In the immediate aftermath of the Christmastime attacks, the population of the United States pretty much vapor locked.  No-one went shopping, no-one sent their kids to school, even if the schools were open, and for the most part, we stuck around our homes and watched the news for a few days.  Churches, on the other hand, were packed full, although with openly armed parishioners in front of more than a few of them.  Like I said, no-one reported retaliation against Muslims in the United States, but after the relative calm that occurred after 9/11, that wasn’t much of a surprise.

Of course, the economy took a hit, with a rather sharp recession hitting us that winter and spring.  The retail and service economies pretty much collapsed for a few quarters, which sent ripples back into transportation and manufacturing.  This caused the soft landing of the Chinese economy to turn into a crash.  The Communist regime had wisely stayed out of the war in Korea, but the sudden drop of demand in its largest export market sent shock waves through their overheated economy.   There was unrest, most of which was put down quite violently by the PLA, and the Chinese government almost fell in a military coup about a year into the war.  Since then, they’ve slowly built back up, with more focus on their domestic market, and as our economy slowly recovered, so did theirs.

Like China, Russia pretty much stayed out of the war.  There have been a few incidents in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the Chechen war has flared up again, but that bleeding sore would have been there no matter what.

In other words, Iran pretty much stands alone, but they are a tough nut to crack if you’re not willing to use a hammer.  For one reason or another, the President chose to not utilize overwhelming force, nuclear weapons, or a ground invasion to deal with the Iranians.  It’s been a long war, and there’s no end in sight.

The morning after the declaration of war, we had something in America that hadn’t been seen since 1941 – long lines at military recruiters.  I, along with a lot of veterans, got my DD-214 and resume out of the safe and headed to the nearest recruiter to sign back up.  We were joined by a large number of young men and women who wanted to leave their colleges and jobs to serve.  Unfortunately for me, they weren’t looking for 41-year-old Russian linguists and computer nerds, so I was turned down, but a lot of younger veterans and those with more critical skills were accepted.  A lot of the first time enlistees had to be put on a waiting list to be sent to training, but it’s a credit to them that when they were called months or even years later, they almost all still volunteered.

China and South Korea are occupying what used to be North Korea, but we have been providing a lot of material and personnel support.  Even though the communist regime was pretty much gutted within days, a lot of people feared that what was left of the DPRK armed forces would attack the South.  Luckily, that didn’t happen.  Once Pyongyang and the top level of leadership were eliminated, most North Korean soldiers, including officers, just walked away.  I’ve read reports that some officers tried to hold their units together and fight, but those officers were outnumbered and short-lived.  There are occasional reports of communist forces coming down out of the mountains and shooting up a checkpoint or assassinating some official or another, but they are becoming rare.  Without support from China and with the North Korean people learning that it’s better to be fed than to live in a worker’s paradise, their numbers are dwindling.

Of course, our government didn’t let this crisis go to waste.  Even though a lot of the blame for the Christmastime attacks fell on the Department of Homeland Security, it got a big shot in the fiscal arm and has spread its reach a lot further into the nation.  The Border Patrol has become fully militarized, and the Mexican border zone has pretty much become a free fire zone.    Canada, for their part, has rounded up several hundred Hezbollah and Iranian agents, all of whom were extradited to the United States.  Those trials are still going on, and will probably stretch out for years.  There’s also a new “electronic fence” and a lot more in-person patrols going on along the Canadian border.

The Department of Education made a play to get its own security force to guard schools and such, but that was shut down by Congress after the state governors collectively agreed to form the Home Guard.  The Home Guard, distinct from the National Guard, is a collection of volunteers who keep watch over schools, busses, factories, and the like.  It’s composed mostly of veterans who didn’t, for one reason or another, go back in the military.  Most of its members do their duties armed in one form or another, although some states discourage that.  Kentucky, on the other hand, has no issue with us carrying whatever gun we choose to, so long as we carry a gun.  The Home Guard was formed in the months after the attacks, and was instrumental in thwarting the second wave, which struck on the six month anniversary of the Christmastime attacks.

The Iranians tried to catch lightning twice, but their second attempt pretty much fizzled.  The combination of increased security, a more aware population, and Home Guard units standing watch made sure that most of the people who tried to repeat the success of the December attacks met with a rather sticky end.  One woman, who made the mistake of hesitating as she walked up to a bus station before blowing herself and a bunch of students and their mothers apart was beaten to death and pretty much ripped limb from limb by the parents of the children she’d tried to murder.  No-one bothered the school bus I was riding on that day, but one bus in Louisville got shot up before its attackers were killed by LMPD and the Guardsman on the bus.  Luckily, only the Guardsman was hurt in the attack, with all of the children having learned their lessons during drills on what to do in the event of an attack.  The use of busses has greatly expanded in the years since the attacks, as most schools got rid of drop off and pick up on school grounds, and those that kept it made it an ordeal to get through security.  The home and community schooling movement has had a big shot in the arm from all this.  The number of children being educated by their families has skyrocketed.

