GEORGE BUSH AND THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES: Why There Hasnt Been Another 9-11

Cicero, the Roman orator, told a story about a Greek King of Syracuse in Sicily named Dionysius (432-367 BC). He was rich and had the best of everything. He also had the usual retinue of court flatterers, one of whom was named Damocles.

Tired of hearing from Damocles how happy he, Dionysius, should be, the king offered to exchange places with Damocles for a day. The young man was deliriously happy to be wearing costly robes, eating the finest foods, imbibing the best wine, attended to by beautiful women – until he noticed a sword, suspended above him and hanging by a single horsehair. Should the hair snap, the huge sword would fall and pierce him to death.

Too terrified to move, he called out to Dionysius, who replied that the sword was there to teach Damocles a lesson: that the happiness of kings was an illusion, that there was always such a sword hanging above the life of any king, who at any moment could lose his kingdom or even his head.

One lesson we can draw from Cicero’s tale is the importance of identifying the particular Swords of Damocles hanging above the heads of your country’s enemies. There’s always at least one. The trick is figuring out what specific sword is hanging over what particular enemy.

Israel, for example, recognizes that the Aswan Dam is Egypt’s Damoclean Sword. There is no possibility whatever of Egypt’s winning a war with Israel, for if Aswan is blown, all of inhabited Egypt is under 20 feet of water. Once the Israelis made this clear to the Egyptians, the possibility of any future Egyptian attack on Israel like that of 1948, 1967, and 1972 is gone.

There has been a rumor floating in the Washington ether for some time now that George Bush has figured out what Sword of Damocles is suspended over Osama Bin Laden’s head. It’s whispered among Capitol Hill staffers on the intel and armed services committees; White House NSC (National Security Council) members clam up tight if you begin to hint at it; and State Department neo-cons love to give their liberal counterparts cardiac arrhythmia by elliptically conversing about it in their presence.

The whispers and hints and ellipses are getting louder now because the rumor explains the inexplicable: Why hasn’t there been a repeat of 9-11? How can it be that after this unimaginable tragedy and Osama’s constant threats of another, we have gone over three years without a single terrorist attack on American soil?

The proximate reasons aren’t sufficient: that we have taken the fight to the enemy in Iraq, drawing their attention and energy away from America; that the intel and law-enforcement folks have caught and prevented a number of planned attacks. These are good reasons why there haven’t been more attacks – but they don’t explain why there haven’t been any.

For over 40 years, America and the Soviet Union fought a “Cold” war that never got hot because each had a nuclear Damoclean Sword over the other. After 9-11, George Bush went after Osama’s Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and began systematically hunting down and either killing or capturing scores of Al Qaeda agents around the world. But he also thought: “Is there some threat so horrible to Osama and these Wahhabi fundamentalists that they would refrain from attacking us again? We can fight this war with them elsewhere, in Afghanistan or Iraq, but how can we make America off limits? That’s the kind of threat we need.”

There’s only one threat that would deter Osama from repeating a 9-11 type terrorist attack on America: a threat to nuke Mecca.

Completely obliterating the terrorists’ holiest of holies, rendering what is for them the world’s most sacred spot a radioactive hole in the ground is retribution of Biblical proportions – and those are the only proportions that will do the job.

Osama would have laughed off such a threat, given his view that Americans are wussies who cut and run after a few losses, such as Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia in 1993. Part of Bush’s rationale for invading Afghanistan and Iraq – obviously never expressed publicly – was to convince Osama that his threat to nuke Mecca was real. Osama hates America just as much as ever, but he is laughing no more.

He is not laughing because he knows that he is playing poker with a Texas cowboy holding the nuclear aces, that there is nothing his Al Qaeda could do terroristically to America that could come remotely close to the permanent obliteration of Mecca. So far, Osama has decided not to see if GW is bluffing. Smart move.

For one version of the rumor is – as discussed in Mad in Mecca – is that there already is a W-80 nuclear warhead undetectably buried in Mecca that can be triggered by a satellite signal.

This is why Osama is going after the Saudi Royal Family rather than going after America. It’s also why he is going desperately crazy. GW cleaned his clock in Afghanistan, the Royals are doing the same in Saudi, so now he is embarked on persuading Sunni Arabs in Iraq to immolate themselves on his behalf.

These folks are outnumbered four-to-one by the Shias and Kurds and would get wiped out in the civil war Osama and Zarqawi are trying to instigate. Persuading an entire people to commit auto-genocide (as opposed to getting a few of them to blow themselves up individually) is a tough sell.

The success of the January 30 Iraq elections is the beginning of the end for Osama and his Al Qaeda. He is a Moslem Damocles with GW’s terrible swift Sword of Doom above him that he dare not let fall.