The Cowboy Hat Option

In Stanley Kubrick's dark satire, Dr. Strangelove, actor Slim Pickens, playing Maj. T.J. 'King' Kong, has a great moment is which he believes that Washington DC has been nuked after losing radio contact with the mainland aboard his long-range bomber. Off goes his pilot's helmet and on goes his cowboy hat as martial music keys in the background. Shit is about to go down. The "rational" balance of Mutually Assured Destruction has been upended, and now its time for some good ole American vengeance. I've discussed with OTR's Dr. Emile the potential for another "cowboy hat" option, and speculated both to its target (Mecca) and as to how the Pentagon bureaucracy would handled such a deranged and inevitable idea during the current War on Terror. What I should have been paying closer attention to is Congress:

A Colorado congressman (Tom Tancredo, R) told a radio show host that the U.S. could "take out" Islamic holy sites if Muslim fundamentalist terrorists attacked the country with nuclear weapons. . . .

"You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.

"Yeah," Tancredo responded.

I wondered if such a threat might already been whispered into certain ears in Waziristan, in the hopes of reaching bin-Laden, much in the way the James Baker warned Tariq Aziz, Iraq's former deputy Prime Minister, that if chemical weapons were used in Gulf War I, the response would be a "resounding silence in the desert".