The Terrorist War
Because of the furor over the Hitler business, Mr. Buchanan's main thesis largely went unnoticed. Mr. Buchanan argued that American commitments around the world far exceed the country's ability to meet them. At some point, he predicted, we could find ourselves in multiple wars on several continents without the means to achieve victory. In Walter Lippmann's phrase, that could spell"foreign policy bankruptcy." To forestall this scenario, Mr. Buchanan called on the United States to undertake a top to bottom review of its global commitments.
Among the wars he warned we might have to fight if we did not limit our commitments was a war against terrorism. Do our global commitments possibly invite attacks of terrorism? If so, which ones precisely -- the commitment to Israel? The commitment to Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf Arab regimes (which commitments we made in order to provide for secure supplies of oil)? The commitment to free trade and globalism? Though he never explained which commitments exactly might be responsible for such a war, Mr. Buchanan laid out the course such a war might take. We have reprinted his war scenario below in hopes that it might provoke fresh thinking.
THE TERRORIST WAR
It is in February of 2005 that the explosion occurs in the port of Seattle. It is a low-yield crude atomic device, but the devastation is incredible. Thousands are dead; thousands more are injured and wounded, many burned horribly. The device was smuggled in the cargo hold of a ship and detonated only hours after the ship had docked. No one knows for certain who put the device there. Iran condemns the act as an inhuman atrocity and an affront to Islam, but notes that America was the first to use such weapons. North Korea is also a suspect. But intense speculation focuses on a group associated with the financier of terror Osama Bin Laden, whom U.S. special forces ran down and killed years earlier. Bin Laden's agents reportedly acquired nuclear weapons from rogue army elements in Russia or Kazakhstan in the 1990s, or got one from a Pakistan now controlled by allies of the Afghan Taliban. But one thing is certain: The missile defense system America is completing has proven to be a Maginot Line. The enemy has gone around it.
The U.S. military now concedes there is no way to stop a Scud or cruise missile from being launched from a merchant ship a few miles off the United States coast. It will be a Herculean task to inspect thousands of such ships passing the American coast or entering U.S. ports each year.
At this point, a call comes to the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain warning that another device will be detonated within two months in another U.S. port, or in the locks of the Panama Canal, if America does not declare it is getting out of the Middle East and the Gulf. The CIA confirms that the caller demonstrated knowledge of how the Seattle bomb was delivered, knowledge that U.S. investigators have not yet given out to newspapers.
Meanwhile, there is panic in every American port. From Boston to Baltimore to New Orleans to San Diego to San Francisco, millions of people are refusing to go to work near port areas and are selling apartments in order to move inland. ...