The Assad regime collapsed under the weight of Israeli bombardment and rebel ground forces.  Once Assad himself had boarded a plane and headed to Tehran, the bloodbath began.  People who had either supported the regime or were members of groups that had supported the regime were hunted down and publicly executed.  Of course, once the government was gone and old scores were settled, the factions that had made up the “Free Syrian Army” turned on each other and fought over control of the country and the huge military stockpile that Assad left behind.  The civil war there has dragged on for years, but it looks like the worst of it is over now that the sides have bled each other white and the weapons depots are pretty much empty.

Once Syria was neutralized, Israel turned on Gaza and the West Bank.  Every block in Gaza that had a rocket launcher on it was leveled, but even Egypt has praised Israel for minimizing civilian casualties.  Hamas was gutted, with what survived of its leadership getting the heck out of Dodge just ahead of the Israeli army.  Unfortunately, the Israeli answer to what to do about the Arab populations of the West Bank and Gaza has pretty much amounted to ethnic cleansing.  With the memory of rocket bombardments that distracted them from countering chemical attacks against their civilians fresh in their minds, Tel Aviv had little compunction about telling the residents of these areas to get out and stay out.  The usual bleeding hearts at the U.N. and E.U. made noises about it, but the answer from the Israeli prime minister, given in front of a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, boiled down to “go pound sand”. Israel still has to deal with regular terrorist attacks, and their relations with most of the E.U. are very tense, but they’re no worse off than they were a decade ago.

As for Iran, well, things haven’t gone as well for us.  After turning Natanz and other nuclear and command installations into rubble, the President called off the dogs.  With Syria in shambles, Israel ejecting hundreds of thousands of people, and the northern half of the Korean peninsula in flames, he didn’t want to commit resources for an invasion of Iran and continued bombing would have done no further needful damage.  Of course, Tehran crowed about facing down the Great Satan, and low-level terrorist activity against our forces throughout the mideast became a regular event, as did terrorism in the continental United States.

Their puppet government in Iraq protested the use of their airspace in the initial phase of the war, but once Iran was unable to provide them with much support, the government in Baghdad pretty much dried up and blew away.  I understand that a separatist movement in the Kurdish region is gaining momentum, and if Kurdistan leaves, then the rest of Iraq will probably shatter. The Kurds seem to be the only people actually following through on Iraq’s declaration of war against the Iranians, with regular raids and artillery duels across their border.  If I had to choose my allies in the region, they’d be much higher on my list than the southern Iraqis.

We’ve spent the last couple of years playing cat and mouse with the Iranians.  We make an air raid or night-time smash and grab against them, they send a group of suicide bombers against our soldiers or try to kill more of our civilians.  The new normal in the heartland is armed Guardsmen on the streets and citizens watching for the shopping bag that gets left behind or the mother wearing a coat that’s too big or too heavy for the weather.  The term “Balance of Terror” has been used more than once.

Right now, the President is holding out against making further commitments until after the election.  He says he doesn’t want to saddle the next person to hold the office with a battle plan he put together. My gut tells me he doesn’t want his party to lose political points because we’re bogged down in a land war in Central Asia during the election.  The President sent up a few trial balloons about putting off the 2016 elections due to the war and concerns about safety at polling places, but that was met with widespread howling.  His party didn’t do well in the mid-term elections, but the presidential election later this year is expected to be very close.  A war hasn’t changed the fact that almost half the electorate supports one party and most of the other half supports the other.

So there we are.  North Korea is slowly coming out of the dark ages, although it was and still is a bigger basket case than any of the Eastern European countries were after the fall of communism.  Our country is still strong, but has a lot more ‘security’ baked into its domestic cake.  Iranian forces have been sparring with our allies in Turkey, and there’s a possibility that a full-blown ground war will erupt along that front, but that remains to be seen.  The Turks probably wouldn’t need or ask for our help anyway.

It’s strange that the Third World War would be both so bloody minded and so long-lived.  If you’d asked me the day after the attacks if Tehran would still exist almost four years later, I would have asked if you were crazy.  Now, after a few weeks of heavy fighting and over three years of fancy footwork, I have no idea when the war will be over.  Girlie Bear will be commissioned into the Army Medical Corps soon, and her two older brothers are both in the service, one in the Navy, and one in the Air Force.  Who knows what the next few years will hold for them?

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.