Kerry on Defense - what if Kerry had gotten his way? (pt 2 of 2)
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Kerry's Lies and Spin
Let's say that John Kerry, and not Michael Dukakis, had run against Bush the Elder in 1988 - and won.

Let's also stipulate that unassailable Democratic majorities existed in the House and Senate, capable of supporting any move Kerry wanted to make, and endlessly willing to do it, even at the expense of their constituencies.

In this hypothetical alternate 2004, we're in deep trouble - "we" meaning "the whole world, even the French and Germans." Why? It's all John Kerry's fault.

In 1990, instead of going to the aid of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia when Saddam Hussein attacked, President Kerry declined to act. Saddam was able to seize the oil fields and refineries in northeast Saudi Arabia before a coalition of Britain, France, the Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians and the Gulf Cooperation Council stopped his forces short of Mecca.

However, this coalition was not powerful enough to throw Saddam out of either Kuwait or the land he occupied (and continues to occupy) in Saudi Arabia. Saddam was able to pay Iraq's massive debts from the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s with the profits from oil production in the captured lands.

Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf states eventually made an uneasy peace with Saddam Hussein, who is now well on his way to his long-term goal of politically and militarily dominating the Arab world by a mixture of overt threats and covert subversion and support for international terror.

President Kerry's inaction during the Iraq-Kuwait Crisis allowed Saddam Hussein's program to acquire weapons of mass destruction to proceed unimpeded.

By the fall of 1992, the nuclear weapons program headed by Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel was able to leapfrog past the construction of fission-only weapons, purchasing plans from the Chinese of the technology behind compact hydrogen bombs of the type used in American nuclear artillery shells which was stolen by the Chinese from Los Alamos National Laboratories - an event which was soft-pedaled by the national press, as was the multi-million dollar series of campaign donations made at roughly the same time by the Chinese Army through several intermediaries to Vice-President Al Gore's office.

By 1994, mass-production lines were established in Iraq both for the compact nuclear artillery shells and for strategic hydrogen bombs roughly equal in yield and design sophistication to those on Minuteman III ICBMs. By then, no hope existed of curtailing any of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction acquisition programs - so he soon became the possessor of the fourth largest nuclear arsenal on Earth, and the second largest chemical and biological arsenals, after the Soviet Union.

Of course, the Iranians were not sitting on their hands during all of this - their program to acquire nuclear weapons instantly went into overdrive, and received crucial assistance from the nuclear arms bazaar run by Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan. The 1990s were a busy decade for Dr. Khan, who sold nuclear weapons and plutonium manufacturing technology to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and Libya as well, mostly with Saudi financing.

In 2000 Hosni Mubarrak, the strongman ruler of Egypt, was killed by the Muslim Brotherhood, and a junta of radical Muslim army and air force officers took control of the country. Encouraged by their covert possession of nuclear weapons and strengthened by the military might conferred by Mubarrak's military partnership with the United States, the Egyptian junta overran the Sinai buffer zone in August 2004 with a massive armored force while bombing Israeli positions indiscriminately.

The Syrians, forewarned of the attack, seized the opportunity to recover the Golan Heights from Israel. Syrian-assisted Hezbollah guerillas invade northern Israel before being bombed and destroyed by fighters from Ramat David Air Base.

Stout Israeli resistance to the Egyptian/Syrian attack placed the success of the operation in doubt, and poor command and control is blamed later for an Egyptian brigade commander's decision to destroy a large concentration of Israeli armor with a nuclear-armed and range-enhanced Nodong-2 tactical missile (bought secretly from North Korea).

The Israelis responded with tactical nuclear strikes on Egyptian and Syrian troop formations and air defense sites. Tel Aviv, Damascus and Cairo were destroyed in retaliatory strikes before the respective armies' command and control was totally disrupted and the remnants of the warring forces withdrew to their countries to help restore order.

