Protect and Defend by Harry Eric

Author:Harry, Eric [Harry, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780786756124
Publisher: Argo-Navis
Published: 2015-01-20T08:00:00+00:00

BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL, MARYLAND

February 17, 1300 GMT (0800 Local)

The Senate and House leadership gathered in a semicircle of seats pulled up to Gordon’s bedside. Their faces were grim. The chants of the demonstrators outside the hospital, now nearly ten thousand strong, were clearly audible in the silence. Gordon knew the meeting would be contentious. His visitors had all just run the gauntlet of protesters at the gate. But it was the quieter protests that worried Gordon most. The flood of antiwar sentiment conveyed by phone calls, letters, and faxes. It was the collective roar of the politicians’ constituents against which Gordon would fight his battle.

“The question has been raised,” he began, “why are we fighting in Siberia?” Almost all of the politicians facing him had voiced vocal opposition to the war. “I called you here to answer that question.” Daryl handed Gordon a glass of water. The painkillers gave him cotton mouth, and the words sounded as if they were stuck together. Gordon cleared his throat. “Siberia has a landmass equal to that of the U.S., Western Europe, and India combined. It had a pre–Civil War population, however, of only nine million, and that has now dropped by half. Yet Siberia contains the greatest deposits of natural resources on the planet. Its cobalt, chromium, iron ore, molybdenum, nickel, vanadium, tungsten are still virtually unexploited. Gold, copper, mercury, lead, platinum, tin, and zinc are all buried there in abundance, as are diamonds, emeralds, graphite, mica. And, of course, the fuels that run the world—oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium. There is not a region on earth richer in resources, and those resources are now ‘in play.’ They’re up for grabs.”

He paused to take another sip. “The fight over Siberia is between China, and the U.S. and Western Europe. In the era of imperialism it would be quite correct to say that we were the imperialist exploiters. We were in the wrong, then, but that era is gone and we are now in the right. We have just completed a half century of ideological competition in which our principal foreign policy was to contain the spread of totalitarianism, whether fascist or communist. We expended vast sums from our treasury and paid dearly for that policy in blood. This current war between East and West is a continuation of that competition. It is not racial or even particularly ideological. If the world’s most populous country, which is a totalitarian dictatorship, were to acquire control over the world’s richest supply of natural resources, we will one day again have to pay a great price. We are fighting today to avoid an even greater fight in the future, and that, in and of itself, is just.”

His voice had grown weak, and he again paused to take a drink. This time several of the congressmen glanced at each other. “Finally,” Gordon resumed, having to clear his throat repeatedly, “we are fighting for something more important than natural resources or totalitarian containment. We are fighting for our soul—our identity.

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