So how did all this happen?

After everything had settled down, the dead buried, and the wounded comforted, the American people started demanding answers.  We had spent over a decade in quiet denial about our vulnerability and had spent billions to harden infrastructure, airports, and transportation networks.  What had happened was that while we were fighting against al Qaeda and every wild-eyed jihadist that came our way, Iran had been watching and learning.  While we were patting down little old ladies flying to see their grandchildren, they noticed our porous borders and absence of security around our civilian populace.   While we worried about truck bombs in Times Square and put in half-ton planters in front of Disneyland, they did hundreds of dry runs getting trucks close to schools.  They took advantage of our open and trusting society to infiltrate our country and to convert some of our own to their cause.

Once the active fighting part of the war was over, Congressional hearings were held as to how we were hit, how it was done, and who on our side should have seen it coming and done something about it.  Other than to coalesce reports of failures in intelligence and law enforcement, they didn’t amount to much.  No-one was fired, much less prosecuted, and the hearings ended with a lengthy report that was mostly declared classified and locked away for 50 years.

Here’s what we know, or at least strongly suspect:

Hezbollah, a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, had been very successful at getting people into our country, principally through Canada.  A ‘family’ would get asylum in Montreal or some other large city, put a few of their people through medical school or whatever, get them a work visa in the U.S., then import the entire ‘clan’ over the border.  With our critical shortage of healthcare, technical, and other specialties, coupled with lax immigration policies and political correctness, it wasn’t even that difficult.  Repeat the process a couple hundred times over three decades, and you have a pretty big hidden force inside the United States.  The Christmastime bombers were mostly from that group.  The other principal group was from second generation Iranian-Americans.  While their parents were pro-American and anti-Ayatollah to a fault, their children were less secular and more susceptible to the influence of pro-Iranian preachers, both in the United States and on the Internet.  About 30% of the people who blew up schoolchildren and holiday shoppers were the sons and daughters of people who had come to this country seeking refuge after their Iranian home was taken from them.

Interestingly enough, the Iranian-American community has been a pillar of patriotism since the attacks.  Several high-profile arrests of the ringleaders and those planning to take part in the second wave of bombings were accomplished because someone with a Persian surname called the FBI.  There’s even a Persian Legion in the California Home Guard, with men who fled Khomeini standing guard over the country that sheltered them in their youth.

The teams that attacked Tucson and Phoenix were found to be from South and Central America, and were armed with weapons that probably came from or were stolen from one banana republic or another.  The leading theory is that they came from Venezuela or Cuba, with help from Hezbollah, but the survivors refused to speak after they regained consciousness, and they will probably go to their executions just as mute, so there isn’t any confirmation on that.  However, it has been noticed that we’ve gone almost two years without importing a drop of oil from Venezuela, and travel restrictions on travel to and commerce with Cuba have been tightened considerably since the attacks.  You make the call.

When they had a nuclear device ready for testing, Tehran apparently decided to make it a very public demonstration.  But knowing that we would have to respond, I guess they decided to go for broke.  Terrorist attacks against soft targets in the continental United States, coupled with missile and rocket attacks against Israel and U.S. interests in the Middle East were meant to knock us back on our heels and keep us from meddling in their entry into the Nuclear Fraternity.  I guess you could say that they mis-calculated.

No-one knows why North Korea made their ‘demonstration’ and then started making preparations for another attack.  That regime may not have ever been classified as wholly rational, but they were very adept at staying alive, and using nuclear weapons and threatening to use them again, along with possibly preparing for a ground offensive into South Korea, pretty much summed up their suicide note.  Again, they probably thought that once we knew they had the capability to get a nuclear weapon to the home country, we’d back down.  Unfortunately for them, their way of telling us triggered a nuclear response, and their people will be dealing with the consequences of that action for years to come.