficial rules that say that Catholics can't eat meat on Friday. Those are the 'unoffical' laws that are related to the religion.

Some people in America follow religious laws voluntarily, living in communities where people are free to leave anytime - like the Amish.

On the other hand, sharia civil laws, when enforced by the state, are always a form of apartheid, granting women and non-Muslims fewer rights than Muslim men. When anyone supports state-enforced Sharia laws, they're supporting apartheid.

When Sharia criminal codes are enforced by the state, the laws are equivalent to the laws followed by Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose system is often more brutal than Afghanistan under the Taliban. Sharia criminal codes enforce the hand chopping, stoning, beheading, etc.

Under these laws, the penalty for choosing to leave this 'community' is death

Opposition to state-enforced sharia laws is an opposition to totalitariansm and apartheid.

Sharia includes punishment for apostasy. From Wikipedia

Spoken or written renunciation of Islam is apostasy, however, displayed disloyalty or blasphemous acts can also be deemed apostasy...There is no definition and consequent punishment that spans all Islamic views...Although there is a consensus in the four Fiqh (Schools of Jurisprudence) that an apostate should be killed, most Muslim countries rarely carry out the death penalty at present...

Can the citizens of a State that empowers punishment for apostasy exercise their natural rights?

This isn't a call for intervention, but for clearer thinking. Sharia, as currently understood in most of the world, is incompatible with human rights.

TJ: "What do the US body count curves look like for these two cases? At first glance Case II looks better. The problem is that the US has ~5 million Muslims. How will they react to the nuking of 1 Billion of their co-religionists? I would expect very poorly. Sooner or later, and likely sooner, they would all have to be killed too. So the cost of Case II is really 5.1 million US fatalities up front, whereas Case I is 100k/yr ongoing."

Now THAT'S some speculative stuff. No WAY. Nuke the homeland. You'll see America come together like never before. I'm not flag waving here, I just want to emphasise that your reasoning is... how do I say it? Nutty.

Those that oppose the war in Iraq will find all kinds of ways to rationalize away the terrorism issue:

1) They'll tell you that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, hoping that this truth will obviate the rational for war.
2) They'll swear that the occupation of Iraq generates terrorism, hoping that this argument is persuasive enough to cover the last 50 some odd years.
3)Then - when they are forced to acknowledge that terrorism is a real problem - they'll emphasise that you are more likely to die in a car accident then a terrorist attack.

Sound like anybody that you know?

Those that make this argument are not really stupid... but SELFISH, profoundly self-centered, and deeply in denial. If it didn't affect them - it didn't happen. To them, the WTC was just another horrible vision on the screen, an opportunity to pontificate on the evils of the world, as easily forgotten as last night's horror film. But it didn't touch them... certainly not enough to tempt them to surrender their world view and the accompanying self-image as multicultural, tolerant, and virtuous people.

But if an American city gets nuked, EVERYBODY will know somebody who died... many will know more. Horrible suffering in hospitals. Orphans. Families torn apart and wiped out. History itself wiped out. An economy in the shitter, a stock market crashed. Life's savings gone overnight.

And when everybody is actually affected personally, you will see a demand for a solution NOW, echoed by the VAST majority, regardless of race, creed or culture.

"Co-religionists?" I'm struggling not to laugh. We wouldn't have to "kill" Arab Americans: they'd be the ones telling folk like you in no uncertain terms that YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE DEALING WITH - PUSH THE BUTTON NOW!

mary, you're talking about hudud, not sharia per se.

mary, you're talking about hudud, not sharia per se.

Hudud laws include the criminal codes. The civil codes, taken by themselves, even without the hand chopping, etc. are apartheid laws.

If the government is enforcing Shaira, it's an apartheid system. Canada was trying to set up a system to enforce Sharia civil codes, on a "voluntary" basis. Muslim and human rights groups protested these apartheid laws. The effort to enforce these laws was abandoned.

