The Living Will Envy The Dead (3 page)

And the Russians gave one to us.  They used to rule half of Europe after the Second World War.  They were in control of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and a dozen other countries, some that had once had an independent existence, others formed out of the ruins of the so-called Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  It might have been a Union, but it wasn't Soviet, Socialist or remotely Republican.  It was a prison camp for half of Europe and a deadly menace to the rest.  It fell apart, largely because communists make lousy planners – poor or even falsified feedback – and we declared victory.  Why not?  We’d won the Cold War without fighting.

The Russians didn’t see it that way.  They hit rock bottom during the Clinton years and started to climb back up again.  They pushed through an entire series of reforms that started to rebuild their economy, and then they started to rebuild their military.  They were still the only serious threat to America’s existence, but we didn’t take them seriously any longer.  They might have produced a few impressive pieces of kit, but most of their technology might as well be used as scrap iron.  In 2001, after 9/11, the Russians realised that they were in a stronger position than they had thought.  We – the USA – needed them, and they didn’t need us.  They grew more confident, started to pull their former satellites back into their orbit, and invaded Georgia.  There’s a ton of crap written about that war, most of it completely missing the point, but the writing on the wall was that the Russians were back.  They had kicked the shit out of the Georgians…and NATO had done nothing.  NATO
could
do nothing.  The Russians were back in Eastern Europe.

We needed them, desperately, to assist us.  Pakistan was falling into chaos.  We needed supply lines through Russian-controlled areas to supply our forces in Afghanistan.  We needed them to stop fucking about with Iran.  The Russians had no problems with either of them – they regarded the Iranians with the same kind of attitude that the KKK has for the NAACP – but nothing comes for nothing in this world.  They would give us what we wanted, for a price, and that price was effectively selling out Eastern Europe.  Our new and inexperienced President effectively took the deal…and, in the absence of clear support from Washington, Western Europe followed suit.

Look, I’m not defending them, but I understand their position.  During the Cold War, Western Europe was terrified that there would be a nuclear war, fought in Europe.  Victory would be meaningless if it meant the complete devastation of Europe, as far as they were concerned, and so they had the twin priorities of defending against the Soviets and restraining us.  They couldn’t stand up to the USSR on their own, so they needed us, but they couldn’t survive a nuclear war either.  Matters only got worse as Putin started exporting larger amounts of Russian energy to the West.  All of a sudden, resistance to the Russians meant European citizens freezing in the cold.  How much resistance do you think the Russians faced?

Anyway…we had effectively won in Iraq, if only for certain values of ‘won’ and were pulling back, when the Russians made their move.  They had always hated the presence of American BMD systems on Polish soil.  They might not have been a threat to the vast Russian arsenal of ballistic missiles, but they resented them, just as we had back during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The Russians had already taken over the Ukraine and Belarus – oh, they’d learned; there was far less direct rule from Moscow, but when Moscow said ‘bend over,’ they bent over and took it – and they had forces right on Poland’s border, glaring towards Warsaw.  They told the Poles to evict us, or else.  The Poles screamed to Washington, Brussels and the UN.

The UN did fuck-all, of course.  It had no army and, in any case, the Russians had a veto.  Brussels dithered.  The last thing the morons there wanted was something that would disturb them from leeching as much as they could from the European Union before it collapsed under its own weight.  Washington didn’t blink.  All of a sudden, the BMD system was a vital American interest again…which kind of makes you wonder why we hadn’t bothered with some other precautions, like stationing a division or two in Poland to protect it.  They flew in an Airborne unit and started to deploy more American troops to Europe.

Now,
that
was a fuck-up.  Don’t get me wrong.  The Airborne soldiers are as good as they get, but they don’t have much in the way of heavy equipment.  They were a speed-bump, just as they had been a speed-bump in Saudi Arabia in 1991, and if they had been challenged, they would probably have been annihilated.  Oh, they’d have taken a bite out of the Russians, but they would have been lost, for nothing.  The President was twisting arms and using everything he could to get a large American force into Poland, but the EU was playing games.  They thought that the President would posture a bit and then withdraw, or back down, and they didn’t want to be associated with it.  Hell, I can’t blame them for that.  I thought the same.  The idiot in the White House genuinely believed that a small army was a good idea, but how could we carry out his foreign policy ideas without a bigger army?  We were in the midst of a build-up when the balloon went up.

The Russians launched a campaign of
maskirovka
.  This is something the Russians are very good at and we’re very bad at, mainly because of our tradition of a free press.  They launched a smear campaign to brand the Poles warmongers and set off a series of ‘incidents’ to convince the world that the Poles had started a war.  The fighting got rapidly out of control, just as the Russians had intended, and the Poles were getting the worst of it.  God knows what happened to the Airborne soldiers, but I wouldn’t put money on it being anything good.  Europe convulsed as Russian commandos started to cause havoc, while anti-war protests appeared everywhere – no one traced all of the funding, but I’d bet good money that it came from Russia – and riots appeared on the streets.  They knew that they were under attack, of course, but at the same time, no one was quite sure what was going on.

Now, I'm going to digress here.  We view other countries as being monolithic, governed by a single will, and those countries are either with us or against us.  Iran?  Bad country, bad people, bad government…enemy.  Saudi Arabia?  Good country, good government, good people…friend.  Boy, did we get
that
one wrong or what?  We’re wrong, of course.  The lesson we should have drawn from Iraq regarding Europe was that if supporting the US is a vote-loser, politicians in Europe – or wherever – won’t support the US.  Not out of malice, but out of simple political survival.  They were politicians.  What did you expect, really?

