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.

At the exact moment that the Iranians became part of the Nuclear Club, the “object” that North Korea had launched into orbit a few weeks earlier, which had been pronounced as “dead weight” that was spinning out of control, exploded over the South Pacific.  It’s yield was about 20 kilotons, comparable to the bombs used on Japan in 1945.  This action destroyed a significant portion of the GPS constellation, either destroyed or fried several other satellites, and caused significant damage to the International Space Station, resulting in the death of a Japanese astronaut and injuries or radiation poisoning to the rest of the crew.

The electromagnetic pulse it emitted caused power disruptions and damage to ships across a wide swath of Micronesia, New Zealand, and eastern Australia.  If there can be any luck in nuclear explosions, we got lucky in that it didn’t go off over Europe or North America.  Even with that,  the damage done was ugly.  Even though most of the impacted nations were able to recover quickly, in the weeks it took to bring power and communications systems on-line, lots of people died because of loss of medical equipment, sanitation facilities, and water and food distribution mechanisms.  I guess it says a lot for the human race that wide-spread unrest due to these disruptions weren’t noted in any of the impacted countries, which surprised a lot of pundits who predicted anarchy.

Just like their Iranian counterparts, the North Koreans immediately took to the airwaves.  They declared solidarity with the Iranians and promised to rain death and destruction down upon the rest of the world if they or Iran were attacked. Interestingly enough, the announcement of the “test”, as they called it, and their intentions to utilize such weapons if the “provocations” of South Korea and the United States did not stop was not given by their Supreme Leader.  A grim-faced general, his chest bedecked with medals, gave the address.  Since then, there has been a lot of speculation about why that was.  The most common theory is that the young leader of the DPRK had decided that going full on nuclear saber-rattling in support of the Mullahs wasn’t such a good idea, and his generals had decided that he wasn’t destined by heaven to lead the glorious people’s revolution anymore.  But I guess we’ll never know, because a nuclear attack against an allied nation didn’t sit well with the United States.

Even the President, who was well-known for bowing to dictators and being as confrontational as a slow Loris, couldn’t ignore the ASEAN treaty, which Australia and New Zealand invoked as soon as the dust started to settle.  Even though there wasn’t a lot of damage or loss of life from the detonation over the South Pacific, most of what did occur happened in New Zealand and the heavily populated east coast of Australia.  It just so happened that an American carrier group was steaming into Sidney for a port call at the time, and while military electronics are hardened against EMP, they didn’t come away unscathed.   Members of Congress immediately began clambering for a United States response, and even the most liberal of the media had their war talk on when the morning news programs came on the next morning.  The President made another appearance on TV, again from Undisclosed Location, assuring the American population that all was well and that he had things in hand.  Another naval task force was on its way to Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of the South Pacific to provide aid where it was needed.

The President acknowledged that the Iranians and North Koreans were probably in collusion as to the timing of the explosions, and he officially called on them to immediately stand down their nuclear programs and allow in international personnel to dismantle them.  He set a deadline of four days for them to agree to this and halt the bombardment of Israel.  Needless to say, the deadline came and went without any word from Tehran, Pyongyang, or Damascus.  Israel, of course didn’t wait to launch their air war against Assad.  The President asked that Congress reconvene, and every Senator and Representative who had left for their home states for Christmas returned to Washington.

Bowing to public clamor and political pressure, the President, probably the most eloquent speaker of his generation, came to the Congress for a declaration of war at noon of Christmas Eve.  He invoked Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, talked of a second Pearl Harbor, and for once got both parties in Congress to cooperate.  The Senate went 96 to 4 for war, with the House voting 430 to 5.  Ominously, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors were in the gallery for the votes and were among those clapping when the results were announced.

I guess eventually records of why the North Koreans decided to double down on stupid will be found, but that probably won’t be during my lifetime.  While the President was still trying to figure out an appropriate response, they started getting more missiles ready at their launch site.  That pretty much sealed the deal for them.  Before they could get the fueling trucks off the pad, several American submarines, bombers, and ICBM’s turned most of the important parts of North Korea into ash.  No-one knows if the leadership survived the strikes, because the known and expected entrances to their underground complexes were hit at least once with nuclear weapons.  It really doesn’t matter how strong and deep your bunker is if it’s buried under a few thousand tons of radioactive rubble.  Conventional weapons were used against the known marshaling areas for their ground and air forces, ammunition depots, and rail yards.  The Air Force apparently learned a little something from 1950, and studiously ignored the area directly to the south of the Yalu River, which either gave China no excuse to become involved, or gave them wiggle room with their domestic constituency as to why they weren’t helping their communist brethren.

