A House Divided

by Adam Yoshida

  "Indeed, one can draw a line between the American slavery of the past and the American slavery of today. In both cases, in the case of the race-based slavery that we once extinguished by the sword and in the case of the supposedly democratic form of slavery that exists today, measures were taken that were justified as temporary evils meant to be soon extinguished. In the case of the former, the labor of blacks was supposed to be only a temporary need and, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, it was felt by all that slavery was an evil on its way towards an easy extinguishment. Likewise, in the case of the welfare state, it was always advertised as a temporary evil required by emergency conditions.

  "However, in each case, each of these peculiar institutions soon found adherents who would justify them not as necessary evils but, in fact, as positive moral goods. This is the natural view of some people who find themselves unable to deal with the moral ambiguity of necessary and temporary evils. They will rationalize them, justify them, and transform them into absolute goods. They will project and claim that it is their opponents and not they themselves who are compromised by evil. It did not hurt that in both the cases of the American slavery of old and the American slavery of today that powerful interests had an economic stake in its perpetuation. Just as the planter class of the Old South would have been – and was – ruined by abolition, so likewise would the modern class of bureaucrats and ward-heelers be destroyed by the effects of a second abolition.

  "Yet, today as more than a century and a half ago, we all know that liberty and slavery are not compatible and cannot co-exist. One will inevitably crowd out the other. A nation cannot exist half-free and half-slave. It will, as Lincoln once noted, ultimately become all one thing or all the other.

  "There is an irrepressible conflict that exists in America today between those who would create and build this country and those who believe that the former group are obligated to support and provide a living for them. In the settlement of this conflict we will find the future of America. If the former prevail, then we shall return to our origins as a constitutional republic of free men. If the latter are victorious, than we shall sentence our children to generations of grey conformity and decline until, God willing, some future generation of Americans, perhaps braver and nobler of spirit and mind than our own, rediscovers the animating principals of the Founders and takes whatever action shall prove to be necessary to restore our nation and people to greatness."

  The Majority Leader's speech caused a fair stir, especially on the internet, where his invocation of slavery was deemed by some to be deeply offensive to African-Americans. The controversy would doubtless have – as Rickover had intended – become worse had the story of the century (up until that point, at least) not broken the following day.

  Like many terminal cases, the Islamic Republic of Iran had opted to choose the time, place, and method of its own demise. However, unlike almost all other dying patients, the Islamic Republic possessed nuclear weapons. This was an important difference.

  President Majid Shahidi took one final look at the sky before he stepped onto the deck of the Russian-built Kilo-class submarine Yunes , presently sitting dockside at Bander Abbas. The President, a former Energy Ministry technocrat who had been educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the 1990s, had been elected as a pro-Western modernizer and had been believed to mark the eclipse of the Ayatollahs, as his presence in the election was a result of a backdown by the Council of Guardians in the face of popular protest. Indeed, the American President had taken his election as a chance to signal via backchannels that he was open to direct negotiations that would have legitimized Iran's heretofore-unacknowledged status as a nuclear weapons power. What the consensus at major Western intelligence agencies and foreign ministries had missed was a simple truth: the fact that Shahidi was not an Islamist fanatic did not mean that he was not a fanatic.

  Iran's candidate of hope and change had been able to bring neither to the people. The regime – a regime that he despised but now controlled – was hopelessly corrupt and inefficient. Energy price subsidies consumed much of the state's revenue – made infinitely worse by Western sanctions – and the majority of the nation's people could only afford food with heavy government subsidies. Reforms had brought riots and rebellion. Shahidi had privately come to hate the Iranian people as ardently as the worst foreign bigot. Worse still, the damnable Ayatollahs and their followers had not, as predicted, gone away. Instead, they pointed to the failures of Shahidi's reforms as evidence of his Godlessness and personal corruption. The Islamists had joined the food riots in the streets and argued that his failure to successfully push reforms through their grotesque system was his fault.

  Shahidi had responded to his troubles by falling back upon that old standby in the Islamic world: blaming Israel and the West for everything that had gone wrong. The reformer's rhetoric had quickly become as strident as that of his predecessors, referring to the State of Israel as a "cancerous blot on the Earth" and describing it at the United Nations as a, "stain to be wiped away."

  This turn had won the President fans among Iran's Islamists, but had done little to quell the riots in the streets (save to the degree that it had won him followers willing to shoot some of those rioters. In that sense it had been a very productive decision). Instead, entire cities had turned against the central government, ejecting tax collectors and other government officials by force. Parts of the regular army had refused to join in the repression, forcing Shahidi to send the Revolutionary Guard against both civilian and military rebels, often with mixed results.

  Majid Shahidi was not a man inured to failure. He was the favorite son of his mother. He was the golden boy in school. He was the hope of his village. As a man, he was beloved by women of all ages and of every marital status. He could not fail. He could, however, redefine success.

