I’ve got a small grease fire going in a pan on my stove. I don’t have a fire extinguisher but I have a can of gas in the garage. If I poured a bunch of gas on the fire, would that put it out or would it just make it hotter?
Ok. Let’s do it. Let’s get a billion people, some of whom are Americans, pissed off at us.
Half of those billion are male.
Let’s be generous and say half of those males are of an age that they can carry a gun.
Figure a tenth of those males (I use the term “males” instead of “men” because I’m guessing that there would be a lot of boys who aren’t even old enough to shave) actually would take up arms against the U.S. and its allies.
We’re talking about a combined force twenty-five million, driven by religous fervor and a hatred beyond anything you can imagine. A lot of countries who had formerly been allies would turn against us for daring to threaten their holiest of holy places. The governments of every Muslim country on the planet, plus a lot of very wealthy folks in countries that had substantial Muslim minorites would contribute money, weapons, supplies for these armies.
I think that could be a bit of a problem.
If you were to nuke Mecca, you’d have to nuke the entire Islamosphere - every city in North Africa, the Middle East, and the various -stans. You might want so much blood on your hands…
Interesting comments. Thinking about them I’m wondering about how the Hiroshima experience might influence the discussion. What if we had the same discussion a week or so before nuking Hiroshima? Would we be concerned that the whole world, or all of Asia would turn against us?
If not, then what are the key differences between the two? How did we get away with nuking two Japanese cities without inflaming all the Asians?
Or is it possible that the Muslims are true to Osama’s prediction, that they will prefer the strong horse, and actually like us more for the show of strength?
I have my own reasons for opposing the bombing of Mecca, unrelated to the above.
Nuke Mecca? Meh. But please don’t nuke Medinah, it’s only blocks from my house. And where would one golf, after that? 
In WW2, the whole world was at war, literally. Germany, Italy and Japan were in the middle of pissing off every other country around them. Japan was enslaving, raping and torturing their way through many east asian countries. You seriously thing any of the non Japanese asians would be angry at the US? While it killed mostly innocent civilians, it also brought to a close the bloodiest war in human history. The bombing of the WTC would not even count as a minor battle in the scope of WW2.
Now, the whole world is not at war. Muslims are not invading other countries, enslaving, raping, etc. A few nutbars have taken it upon themselves to terrorise Jews and Americans in the name of Islam. I think invading Iraq, while wrong imo, was a show of strength as you describe. Afghanistan certainly was. Bombing Mecca would be an act of cowardness and evil against a identifiable group that largely does not currently support all out war with the US/Isreal.
I appreciate your analogy but it just doesnt work in this case.
And while on the subject of the number of Muslim countries the act under discussion would piss off, don’t forget he billion or so Muslims in Indonesia.
People have given a lot of reasons this would be a bad idea, but I’m not sure it’s really off the table.
If terrorists ever manage to set off a nuclear weapon in an American city, the response would make the outrage over 9/11 look like nothing in comparison. I suspect that in the immediate aftermath of such an attack there’s no limit to the level of retaliation a solid majority of Americans would support. The political center of gravity could shift so far towards explicit support for genocide that taking out only Mecca might seem like a reasonable compromise.
Geeze louise, lol
Try this instead , go to russia , pick up a bunch of those nukes that osama has supposedly ,and plant them in Mecca and Medina.
If the whole kit and kaboodle are gonna go ballistic and go on the warpath , we may as well point em in the right direction, but if the states were to actually target various sites , then its for all the marbles, no one is gonna say boo afterwards.
Declan
One distinction which seems to have escaped you is that Japan is a country we were actually at war with. We are not at war with Saudi Arabia. It would be pretty stupid to nuke a country which is ostensibly an ally of the US just to show them terrorists what’s what.
Also, the number of Muslims in the world far exceeds the number of Japanese c. WWII.
It goes without saying that Hiroshima was not a holy site for more than a billion people.
Frankly, even the threat would be a boon to al Qaeda. It’s value as propaganda and as a recruiting tool would be incalculable. Al Qaeda could only hope and pray that they would be so fortunate as to have the US threaten to nuke Mecca. It would be a dream come true for them.
Your speculation that Muslims would somehow respect us for threatenimg to destroy their holiest site, not mention killing who knows how many innocent people.
And there’s also the fact that we would be forfeting any and all international alliances. When you put yourself on record as threatening to nuke your own allies you tend to lose trust.