Here are some examples of 'civil' sharia:

- A woman is only eligible to receive half the inheritance of a man;

- A woman must seek permission from her husband to leave the house;

- A Muslim man cannot marry a woman who is a Zoroastrian, an idol worshipper, an apostate from Islam or a woman with one parent who is Jewish or Christian, with the other being Zoroastrian; a Muslim woman cannot marry anyone but a Muslim;

- Non-Muslim subjects (Ahl al-Dhimma) of a Muslim state are subject to a series of discriminatory laws – "dhimmitude";

- A non-Muslim cannot testify against a Muslim in court; a person who is "without respectability" cannot give legal testimony; a woman’s legal testimony is only given half the legal weight of a man’s (and is only acceptable in cases involving property)

- People may be bribed to convert to Islam;

- Beating a rebellious wife is permissible;

- Lying is permissible in a time of war (or jihad).

Those are just the civil laws, without the hudud-related beheading & whipping. Equality and human rights are against the law under Sharia.

#52, #53:

Hudud seems to be a category of law within Sharia, fully enforced by some Islamic states and not by others. From a delicate BBC discussion of the intersection of Sharia and Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Within Sharia law, there is a category of crimes known as the hudud (Koranic) offences, for which there are specific penalties for particular crimes. For example, fornication is punished by stoning, the consumption of alcohol by lashing, and theft by the amputation of limbs.

Comment #49 by Mary would thus stand, unaltered.

"Sharia can be as benign as the unofficial rules that say that Catholics can't eat meat on Friday. Those are the 'unoffical' laws that are related to the religion.

Some people in America follow religious laws voluntarily, living in communities where people are free to leave anytime - like the Amish.

On the other hand, sharia civil laws, when enforced by the state, are always a form of apartheid, granting women and non-Muslims fewer rights than Muslim men. When anyone supports state-enforced Sharia laws, they're supporting apartheid. "

that was my point, that the goal should be seperation of religion and state, not creating an Islam minus Sharia.

And even the above isnt an immediate goal. Israel, and I think India, have Sharia as state enforced family law for their muslim citizens. Most western countries did not treat the genders equally in law until fairly recently. We must not hold the democratization project back until the muslims are ready for a level of gender equality we only reached in the last generation.

This has specific implications for Iraq and other countries.

Thanks for clarifying, liberalhawk - it advances the discussion substabtially.

I'm no fan of sharia but frankly, I think the sharia issue is one that concerns us in the West more than it bothers real folks in the ME, who at the moment would be willing to cash in some secularism for more genuine political choices, less corruption, growing economies, etc. Ask an Egyptian about the risk that the MB would roll back some women rights and, more often than not they'll laugh and tell you that it's the least of their worries. But AFAIK al-Ikwhan isn't calling for chopping people's hands off and the like.

My fear at the moment is that unless Egypt makes some structural reforms before really opening its political system, you'll simply be replacing one form of tyranny with another, one corrupt ruling party with another (though clearly it'll be more murky than that). The MB says many of the right things but I don't think the checks and balances are anywhere near in place.

As for the big picture in the ME, I think the region feels like it has tried secularism and associates it with the failures of the present regimes and therefore wants to try something different. So pushing secularism around these parts will be like swimming upstream nowadays. Just look at Iraq.

To expand on LiberalHawk's point:

There have been some U.S. divorce courts that have enforced sharia provisions under the theory that the husband and wife agreed in marriage to sharia distribution of property in the event of divorce. The cases are few though because (a) courts generally won't enforce unwritten antenuptial agreements, (b) courts will not enforce consensual agreements that are reprehensible to public policy and (c ) the numerous variations in Islamic law can make such an agreement too ambiguos to enforce or impermissibly require the court to make a religous ruling in violation of the First Amendment. Based upon the few successful cases (as well as comparable cases involving jewish law), muslim attorneys are advising muslim couples to enter into a written agreement that clearly sets forth their expectations of what is to happen upon divorce.

A few comments:

There won't be a single spasm, rather there will at least one (initial) spasm plus a number of increasingly horrific "slides", plus probably several more spasms setting off, or punctuating, those slides.