  He had known from an early age that he was born to be a great man: a man of destiny. He wasn't sure, regardless of all of the prayers and lectures that he had sat through, if he believed in God, but he certainly believed in himself. The Islamic Republic might very well not survive: not because he was an ineffective leader, he reasoned, but because it had been doomed from its conception. That did not mean that he could not use the Islamic Republic – and those who genuinely believed in it and its mission – to achieve a singular moment of destiny.

  The Islamic Republic, he had begun to tell a certain circle of men, was decaying because it had angered Allah. Allah, he pointed out to them with slashing references to the Koran, had placed a sword in the hands of his chosen nation and they had chosen to sheath it.

  "Did not the Prophet (peace be upon him) say that, the day of judgement will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews? And that, on that day, the forces of nature themselves will align with us? That even a tree will say – O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him?" he asked.

  If they struck Israel, he explained to a credulous few, Iran would surely be spared from the effects of Israeli nuclear retaliation because Allah would project a great shield across the sky.

  To other men – especially those hard-nosed men whose confidence and skills he would require to pull off his plan – he made a more reality-based argument: no one would likely be left to account for the contents of the state's treasury which, even if it was depleted by the standards of a nation-state, still had more than enough money in it to provide for all of them for several lifetimes. What's more, he would make certain that, when the time came, they and their families would get a head start.

  Majid Shahidi hadn't been able to do everything that he had set out to do: but he would prove himself the superior of every Muslim who had lived in the previous four generations by doing something that millions of them had tried and they all had conspicuously failed at.

  Still, Shahidi had no desire to die today. He took one final look – almost certainly the last he would ever get at his native land – before he stepped belowdecks on the submarine and listened to the hat
ch close behind him.

  Major Avi Stern felt the gentle vibrations of his F-35A Lightning as it was buffeted by a powerful wind. The opening decades of the 21st century had not been kind to his country. The failure to destroy the Iranian nuclear program had set off a wave of emigration from the State of Israel as Jews, fearful of an enemy state with nuclear arms that did not back off from eliminationist rhetoric, sought refuge abroad (principally in the United States, Australia, and Canada. Stern's sister had long ago relocated to the latter). The reality of an Islamist bomb had emboldened terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda and had cowed non-Islamist states that might otherwise have spoken against or even assisted the Israelis in the suppression of terror. Pro-Islamist governments in Egypt and Syria had been eager – almost to the point of competition – to play host to the enemies of Israel. Faced with these realities, the nation had cycled through a series of governments that alternatively sought peace at any price, only to run aground against the reality that Israel's enemies did not now, nor had they ever sought, peace with the Jews, and governments that promised new and aggressive forward defense measures only to be forced to back down in the face of the changed military and political realities on the ground.

  Stern was flying a regular combat air patrol over the Golan Heights. This had become necessary in recent years, as an increasingly bold Hezbollah had begun to acquire stealthy drone aircraft from China via Iran and to use them to perpetuate regular atrocities against Israeli civilian and military targets. Surface-to-air missiles and other defensive measures, while effective some of the time, were often less well-suited to picking up upon and destroying the stealthy intruders than the plain old human eye.

  The patrol was an hour old when Stern caught a bright streak in the corner of his eye, rushing across the sky from the east.

  "Is that what I think it is?" his wingman, dispensing with protocol, called out to him.

  "I think... I think it must be," replied Stern, who thought for a second about calling his command to report it. Why bother?, he then thought. They must have known even before I did.

  "Delta 2," he radioed instead, "let's get some altitude."

  The Iranian Shahab-3 missiles – more than four hundred of them in total – soared across the night sky. No one outside of a select circle of men in Iran – most of whom were already in hiding – knew how many nuclear bombs that the Iranian regime possessed, but it was certainly far fewer than four hundred. Most of those missiles, the Israeli Air Defense Command knew, must carry still-deadly but less-menacing conventional warheads. However, there was no way of telling which of these missiles carried what.

  Israeli Arrow-3 missiles raced into the heavens to confront the Iranian threat. Six hundred Israeli missiles – out of a total stockpile of eight hundred – were launched in the space of a few minutes. Both sets of missiles moved towards their rendezvous with destiny, closing at a rapid rate. Within minutes the Israeli commanders began to see the success of their efforts as the interceptors struck home and destroyed one Iranian missile after another. The total number of incoming missiles began to drop. From four hundred they fell to less than one hundred as the Arrow-3 missiles proved to be almost as accurate as advertised. But that still left many missiles inbound, an unknown number of which could have a nuclear payload.

  At the Israeli Air Defense Command a critical question was now debated: should they put the remaining interceptors into the air? The Mossad remained uncertain as to the number of Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles possessed by the Iranians. If they expended their whole stock of interceptors, they might leave themselves defenseless against a second attack. Moreover, the Arrow-3 was less effective if it was launched against a missile during the later stages of its flight. After a few tense seconds, the director made a simple pronouncement: they would adhere to doctrine. Anyway, perhaps there was something that might be done to abate a second attack.

