Cracking the seal of his bottle of vodka, Dave took his first drink in six years. The two hundred year old wooden floor planks that ran up and down the three floors of his Georgetown townhouse creaked involuntarily from age. He was used to it and it was reassuring, a feeling rarely felt in Washington these days.
The humid summer's night air that seemed inescapable flowed in and around his overstuffed chair as that first drink finished like an old lover in the middle of the night. Israel was in play and Dave knew why. That’s why the drinks. The ice didn’t have time to melt as he poured his second. It was helping, the drinks that is, as he started to think of his days in Beirut when Iran started their little games in the region. If only he knew then how long this would last he would’ve quit years ago.
He knew the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas was no random act. Dave got wind of the plot back in March but details were sketchy. Like 9/11, you knew but you didn’t know.
Odd, he thought, was that my second drink I just finished or was it my third? He had turned into a lightweight. In the old days in North Africa a bottle would be just a walk in the park, now two drinks are taking him down.
Pouring another drink, with ice no more, it was important to numb the knowledge that had throbbed in his brain for weeks. The President of the United States knows Hamas will detonate a North Korean nuclear device supplied by Iran on the border of Israel and the Gaza Strip. The logic in this escaped him, unless you’re a Muslim fanatic hell bent on turning the Middle East into an inferno. Dave knew Iran had nothing to lose by using Palestinians as fall guys. The low megaton bomb would take out most of the Gaza which is a cesspool anyway, most of Israel's armored divisions now amassed at the border and send its radiation into half of Israel rendering most of Israel paralyzed economically. This would leave Israel with no targets to hit back at and a broken country.
It was now 2 A.M. in D.C., Monday morning in Israel and no mushroom clouds yet as he poured another drink nearly taking down three quarters of the bottle. He knew Iran saw the handwriting on the wall as ISIS disrupted their little thing in the region by taking parts of Syria and Iraq. This was by design turning ISIS’s Caliphate into a wall between Iran and the Mediterranean Sea which Iran wanted desperately. Dave could see Iran was running out of time as Iraq’s government continued to buckle under the pressures brought down on them by the murderous ISIS troops backed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Dave knew it was a mess and a big gamble by all, but he knew eventually one side would win and we needed to be on that side. It was like choosing between an axe murderer and a chainsaw slasher.
The President in all his insanity was too afraid to even acknowledge that he knew of this planned border explosion. So he sits and waits with the prospect that thousands will eventually die, our last real ally in the region will be rendered helpless and the Middle East will be once again ruled by the warring tribes of Islam.
Dave’s hand accidentally knocked over his bottle as he slipped into a deep sleep in that overstuffed chair. As he snored away, his alarm clock was giving him two hours of sleep before he had to be back at Langley for another dose of lunacy. – N.P.Contompasis