Nuclear weapons are much overrated in terms of immediate destructive effect. Absent multiple really large groundbursts aimed at covering large areas with lethal short-term fallout in a brief period, their major utility in causing mass fatalities will be to destroy civil infrastructure and/or cohesion, and thereby maximize deaths from disease plus, in some areas, exposure (such as heat and thirst in desert areas).

Disease is the most underrated cause of mass fatalities. Civil disorder and violence are underrated too, but not as much. Nuclear weapons are most effectively used in causing all of the above through societal collapse. It wouldn't take much to put failed/failing states, or many Third World ones, into societal collapse. Fear of nuclear attack alone might do that in really shaky countries such as Pakistan.

People won't stay in place to die. There will be absolute tidal waves of refugees towards areas offering, or seeming to offer, security. Think of nuclear attack as a cascading event failure. But nuclear attack might not be necessary to start such a process.

Most importantly, the whole process of genocide will almost certainly start first with major intramural violence between Arab factions followed by societal collapse, of which the most likely to be first will be in Saudi Arabia when the Saud clan loses power. There is an alleged consensus among the intelligence communities of the major Western states that the Saud clan has five or less years to survive. That is also the opinion of John R. Bradley, author of Saudi Arabia Exposed, who posted here at:

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/007382.php

Mr. Bradley may be writing an article at this minute outlining scenarios for a Saudi collapse which include awful demographic consequences.

Nothing, including nuclear weapons (save for a Cold War goes hot type of conflict between two superpowers, and we'll be the only superpower for at least another generation), compares to the more lethal biological weapons in direct killing power.

But the most likely cause of massive fatalities as envisaged in this thread will be wide-scale societal collapse, possibly but not necessarily started by nuclear attack, and spread by titanic refugee flows.

As for the big picture in the ME, I think the region feels like it has tried secularism and associates it with the failures of the present regimes and therefore wants to try something different. So pushing secularism around these parts will be like swimming upstream nowadays. Just look at Iraq.

Bin Laden called Afghanistan's sharia under the Taliban a 'perfect state'

Islamists aren't beheading monks in Thailand because they want US troops out of Saudi Arabia. They're not killing Hindus in Kashmir, they're not murdering children in Beslan and they're not murdering office workers and firemen in New York because they care so much about the Palestinians. They're doing it all for sharia. If you don't believe me, just read what they say.

Sharia is the key. That's what the Islamist are fighting for, the violent ones like al Qaeda and the non violent ones like Hizb ut Tahrir and the Muslim Brotherhood.

If sharia is enforced by a state, they win and we lose. That's how this war is being fought.

Mary is right, and that's precisely why this is - as Bush promised - going to be a long war no matter how we fight it. Whether in Iraq specifically or elsewhere, the WoT is something that will last for generations and not merely months or years.

For Al Queda and the rest of the jihadist fundamental Islamists, plan #1 is to defeat the US (or other nation) in the field on whatever battlefield we choose to engage them, and then install a Sharia state led by the Al Queda 'emirs' and use this state to spread thier violent message to neighboring 'apostate' states. You can see Al Queda attempting to make this plan work in Afghanistan and Iraq. You can also see Al Queda trying this plan against other actors than the US elsewhere in the world - Thailand, Central Asia, the Philipines, Kashmir, etc. But if that fails, Al Queda has plan #2.

Plan #2 is to use the very democratic reforms that we institute against us, by feeding on the populations distaste with secularism and fear of Westernization. They hope to create larger and Islamic party movements until eventually this Islamic party movements can topple the democratic insitutions that gave rise to them and insitute a Sharia state. Al Queda is pursuing this line of attack in Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan. And the Shar'ia counterparts to Al Queda used this model in Iran and would like to use this model in Iraq and Lebanon.

The American plan has to be to defeat Al Queda whenever it faces them and on as many fronts as possible. This exposes Al Queda as weak and ineffectual, and gives us oppurtunity to try to institute a more American model - free market economies, democracy, secular governments, broad non-Islamic education in the hopes that the adoption of this model will reap such rewards on the population such that in the long run Al Queda cannot make thier model seem attractive.

