"The Bomb"

Typically, I am one to abhor the usage of nihilistic violence, and when reading the comments section of mainstream news articles rationalizing the illogical wars being fought in the Middle East, I cannot help but cringe at the relative popularity of the concept of completely annihilating the Muslim world with a series of well-placed nuclear weapons, characteristically expressed in the parlance of our times as “dropping the bomb.” The Bomb, in context, is the hopeful wish that the American government can end the War on Terror as quickly and as painlessly as possible, just as they did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to signal the death-knell of the evil imperialist Japanese. Nowadays, even to patriotic Americans, the War on Terror has taken on an air of absurd hopelessness, and I suspect most rational citizens would vote to end the violence, if not for the fact that a peaceful resolution would symbolize victory for the Muslim terrorists. What people really want is to finish the job Bush started, to annihilate Al-Qaeda and global terrorism, even at the cost of innocent lives overseas; with this accomplished, surly our society can do away with TSA pat downs, government surveillance, and the ever-present encroaching of our own government on our civil liberties, which, naturally, is done because of the unsure times we live in, the ubiquitous manifestation of Global Terror in an uncertain age.

While these seemingly misguided comments used to fill my benevolent mind with metaphysical anguish, I now understand the hidden logic of these American patriots exercising their freedom of speech, and, in confluence with my preexisting Rothbardian ideals, have developed a compromise that can end terrorism as we know it, though the means may seem lofty at first. Realistically speaking, Americans calling for Muslim genocide overlook the fact that this option is simply not financially viable, nor will it do anything to crush the cause of global terrorism. Furthermore, by making the Middle East our nuclear playground to a greater extent than we are already doing with Depleted Uranium tipped missiles, American Muslims would surly misconstrue the measures taken as a war against Islam, as opposed to “terror,” and may take up arms against the American government, becoming insurgents in their own backyard. This is the heart of the mystical, confounding principal that Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA bin-Laden unit, and adjunt-professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies, refers to as blowback, which basically states that “killing Muslims pisses off other Muslims”.

In addition to causing a possible, if not entirely probably American civil war, blowing up the Middle East on such a scale would tragically overlook a fact that is all but common knowledge to anyone that has not grown up in the land of the McDollar menu; the American government has admittedly trained and funded the Mujaheedin (cough, Al-Qaeda, bin Ladin) which we are still actively fighting (in Afghanistan) and funding/arming (in Libya). So even if there were a magical button, that, when pressed, would kill every Al-Qaeda terrorist on the face of the earth, the cause of terrorism would not be neutralized, only the symptoms. For this reason, I propose we drop “the bomb” in the heart of Washington, DC.

While the type of bomb is inconsequential (I would prefer the use of one with no long-term nuclear side-effects), it must be powerful enough to completely wipe out the White House, Capitol Building, CIA Headquarters, Eisenhower Executive Office Building, etc, etc. The Pentagon can be imploded (presumably, by themselves) in a series of ineffective drone strikes; in this way Americans can parsimoniously solve a problem that our government’s annual trillion dollar defense budget only exacerbated over the ten years of perpetual warfare. Conveniently, since very few Americans, liberal or conservative, seem to care about civilian casualties, refusing to acknowledge over 100,000 Iraqi deaths as a direct cause of our intervention, my conservative estimate of 300,000 civilian deaths as a byproduct of the explosion should not cause anyone to lose sleep, and a proper death count is really not necessary. Morally, our society will be on par with, if not far superior, to the WWII America that lauded the firebombing of Tokyo, and in the rubble of New-Washington, somewhere near the shattered limbs of our martyred leaders, we may find the elusive concept that has evaded us all as we erroneously attributed its destruction as the terrorists creed—we may find our freedom.

American History

The British Empire faced a dilemma in 1781. It had already been six years since the British-separatists of the New World (they called themselves "Americans") adopted a revolutionary doctrine in opposition to what many saw as tyrannical rule from a country that was too far away to be politically relevant and too violent to be considered benevolent. Historical events such as the Boston Massacre (the Americans were armed with snowballs!) and the passing of the "Intolerable Acts" (British troops needed to be housed somewhere, right?) turned many a separatist against British rule, and as war broke out across what would soon be known as "The United States," the British learned a valuable lesson in what contemporary military nomenclature refers to as "COIN," or counter-insurgency.

Although the Brits had a superior military and economy when compared to the colonists, who resorted primarily to what we now know as "guerrilla warfare," or "terrorism," it became clear to many policymakers in British Parliament that their paradoxical goals of "winning" the war by killing the radicalized colonists and winning the hearts of the colonists so that they accept the legitimacy of the British monarchy were logically impossible to reconcile. The British Army could crush the revolutionaries at a specific battle, or control a specific state, but they could not conceivably occupy everywhere at once, which pissed-off "Americans" did, and, not surprisingly, losing friends, family members, and the value of one's money to a costly war would turn exponentially greater numbers of colonists against the British invaders. In the end, it wasn't a crushing military victory by the Americans that ended the war, but an intellectual revelation by the British; the closest thing to "victory" that could be achieved was to quit shooting the colonists so they could resume making money off of them. 

Of course, history shows us that America and Britain will eventually grow to become close allies, as economic betterment (and the exploitation of third world countries) heals all diplomatic wounds. Today, our government finds itself the enthusiastic leader of an undeclared "war on terror" that most of the Western world has grown weary of, taking their proverbial toys and going home. The diction being employed by both parties' leaders in American politics are peppered with empty platitudes, as if drone bombs dropped on Pakistan explode with freedom and leave a trail of paved roads and electric cars in their wake, and make us richer at home, too. Unfortunately, that is not how warfare works, and Americans are starting to wake up. With every civilian death overseas, our government create ten more enemies that view the American military as a gang of high-tech killers, not liberators. While the government frames the conflicts as clashes of divisive cultures (the Muslim extremists hate us because we are free!), the truth is probably that nobody likes seeing their homeland desecrated by foreign invaders.