  It took less than thirty seconds from the moment that the launch of the Iranian missiles was detected for the Prime Minister was informed of what had happened. It took less than a minute for an order to be transmitted from the Prime Minister to launch crews at Sdot Micha Air Base in central Israel. They were instructed to launch a major counterforce assault against Iran immediately. Even as the Israeli Arrow-3s continued to engage the incoming Iranian missiles, the first of fifty Jericho-3 missiles were launched from deeply buried Israeli bunkers. Each of the missiles mounted three independent re-entry vehicles. And Iran, of course, had no effective anti-ballistic missile defense systems.

  Older Israeli defensive missiles sought to engage the Iranian barrage at the last moment, with hundreds of Arrow-2 missiles being launched in a final effort to reduce the danger. Overall the Israeli defensive effort was very effective, with only forty-seven of the Iranian missiles actually striking Israel. However, of those forty-seven missiles, three were tipped with nuclear warheads. Two of them exploded over the city of Tel Aviv at a little after 7PM local time, spaced some thirty-seconds apart. Both of them were relatively unsophisticated weapons, the first exploding with a yield of forty-five kilotons and the second, a partial fizzle, putting out some twenty-two kilotons of force. The explosions devastated the city, killing over one hundred thousand people instantly, with fifty-thousand more dying in the days that immediately followed. The third bomb struck Haifa, Israel's third most-populated city, killing just under fifty thousand Israelis.

  The Israeli counter-blow hit Iran minutes later, striking at every possible target associated with the nuclear program with massive force. Altogether the Israeli strike, slightly reduced by a single malfunction, resulted in one hundred and forty-seven nuclear detonations, each with a force of one-hundred and fifty kilotons, over Iran. However, because these strikes were entirely targeted against military sites, the initial number of Iranian casualties was actually lower than that in Israel, with an estimated one hundred thousand Iranians in total being killed in scattered pockets across the country.

  Forty-seven seconds after the first nuclear detonation over Israel was confirmed, two Secret Service agents burst through the doors of the master bedroom of a fashionable house in Georgetown to find President Henry Warren in a state of undress with a well-known Washington hostess.

  "Mr. President," the Chief Agent announced, "we have to go right now."

  The President was still in the process of buttoning up his shirt as two agents dragged him by both arms down the stairs and to a waiting limousine. As the President was thrown into the back seat of the car, his exit covered by a group of agents with guns drawn, William Howard, the President's personal aide, handed him a phone.

  The voice of Martin Donovan, the National Security Advisor, came across the line.

  "Mr. President, the CIA has reported and local sources have confirmed that there have been several nuclear detonations over Israel. It was an Iranian missile strike. It appears that both Tel Aviv and Haifa have been hit. Intelligence also indicates that there are Israeli missiles in the air, presumably headed to Iran."

  President Warren was three months into his second term, re-elected in an agonizingly close race where he had actually lost the popular vote, only to be returned to the White House by three thousand voters in Virginia and ten thousand in Colorado who had managed to keep the New York Democrat in the White House.

  "Shit. This is the last fucking thing that I need," replied the President.

  The Presidential motorcade was moving through streets at maximum speed with sirens blaring.

  "Where the fuck am I going?" he asked.

  "Sir," said Donovan, "this is an unprecedented situation. We don't know why Iran fired or what's going to happen next. Procedure calls for you to be airborne. I've initiated the Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan. It calls for you to be on one of our Doomsday planes. The VP is on his way to Raven Rock. SecDef is going to the tank in the Pentagon. The Speaker, the President Pro Tempore, and some others will be getting dispersed as well."

  "Ok," the President said befor
e adding, "keep me updated."

  The President then disconnected the call and jumped to his contact list. He touched the name at the top.

  Prime Minister Joseph Dayan had survived the two nuclear blasts that had devastated Tel Aviv. In fact, the Iranian missiles – seemingly almost randomly aimed – had missed most of the Israeli government. The most senior government official to perish in the attacks was the Minister of Defense, a legendary former General whose place would be very hard to fill. On a temporary basis Dayan, himself a former Defense Minister, was filling the slot. Now, finding himself faced with the multitude of misfortunes that afflicted the country in the aftermath of the attacks, he ruefully recalled the old cliche that the survivors of nuclear war would envy the dead.

  "Of course," explained the Chief of the Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, "we will require a complete national mobilization at this point in any case. The problem is that this is very much an either-or thing. In order to dig through collapsed buildings and the like in both Tel Aviv and Haifa, we will require the labor of a substantial number of people – a large portion of the army. But, at the same time, if a threat materializes on our borders, we will require those very same men there. And, further, if we deploy a large portion of the Army to provide relief, it will be difficult to impossible to disengage them in time to meet any sort of conventional threat."

  "I'm not sure that I see any advice there, General, merely a summary."

  "This is a political decision, Prime Minister, not a military one. I am merely informing you of our capabilities."

  Across the world, crowds took to the streets to celebrate the blow that Iran had struck to the "Zionist entity." Not only in the Middle East but across other places where Islamists congregated. The frenzy spread as far away as London, Toronto, and even to New York City where the celebrants were attacked in the streets by furious Jews and their supporters. In Cairo and Damascus, the crowds were driven into a frenzy, chanting thanks to Iran and calling for the extermination of all Jews.