Against Al Queda plan of action #2, the US needs to use a vigorous information/propaganda policy - one which unfortunately the US probably won't be able to do without Hollywood and the media's help - to try to win the hearts and minds of the democratic populations. But, we must accept that on some occassions we are going to lose that fight, and that some newly democratic nations will choose Sharia. The US plan of action then must be to assume that with Al Queda running the place, within a decade or two, the population is going to be as fed up with thier theocratic masters as the Afghani's were fed up with the Taliban and eventually the society will become more amicable to US or other intervention and the adoption of a US model. In other words, its probably impossible that we could when every battle in the hearts and minds war (any more than we could win every battle for hearts and minds against communism), but that in the long run the bankruptsy of our opponents system will undo it.

But whereever there is a chance of creating non-theocratic Islamic nations operating under a more US style model, it must be seized and whenever we are military engaged with Al Queda we must be percieved as ultimately victorous. To do otherwise yields to much ground to the enemy.

If they think that they can shock the American people into submission by the extremity of their violence, then the Islamic world is in big trouble.

What he said.

Tom Holsinger said this:

There won't be a single spasm, rather there will at least one (initial) spasm plus a number of increasingly horrific "slides", plus probably several more spasms setting off, or punctuating, those slides.

and this:

People won't stay in place to die. There will be absolute tidal waves of refugees towards areas offering, or seeming to offer, security. Think of nuclear attack as a cascading event failure. But nuclear attack might not be necessary to start such a process.

Most importantly, the whole process of genocide will almost certainly start first with major intramural violence between Arab factions followed by societal collapse, of which the most likely to be first will be in Saudi Arabia when the Saud clan loses power. There is an alleged consensus among the intelligence communities of the major Western states that the Saud clan has five or less years to survive.

Tom,

You are spitting into a strong wind.

Nukes are magic, don'tcha know.

Nuclear war happens once and everyone dies immediately with no pain. No one lives on to pick up lethal, horribly painful and degrading, diseases from drinking water dirty with other people's shit.

Nukes used in anger, lethally dirty water people have no choice but to drank and the real world implications of huge refugee flows are so far outside the frame of reference of most people that, when you coldly, logically, explain the implications you get reactions amounting to the cries of heresy by religious fundamentalists.

That is the power of the assumed paradigms you are challenging. It is why I invented the concept of "Incrementalism on the Road to Hell."

Cassandra lives and is still ignored.

Most of the above, including the 3 conjectures, is based on a bomb being detonated in the US.

So what are the implications of an attack on a NATO member, for example Denmark?

Does the US/NATO retaliate? I would hope that the NATO rules will still apply.

"I see zero value in killing civilians for the sake of reducing the enemy civilian population. I do not follow the arguments that this will change the enemy's mindset. I believe that the analogy to Japan does not hold; the gov't ultimately surrendered -- the people would have gone on. We don't need to nuke Saudi Arabia to get them to surrender."

There is a difference between the surrender of a government and the surrender of the populace. We may need to nuke Saudi Arabia to demonstrate that our resolve is not limited.

For some, only the clear knowledge that the US can be Kaiser Soze will be enough.

Two more things I want to add to the list of 3 - they fit, but don't fit. I'll tack them on here, therefore, while I decide what to do with them...

• March 2006: Cicero's "gated world" scenario from "Threshold" is the polar opposite of the globalized world future that's currently conventional wisdom. It remains my pick as our most likely future by far, given that (1) technology, politics, and the influence of Islam are lowering the bar for WMD; but the existing globalized world order (2) has shown no ability to deal with this emerging reality, and (3) cannot coexist with the consequences. This is not a set of givens that suggest survival for any organism, or polity - and those who think it can't happen might want to talk to the optimists of the globalizing 1890s for a reality check.

• April 2006: A more scenario-like "several futures" discussion over at Gates of Vienna, in Baron's thought-provoking outside the box piece "The Fall of France and the Multicultural World War". Scenarios discussed include "Eurabia," 3 sub-scenarios under "War," and "Western Rebirth in Europe." All very short sketches rather than detailed projections, but usefu as a way of getting one to think about trends and possibilities.