[lit-ideas] Re: Nuclear Responsibility and Iran
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:46:03 +0900
On 3/11/07, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
John McCreery writes, regarding the conversation Eric and I were
having about the threat of al Qaeda to the US homeland
> In fairness to Eric, scenarios similar to those he imagines are
> spelled out in considerable detail in Stephen Flynn (2004) America the
> Vulnerable: How Our Government is Failing to Protect Us from
> Terrorism.
(John then provides some paragraphs from Flynn.)
I'll take your word for it, of course. Eric's most dramatic scenario
was al Qaeda's detonating a nuclear weapon in ten major US cities
simultaneously. Eric said that this possibility had been 'demonstrated.'
My suggestion was that that something was possible did not entail that it
was likely. Maybe the mere possibility of something terrible's happening
is enough to suspend civil rights for the next century and beyond. This isn't
how I would weigh things but I can see why others might.
Flynn's book is based on an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs in
February, 2002. In that article he seems to focus not on what some
enemy-wihout-a-state
is likely to do but on US unpreparedness in the face of what such an
enemy might do; I could find no Doomsday scenarios in it. No doubt
they're in the book. I'd summarize his argument as: given what such an
enemy might do this is what we should do but have not done. Here's the
link to it.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20020101faessay6557/stephen-e-flynn/america-the-vulnerable.html
The book begins with a dramatic what-if scenario not quite so
catastrophic as Eric's, but plenty catastrophic enough. That said,
Flynn's conclusion articulates for me the position I now hold in this
matter.
As for the lack of preparedness, that appears to continue. The Dept.
of Homeland Security remains a bureaucratic maze, largely staffed, at
least in its upper echelons, by political hacks; their performance
during and since Katrina is an awful warning of just how bad this
administration is at delivering anything like genuine preparedness.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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