Saudi Arabia soon announced its possession of nuclear weapons, followed by Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria, all threatening to finish the destruction of Israel if the West Bank settlements were not evacuated forthwith.

Meanwhile, President Gore was left totally without options. Then-President Kerry's refusal to stop the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1990 largely destroyed any credibility or diplomatic clout the United States had built up in the Persian Gulf under Reagan.

When Kerry stopped production of the M1 Abrams tank and Bradley fighting vehicle, most US Army and National Guard units were left with M60A3 main battle tanks, based on an obsolete design dating from the Korean War, and M113A3 armored personnel carriers whose comparatively thin armor won't even stop heavy machine gun fire.

The complete lack of a credible equipment base for modern manuever warfare causes the US Armed Forces to abandon the AirLand Battle concept which might have given American forces a decisive and vastly disproportionate edge in combat effectiveness over Iraqi and other potential Middle Eastern adversaries. (Note: and which actually did do so during Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom in the real world)

Even if Gore had wanted to intervene in the rapidly evolving 2004 bloodbath in the Middle East, he couldn't have gotten enough troops and tanks to the area in to make a difference before the worst damage had been done, because Kerry had also halted purchase of enough C-5B Galaxy military transport planes to move a division's worth of troops and supplies in a timely fashion.

Meanwhile, Kerry's massive drawdown of US defense capabilities, his precipitous and unilateral cancellation of the "Star Wars" missile defense program and cancellation of advanced infantry and armor weapons systems in the pipeline removed much of the pressure on the Soviet economy and restored the Communist Party's prestige and power, assuring its survival through the 1990s.

Demonstrators against a new wave of oppression were mowed down by internal security troops throughout Russia, and the Soviets' secret biological warfare program went on as usual, while Kerry's science advisor Matthew Meselson poured scorn on the idea that the Soviets had a secret bioweapons program.

The epidemic in the US and Britain of an odd strain of Legionnaire's Disease that killed its victims by making their immune systems attack the myelin coating of their nervous systems came as a complete surprise to Gore administration officials and all of the major press organizations except the Weekly Standard, National Review, and Fox News. (Note: such an agent was actually developed by Dr. Sergei Popov of the Soviet Biopreparat biological weapons agency, according to the New York Times)

Encouraged by the Soviets' political resurrection, the Chinese Politburo ordered a crackdown of dissent and democratic political activity, culminating in the murder or imprisonment of two million politically unreliable citizens, and signed a 20-year nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.

Chinese and Soviet naval units began a series of joint exercises in the Pacific, at times harassing fishing boats and freighters running under the US flag and those of her allies.

Osama bin Laden, on his return from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia, gained a loyal following among all classes of Saudi society. His plan to have hijackers commandeer passenger planes and crash them into targets in New York and Washington DC was discarded when some of his followers in the Saudi National Guard use their positions of trust to steal two nuclear weapons from the Saudi arsenal and give them to bin Laden's organizations.

Six weeks later, just before the Egyptian/Syrian attack on Israel, the city centers of New York and Washington DC were incinerated by nuclear blasts.

But President Gore (away on a state visit to Beijing) was in no position to respond to these atrocities, because one of predecessor John Kerry's first acts in office was to cancel the Peacekeeper missile program and remove existing Peacekeepers from service, and to drastically curtail American intelligence activities throughout the world in order to assuage the concerns of his friends in the French and German governments.

Thus, there was no way to identify where the bombs came from (the plutonium was made in secret Pakistani nuclear reactors whose design and characteristics are unknown to the IAEA and CIA), and retaliation against the responsible parties (in the unlikely event they were ever identified by the post-Kerry CIA) with obsolete missile and aircraft delivery systems and old, unserviced nuclear warheads was chancy enough that Gore was unwilling to risk that option.

Occasionally, a city in Europe or the United States disappears under a mushroom cloud. Europe and the United States are united - in their inability to do a damn thing about it.

Copyright Vance P. Frickey, 2004