Anyway, back to the war.  Germany and France mobilised and suddenly they couldn’t do enough for us.  NATO was starting to look like a working prospect again, with a mass army facing the Russians, who had overrun nearly half of Poland by that time.  The two forces met in Western Poland, where Hitler had suffered his greatest defeat, and struggled for days before the Russian offensive was finally blunted.  The Russians had played their cards and lost.

Or so it seemed.  It turned out that hardliners in the Russian Government were absolutely determined not to suck up any more humiliation.  They’d been marginalized after the Cold War and were determined not to suffer that again.  There was a brief gun-battle in the Kremlin and the hardliners were firmly in control.  They deployed tactical nukes and, in four explosions, inflicted more damage on us – and the Europeans – than anyone had taken since the Korean War.  We struck back, of course, launching our own tactical nukes…and the blasts started to move steadily westwards and eastwards.  The Russians, by this point, were getting a little desperate.  They’d hoped to force us to back down.  We hadn’t blinked.  Perhaps, in hindsight, we should have blinked, but we didn’t.  They struck and we struck back.  They deployed tactical nukes mounted on cruise missiles against our carriers, sinking several.  We struck back by destroying their ports.  They…

They fired on Paris.  I think they saw the French Government as the weak link in the NATO chain and they might have had a point.  The French had too many problems with rioting youths – politically correct codeword for Muslim youths – and really didn’t want the war.  The Russians hit Paris with a nuke.  The French struck back by targeting Moscow and then…it was Katy bar the door.  Everyone was shooting at everyone else.  We were going into some of the ‘never even think about using’ war plans and targeting Russian industry, military bases deep within the former USSR and even their population. 
They
were doing the same to us, and Europe.  Oh, and they did the same to China as well.  The Russians had always bought into the ‘Yellow Peril’ concept, but more on that later.  The President ordered mass retaliation and we launched almost everything we had towards the Russians…

And we weren't the only ones.  Israel had been watching the war closely and they
knew
that we were going to be down and out for at least a decade.  Israel needed us to survive.  The core problem of the entire Israeli-Palestinian dispute was that one side’s minimum demands were larger than the other side could reasonably accept.  Israel was smaller than just about every US state and
they
couldn’t think about giving up territory without cast-iron guarantees.  The Arabs, for domestic political reasons, couldn’t and wouldn’t give them such guarantees.  Israel knew that we were going down and they opened fire.  They destroyed almost every Middle Eastern city within range; Tehran, Baghdad, Cairo and others.  The mass slaughter lasted barely a day, but by the time it finished, the population was a bare shadow of what it had been.

And the
Chinese
were getting into the game.  They saw the Russian launch and fired back themselves.  That triggered off the Second and Final Korean War.  North Korea launched against South Korea, Japan and, for good measure, Guam.  The Japanese downed three out of the nine missiles the Koreans launched, but they still lost five cities to nuclear blasts.  The sixth missile failed to detonate.  Japan launched back as the country convulsed; it turned out that Japan had secretly been stockpiling nukes ever since President Clinton fled Somalia.  It was very secret.  I don’t recall hearing anything about it until after the war.  China panicked – they’d taken hits themselves from the Russians – and fired on Japan and Taiwan.  It turned out that the
Taiwanese
had nukes too…and they shot back.  They were also incredibly lucky.  There was a pair of
Ticonderoga
-class guided-missile cruisers in the area and all, but one of the Chinese missiles was downed.  (The Chinese had thrown their main force against Russia, which I always thought was a little pointless, but the Chinese hadn’t known that at the time.)  North Korea’s mass offensive into the south made incredible headway during the first few days, and then stalled badly as the effect of the nukes started to take its toll.  The entire country came apart.

And then the Indians got into the game.  They’d made a secret agreement with us that we would provide security for the Pakistani nukes, in exchange for not shooting the shit out of Pakistan after numerous terrorist attacks.  They panicked and started rattling the sabre at Pakistan.  The Pakistanis panicked in turn and rushed to full alert.  Some idiot fired a missile – records aren’t clear on who and it hardly matters now – and both sides opened up with everything they had.  Pakistan was devastated from end to end, blown right back into a nasty radioactive stone age.  Mac, who served in Afghanistan, says that they probably didn’t notice.  I thought that that was a sick joke.  India got off lightly, compared to Pakistan, but they lost several cities and plenty of good army units under mushroom clouds.  The entire country came apart at the seams when radioactivity entered the Ganges.  The poor and dispossessed were spreading disease everywhere.  I think they lost two thirds of their population in the first year after the war.

I think the only people who got off lightly were the Australians.  They didn’t get nuked directly.  I'm not sure why; maybe the Russians simply didn’t care enough to target them, or maybe we knocked out their Australia-targeted missiles before they were fired.  There’s no way to know their reasoning now, unless we find some charred documents in the ruins of the Kremlin, but it hardly matters.  Australia was an oasis of civilisation in a desert of fire and suffering.  South America came out of the war all right, apart from Argentina and Venezuela.   Venezuela decided to get involved in the war and did plenty of sabre-rattling, just enough to panic the President, who ordered them nuked.  By this point, they were tossing them around as if they were firecrackers.  The Argentineans tried to make another move on the Falklands and the British struck them, hard.  They ended up being assimilated into Brazil.  So did the Falklands.

And that, in short, was the story of the Final War.  I don’t know
what
happened to the President.  I’ve heard hundreds of different stories; some say that he remained at the White House until the end, others say that Air Force One was blown out of the air by Russian nukes, or even jet fighters, as impossible as that would seem, or perhaps something even worse.  I don’t know and I don’t care.  We haven’t had a great President since Reagan.