"The so-called strengths of Islamic terrorism: fanatical intent; lack of a centralized leadership; absence of a final authority and cellular structure" are also its downfall. "Therefore," Wretchard concludes, "the 'rational' American response to the initiation of a terrorist WMD attack would be all-out retaliation from the outset."
It's hard to tell if he's being ironic or just exhibiting the hard right's usual lack of imagination when it comes to military strategy. Wretchard's main point, however, is irrefutable: Keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of Islamists will save not only the West, but Islam as well.
Whether bin Laden has drawn up post-Apocalypse plans or, like the administration with Iraq, contented himself with flying on a wing and a prayer, no one knows but his inner circle. But relegated to the afterlife, Islamists are likely to be met there by Muslims whose ire finally matches that of their revolutionary brethren: "What in Allah's name happened to that Islamic state you promised us?"
One need only recall the words of Richard Russell, the former senator from Georgia, when voting for more nuclear weapons. "If we do have to start over with another Adam [also the first Muslim] and Eve, I want them to be Christians [Muslims]."
Maybe your eschatological Islamists suffer from that much-flaunted syndrome that nobody really understands unless they suffer from it -- the death wish. However, that usually necessitates doubling back to the erotic. Let's cut to the chase then and examine death on a grand scale as a sexual experience.
Whiling Away the Houris
In his article "Nuclear War as an Anti-Sexual Group Fantasy," psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause cites a 1987 article by Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals," in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
She reported her observations of the nuclear-war-policy boys club, which, no secret, is spiked with terms like vertical erector launchers, deep penetration, and, as one military adviser called detonating the bomb, an "orgasmic whump."
"I thought," Cohn said, ". . . someone [might be] embarrassed to be caught in such blatant confirmation of feminist analyses. Of course, I was wrong."
Sexually frustrated and/or repressed, Islamic men have got to be at least as susceptible to this as Americans in the military and defense. The more pent-up the orgasm, the more it looms, in all the glory of its mounting potential energy, like a bomb waiting to go off.
They're not the only ones who will lose their nuclear virginity though. The victims of their attack will be the object of the ultimate deflowering.
DeMause, meanwhile, points out that in periods of prosperity not only progressive but libertine attitudes surge to the forefront. These shifts in the established order cause widespread anxiety.
Furthermore the guilt incurred when the public is forced to confront its suppressed urges is intolerable. We've all known middle-aged women who think Brittany Spears is responsible for the downfall of Western Civilization.
In response we ship out the nation's id in its most vital respository, the body of a young man often equally ambivalent about his urges. While he's invited to work out his complex with bloodshed, should he die, his blood sacrifice cleanses the body politic of its sinfulness.
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