Dangerous Places
Gingrich, Newt
Dangerous Places A fictional treatment of an all-too-real world. by Newt Gingrich Former secretary of defense Bill Cohen has had a fascinating career, and he continues it with this novel. I...
...Yet contained within each caricature there is more than a kernel of truth...
...What better witness could we have to the need for the Department of Homeland Security to conduct several nuclear exercises a year to test our ability to survive a terrorist attack on an American city...
...It will be a worldwide war...
...There are people actually like this...
...In addition to his intellectual breadth and dexterity, Cohen was all-state in basketball in both high school and college, no doubt inspiring Dragon Fire's athletic secretary of defense and former senator...
...Cohen's insights go from the larger world to the smaller world of Washington gossip, maneuver, and manipulation...
...Cohen has the Chinese assert in a planning session among themselves: "The United States," Li continued, "is unlikely to strike Iran...
...However, he is anti-bad Chinese, and he notes their potential for enormous harm both because they play by different rules than we do (assassinations in Washington, for example) and because they can plot in secret while Americans naively relax in public...
...He has been in the rooms in the Congress, the Pentagon, and the White House, and it illuminates his novel...
...if anything, he is sympathetic to the good Chinese...
...He describes the challenge in unifying East and West Berlin and notes that, while the physical wall has fallen, "the wall, it is still there, the wall of the mind...
...Cohen has written several good novels, mysteries, poetry, and works of nonfiction, while serving in local office (as a mayor) as well as national office...
...For example, Tom Clancy, in one of his novels, had a fully-loaded 747 airliner crash into the Capitol long before 9/11...
...In these few words a former senator and secretary of defense communicates his sense that, in 2006, despite 9/11 and everything that has followed, the American people still have not come to grips with how dangerous the world is...
...Li seemed to find particular delight in this notion...
...I recommend it cheerfully to anyone interested in a good read...
...While you may have been reading about targeted killings in Iraq, assassinations in Lebanon, murders in Afghanistan, Thailand, Pakistan, and elsewhere, it may not have occurred to you that such a systematic campaign could be carried out in America's capiDragon Fire by William S. Cohen Forge, 384 pp., $24.95 tal...
...Interestingly, they triumph over both bad Americans and bad Chinese...
...At a later point, Cohen notes, "The fear of more homeland attacks was not just a matter of paranoia...
...As a novelist writing a thriller, he employs caricature: the weak president...
...It is a skillful and sobering opening...
...In passing, Cohen describes one of the greatest problems facing American planners in Iraq and beyond...
...This is a useful novel to remind us that, beyond the war on terror and the threat of Islamist fascism, there is the great emerging force of the Chinese nation...
...And in Dragon Fire, American idealism and sincerity once again triumph...
...Cohen is not anti-Chinese...
...In all too many places, we imagine that if we replace a corrupt, vicious, torturing, and murdering dictatorship there will spring forth a new, democratic, honest, and transparent system of self-government, pursuing happiness and living in peace...
...But Iran will strike at American targets all over the world, especially in America itself...
...The very real danger of a nuclear terrorist threat is also captured in a brief exchange: "Secretary Santini, I've read that in response to a reporter's question of what your biggest nightmare was, the thing that kept you awake at night, you said 'the threat of nuclear terrorism.'" Santini nodded...
...Dragon Fire points to a real-life need for a strategic approach to national security that has to take into account both the emerging challenge of a great Chinese economy and an energetic Chinese nation (not an enemy but a legitimate competitor) and the more immediate threat of an emerging third world war, which ranges from North Korea through Waziristan and Afghanistan on to Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Islamist fanatics of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and their allies (including those in Britain, France, Holland, Canada, etc...
...and, finally, to the dictators of Cuba and Venezuela and, potentially, Bolivia...
...the noble war hero-senator turned financier turned secretary of defense...
...Cohen's novel will cause readers to think about both how dangerous the world can be, and how rapidly a threat can emerge from directions we are not currently thinking about...
...The last 30 pages are both too simplistic and too heroic, a combination of James Bond and a magic solution, and probably the single improbable part of an otherwise imaginative book...
...the unscrupulous, endlessly ambitious national security adviser acting dishonestly and ruthlessly to undermine more honest people in order to manipulate his own rise...
...He comes to the business of describing the modern world from a remarkable range of personal achievements...
...Cohen begins here with a series of targeted killings in Washington, including a secretary of defense...
...about possibilities that have not yet occurred...
...It is a useful insight into the challenges of the modern world...
...It contains a number of provocative thoughts about national security in the 21st century, and some tantalizing tidbits about power struggles in Washington...
...America had real enemies and they were waiting to strike at the least sign of inattention or weakness...
...The genius of America has been the very inefficiency of the system that enabled the honest to outlast the dishonest, and the noble to outlast the vicious...
...One of the great virtues of fiction is it allows you to learn about and think Newt Gingrich, speaker of the ouse from 199599, is the author, most recently, of Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation's History and Future...
...Many more beyond the initial blast area would die of radiation burns and poisoning...
...Dragon Fire includes occasional chilling references to the danger of a war between the United States and the Iranian dictatorship...
...They do operate in remarkably different ways, and march to remarkably different drummers...
...We underestimate the walls of the mind that remain long after the system changes...
...He outlined in detail the catastrophic impact of that much jet fuel on a building and the effect of that hot a fire...
...One for which the American people are not prepared...
...A nuclear bomb, detonated in a major city would kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people instantly...
...Such an attack would have economic consequences beyond the monstrous human toll...
Vol. 12 • December 2006 • No. 15
