Yup,
And much of the story of "Executive Orders" follows how the Preseident handles this and subsequent attacks, and how he chooses to respond.
My personal opinion on this is that the US will respond, but not alone, and not in a constrained way. I think we will see a quiet period of investigation and intelligence gathering followed by a sudden bout of retribution involving attacks on terrorists and support organisations which have previously or currently threatened the United States. As a Canadian colleague of mine said, the USA will use this attack as a reason the "clean house". They will determine a whole series of targets and take them out, probably spectacularly.
And they won`t be alone. I expect that any operation will, by deliberate design, be an international one involving the US, UK, Russia, and maybe Germany and France also. The key point that is being pressed home by every government official around the world (ok, excluding Iraq and Afghanistan), is that this is not just a US problem. It is an international one, requiring an international response.
The time has come to deal decisively with terrorism on a world scale. I fully expect that a coordinated effort will now be made to achieve just such a goal.
Incidentally, the death toll from this attack is liable to reach into the many thousands - my best guess would be around 8 to 10 thousand dead or seriously hurt - a level not incompatible with a small nuclear attack.
In "Sum of All Fears" the finale involves the political ramifications of a decision made by the President that, at first glance, appears appropriate. In the end however, the choice is a poor one.
The clamour by those who feel we should bomb Kabul or attack Baghdad is ill-advised. There are much better ways to get the people who are responsible for this, and those who support them. Targets can be picked that will send the strongest possible message without needing to resort to acts that will result in that most trivialising of euphemisms, "collateral damage".
We now await the decisions to be made by the US leadership to see how George W. Bush behaves under the most extreme circumstances. Hopefully he will receive good advice, from home and abroad, on what the appropriate response should be. I personally don`t have the answer except to say that when it comes, and it will come, America`s revenge will be a terrible thing.
After the successful attack ion Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, who had masterminded and carried out the attack on the US Pacific fleet, stated that he believed, "we have done nothing more than wake a sleeping tiger".
Let us not forget that the USA is the most militarily powerful nation on Earth, bar none.