The Chinese and Russians expressed concern about all this, but didn’t make too much of a protest, and the Chinese took the opportunity to move “relief and peacekeeping forces” into the areas surrounding the border.  These forces acted as a blocking force against the millions of people who immediately tried to escape to the north, and let’s be honest, the Chinese weren’t unhappy about gaining a little territory.  South Korea waited it out, and when the North Korean border troops pretty much melted into the hills, sent convoys full of food north.  They weren’t exactly hailed as liberating heroes, but neither were they attacked for their efforts.  The Australians offered to be the occupation army for North Korea, but cooler heads prevailed before a few thousand pissed off Aussies were sent to make sure the scarecrows that were found in the villages and cities got food for the rest of the winter.

At 7:30 AM local time, 11:00 PM Eastern time, as the last words of the morning call to prayer were fading away in Tehran, its eastern sky lit up like a second sunrise.  Rather than use the underground test site they had begun digging a few weeks earlier, the Iranians had detonated an atomic bomb above ground in the Kavir National Park.  It’s yield was estimated to be about 50 kilotons, a little more than twice as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.  The fireball and mushroom cloud were easily visible from Tehran and most of northern Iran.  The political and religious leadership of Iran immediately went on the radio, television, and proclaimed that the Islamic Republic was now an atomic power, extolled the virtue and righteousness of their cause, and basically dared the rest of the world to do something about it.

They also proclaimed that the campaign to liberate Palestine had also begun.  What that meant was that all of the remaining SCUD and SS-21 units in Syria pointed their launchers at Israel and fired, pretty much at the same time.  Hamas also let loose with a steady barrage of Qasam rockets out of Gaza, which were dealt with by the Iron Dome system that premiered in the fall of 2012.  Unfortunately for the Israelis, attempts to attack the Iron Dome installations directly were partially  successful.  One was knocked out for three days by a series of truck bombs, while two were damaged by infiltrators who got close enough to cause casualties.   Iran also fired off a volley or two of long-range missiles that for the most part either landed in unused land or were shot down in the air.  I’m not saying that Israel didn’t take casualties.  A few of the missiles that got through to populated areas had chemical warheads, which wreaked havoc among the neighborhoods of Nazareth and Haifa. Gas masks don’t do much when a nerve agent is absorbed through the skin, and no government on earth can provide chemical warfare suits and training on how to use them to all of its citizens.

The Israeli Air Force took some lumps when they launched retaliatory air strikes, especially at first.  Their initial targets were anti-aircraft units, which is never a safe game.  Once the Syrian air force and anti-air forces were pretty much dead or burning, Israel unleashed hell upon the Assad regime.  First targets were the rocket and missile launchers in Syria and Gaza that were still lobbing volleys at Israel, followed by a several days of pretty much around the clock bombing of Hamas and what was left of Assad’s government.  Egypt started making some rumblings at first, but when the Muslim Brotherhood was told by the Egyptian military that they didn’t want a piece of this fight, the most they did was threaten to shut down the Suez Canal if the Israelis weren’t called off by Washington.  That went nowhere.  There’s nothing like having an aircraft carrier take up station at either end of the canal to change an Egyptian’s mind.

At the time, I was surprised that Israel didn’t go nuclear on at least Syria.  Assad crossed the line when he gassed civilians, so why not pull out all the stops?  My guess is that Tel Aviv figured they could do OK with conventional weapons, and wanted to keep what they had in case Iran had more than one nuke up their sleeve.

Like I said, Iran launched a few missiles at Israel, but most of their attention was spent trying to hit American forces in the region.  Missiles were launched at bases in Iraq, the UAE, and Kuwait.  Most of them got through, but our forces were already on alert because of the attacks at home, so casualties were light.  Most of the damage was to empty buildings, although the loss of fuel farms at the big air base in Iraq put a dent in our capacity to strike back for weeks.   Luckily for both sides, the Iranians didn’t use chemical weapons in these attacks.  Use of suicide bombers to try to inflict further damage were wholly unsuccessful.  Like I said, the troops were on alert, so at the places where truck bombs or guys in suicide vests tried to hit them, they were immediately turned into unsuccessful martyrs.

Iran was only in that part of the fight for about a day before American air forces knocked their offensive capability off-line.  We didn’t use nukes against them, but the damage was pretty bad.  Natanz was hit with a several waves of cruise missiles, while known launch sites for missiles and anti-air assets were hit by aircraft staged out of Iraq and carriers in the Persian Gulf.  Once the airspace was clear, heavy bombers were sent in with bunker buster bombs to seal off command sites and known underground nuclear research and production facilities.   After a few days of airstrikes, that front pretty much went quiet.  We would have done more, but our attention was focused elsewhere.