There’s one more thing, I’m not sure that anyone has come out and said it in so many words but JFTR, nuking Mecca would, incidentally, be an evil thing to do.
And do you think that would be a good thing? How would it even be logical to retaliate against an innocent country for the actions of some criminals?
I hope God reads this message board, we need another flood to weed out the crazy ones…
What kind of people would even entertain the thought that it would ever be a good idea to launch a nuclear bomb at anything.
I am quite literally speechless. And quite scared.
Because Japan tried to conquor the rest of Asia. Anyway, if the US tried to use nukes to win a military conflict now (say against Iraq) the entire world would turn against you.
No, they’d think you were pychopaths and mass-murderers, and they’d be right.
The criminals in Al-Qaeda have gotten a LOT of support from high officials in the Saudi government and in Saudi society. It could EASILY be argued that the Al-Qaeda terrorists are unacknowledged but still very real extensions of the Saudi government, and that their actions constitute an act of war by the Saudis against the U.S. Of course, the Saudi government would deny, deny, deny, but they do that a lot already.
Making the stakes VERY VERY high for any Third World state that supports terrorists could markedly reduce the resources available to terrorists.
/feeble parody mode on
Osama Bin Laden - “If we bomb Disneyland, American morale will collapse and we will be victorious!”
/feeble parody mode off
I wouldn’t be suprised if the OP is simply a wind-up.
You’re assuming that all these 3rd world governments are capable of mounting a really effective war on the terrorists, which they probably can’t. What are you advocating here exactly? Strikes against any country that harbours terrorists, with the government’s complicity or not?
Anyway, they may have widespread support by the population inside Saudi-Arabia, some of which hold government positions, but the government itself is dead set against Al-Quida. Simply because they are a massive threat to the pro-US government.
In all this talk about nuking Mecca, no mention has yet been made of the fact that well over 200,000 people live in the immediate vicinity so it would not just simply be a matter of taking out the primary Idol of Islam, towards which all Muslims must bow five times a day, the black meteorite set in one of the walls of the Kaba.
Reducing Mecca to a radioactive crater would be an evil thing to do, to put it mildly, but it would have no significant effect on the functioning of the Islamic cult itself.
A commentator I recently read on another blog, for which I have lost the links, suggested that although one of the five pillars of Islam includes a pilgrimage to the Kaba, plus all of the other associated rituals, one is excused if Mecca ever becomes (Thor forbid) impractical for the true believer to fulfil all of his obligations, and risk getting trampled to death in the process, which would be the case if it ever became an inaccessible radioactive mess.
The commentator suggested that in such circumstances, one would expect some Imam to find, purely by chance, of course, a near replica of the meteorite, near the crater, then using this as an inspiration, a new Mecca, bigger, stronger and more feisty than ever can be expected to emerge.
I don’t expect anyone would be so evil as to waste time nuking a worthless place like Mecca, but if such an event happens, let us all hope that better poetry is produced than the effort by America’s answer to the Great William McGonagall, the revered stand up poetess Judyth Hill, following the 9/11 attack, viz.: -
What you’re saying is murder lots of innocent people for the actions of criminals.Not only would that be completely ineffective, it would put the US solidly on the EVIL side of the board and Americans, frankly, would deserve whatever the hell they got.
Why do you call it “worthless?” I have to say I find that to be a completely gratuitous and bigoted remark. I doubt that you would call Jerusalem “worthless.” I also doubt that you would call any city at all in the US worthless no matter how religiously and politically insignificant it was compared to Mecca.
I forgot to attribute my quotes. My first quote was from Evil Captor, the second from Alan Owes Bess.
You want to make the stakes VERY, VERY high? Threaten to cut off the flow of dollars into their states. Unless they’re under sanctions, they’ll sit up and take notice.
That’s probably the best option. The problem with Saudi Arabia is that it is playing a very careful game, trying to keep the wahhabi happy by allowintg them to demonize the US, while keeping the US as their strong ally. I strongly suspect that some subsurface elements of the Saudi government have been involved in helping Al-Qaeda, just as we once helped the Taliban without publicly acknowledging it. So long as we’re willling to put up with this shit, the Saudis and others will do it, because it’s a lot easier than facing the music. And of course so long as we have an idiot government that does things like attack Iraq (of all places) instead of Al-Qaeda’s ACTUAL supporters, we’re screwed.