The Century War V: Some scary stuff

There is scare talk here designed simply to frighten you. Such is the Time Traveler's description of dhimmitude, a new cant word to show the reader the way Muslims will treat non-Muslims. This is a serious enough problem, but here it seems just thrown in as a frightening flourish. The real fright stuff comes when this exchange takes place:

"Galveston," interrupted the Time Traveler. "The Space Needle. Bank of America Plaza in Dallas. Renaissance Tower in Dallas. Bank One Center in Dallas. The Indianapolis 500 – one hour and twenty-three minutes into the race. The Bell South Building in Atlanta. The TransAmerica Pyramid in San Francisco . . ."

After the Traveler intones this list, and more, he adds that these will all disappear in "your next fifteen years. And I've barely begun."

Let's skip over the usual question of "how" and "who" – you are simply left to imagine the answers, and like any good horror writer Simmons knows that what is unnamed and undescribed is the most terrifying. Not to say more difficult to criticize.

But let's do another kind of calculus, unpleasant as it is. In 2001 the US suffered a devastating attack that killed nearly 3000 people. In the five years since we have suffered no attacks in the US, unless you want to count Richard Reed's attempt to ignite his shoe or Jose Padillo's fantasy plot to set off a dirty bomb that does not yet exist (and for which no charges were filed). In the meantime the US reaction has destroyed the governments of two Muslim nation-states, killed thousands of al-Qaeda, disrupted its leadership and squeezed off part of its money pipeline. On this score we can thank the Bush administration, though they have since carried on our three wars with a maddening lack of seriousness and realism. Somewhere around the Renaissance Tower in Dallas being bombed, you might assume that any Muslim nation marred with the slightest evidence of complicity would be destroyed or occupied.

This, of course, would unleash hell (in the words of that neo-con darling, General Maximus Hispanicus). So years of war. This would be open warfare, designed to destroy nation-states, coupled with an ugly shadow war against terrorist cells.

So, what would be likely to happen in this ugly new world?