Indeed, what will become of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan?  The problem with nation building is that it makes two assumptions:  (1) That the representative governments found in Western democracies offer useful models for governing human beings; and (2) people coming out from under the yoke of a strongman dictatorship will want to adopt some form of government based on one of these models.  I contend that these two assumptions are wrong.

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I don’t like to gloat, especially in these circumstances, but I told you so.  The U.S. government, through the loose lips of Mr. Mullins, has finally spoken the words—Pakistan is playing a duplicitous role in the war against terrorism.  This was no secret, at least not for me.  All the evidence was there.  Every sane person on the planet knew this was happening, but no one in officialdom would or could admit to it.  Why do you think we went after OBL without telling the Pakistanis?  Why do you think they shouted “foul” at not being told?  The claim that the spy agency is helping terrorists is no surprise.  What is a surprise is that the Afghan government is so weak that the spy agency’s bloody fist can strike all the way to Kabul and the U.S embassy.

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I’m referring to the Doomsday Clock, of course.  Last time I checked it read six minutes to midnight.  The case of the hikers in Iran and that country’s constant saber rattling might change the clock.  The instability in Pakistan and that country’s increasing animosity towards the West also might change the setting.  Al Qaeda threats, especially those related to revenging the death of OBL, are also a factor.  Add in then tensions between Pakistan and India and the posturing of North Korea, just to name a few hot spots in the world, and one can see that life was much better with the old U.S.S.R. and the Cold War, at least in some sense.  The West had thousands of warheads pointed in its direction, but only one enemy.  Now we’re not even sure who our enemies are!

The proliferation of nuclear arms is akin to a schoolyard of kids who each receive an automatic to play with.  Too many countries and citizens of those countries treat nuclear arms lightly now, like schoolchildren with their video-games education.  Even here in the U.S. (and we should know better), crazies that believe in Armageddon and Rapture have even infiltrated the U.S. Air Force, the very organization in charge of our atomic arsenal (see “The Theology of Armageddon” by Robert C. Koehler, 9/15/2011 CommonDreams.org).  It turns out that in a Vandenberg Air Force Base course titled “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare,” the organizers wanted to give officers in the first week of missile-launch training a religious indoctrination in “Just War Theory,” often called “Jesus Loves Nukes” by its detractors.  Officers of numerous faiths complained and the course was canceled, one small victory for sanity.

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Some news about three of my favorite duplicitous countries:  (1) The Pakistani spy agency has been implicated in the murder of journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad.  Yes, these are the same guys that arrested the people who helped us send OBL to hell where he belongs.  They’re also the same guys who knew where he was all the time.  (2)  It turns out the Afghan police (army?  it’s hard to tell in a Third World country) were incapable of putting down the attackers at that hotel in Kabul.  They needed the help of NATO attack helicopters.  (3) The Saudis have purchased some special tanks from German companies.  These tanks are equipped with special crowd-control features.  Is Angela Merkel and her government embarrassed?

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Arthur Miller’s allegorical attack on McCarthyism, The Crucible, has a good film version.  I watched part of it on Encore the other night and it caused me to start thinking about freedom of religion.  This is another first amendment right that the Founding Fathers forgot to put in the original Constitution.  They quickly fixed their error.  There are two ironies here.  The first is that they forgot this important right, initially.  Many immigrants to the English colony came here to practice their religion freely, so it wasn’t that they were unfamiliar with the concept.  The other irony was signaled out by Mr. Miller:  here you have Puritans, who wanted to practice their religious freedom, doing some very unchristian things to their fellows.

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(Bob Nesoff, Spyder Hole, 2011, Strategic Publishing Group, ISBN 978-1-61204-044-8)

This book offers yet a different take on how to combat terrorism: employ special forces and international collaboration.  (I read the trade paperback version—e-book versions are also available.)  In my own book The Midas Bomb, in John Betcher’s The 19^th Element, and in David Fett and Stephen Langford’s White Sleeper (I reviewed the last two books for Book Pleasures), the military plays second violin to civilians and local and federal authorities.  Bob Nesoff is a former Army Green Beret sergeant, so he follows the adage to write about what he knows.  I’m happy that he did—this tale about the dangers of nuclear proliferation is a thriller filled with military command-and-control suspense that will give readers another enjoyable roller coaster ride.

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(David R. Fett and Stephen Langford, White Sleeper, Synergy Books, ISBN 978-0-9845040-2-2)

We fiction writers have an interesting trade.  Like actors on a stage, our primary job is to entertain, even though we often are introverted people rather than extroverted.  Counter to the pundits’ expectations, people are reading more than ever.  Devices like the Kindle and the Nook allow readers to download everything from the latest N.Y. Times bestseller to newspapers and magazines—or should I say e-papers and e-zines?  Today’s digital publishing revolution provides writers many ways to reach our reading audience and, hopefully, to entertain them.

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I know now what sweet revenge feels like.  I suppose I should feel guilty, but I feel no regrets.  A family member was murdered by this man and friends of both my wife and I were also murdered.  Thousands of others were murdered.  A mass murderer, Osama bin Laden, is dead.

This is a special posting to my blog.  I just need to get these ideas off my chest.  Most people know me as a big, harmless teddy bear, but if I had ever met the mad dog Osama, I would try to kill him myself.  I would put myself in the mind frame of an oncology surgeon extirpating a deadly cancer from the body politic of the world.  I’m sure similar emotions were in the heads of those Navy SEALs.  I probably would have failed–they got the job done.

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It always has been, of course. However, events recently have transpired so fast that not even the Warner Brothers’ roadrunner could keep up with them.  I will only comment here on two things that really bother me, but it’s obvious from previous blog posts that many things concern me about how the West is handling problems in that region of the world.  Today my two concerns are American duplicity and Muslim immaturity.

Duplicity is SOP in our State Department.  You have to wonder if that’s what foreign policy reduces to these days.  When the Egyptian revolution started, the diplomatic corps, led by Mrs. Clinton, struggled to figure out which side to support, the rebels or Mr. Mubarak.  It was clear that it’s time to change our foreign policy and people.  The duplicity resides in supporting some clearly tyrannical and oppressive governments and trying to topple some others.

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Sunday’s N.Y. Times had a front-page article titled “Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By.”  This article is so naïve that it makes me want to cancel my subscription.  I suppose the true culprits are the editors who let such an affront to good journalism make it to the Times, let alone its front page.  What this article is referring to, of course, is the idea that all the uprisings across the Arab world are generated by ordinary people who have become fed up with authoritarian rule.  Al Qaeda has not been present in this process.  So far.  And that’s the problem.  What’s naïve is the foolish thought that they won’t be.

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