Whew. Are you overwhelmed by the news of the last few weeks? Join the ever-expanding club. You'd think once the Arkansas General Assembly went home, things would ease up, news-wise. But April is proving not only the cruelest month, but the newsiest.
Between judicial orders, North Korean launches, the president's tweets, more shootings, those "bathroom bills," the stock market, Syrian gas attacks, retaliation for Syrian gas attacks, Chinese visits, the Supreme Court nomination, Opening Day and Oaklawn, you'd be forgiven for missing a story here and there. This is like drinking from a firehose.
But in the middle of it all, somewhere in the high levels of the American government, somebody decided to drop the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever. And it happened in the war against ISIS in Afghanistan. Fellow Americans, let's not tiptoe quietly by. This is not nothing.
For years America has "led from behind." And any brand-new lieutenant in the Army will tell you that's no way to lead. Even a platoon leader with two months' experience will tell you that he walks just behind the point man, so he can see the battlefield. And make decisions fast. Leading from behind? Try pushing a wet noodle across the table. It doesn't work.
Those days appear to be over.
The enemy in Afghanistan has proven educable. He has learned that it isn't smart to drive or ride across his country, lights on for safety, blaring any music that he's allowed to listen to under the current regime. They don't call our bombs smart for no reason. The enemy has dug in. Literally. He's underground these days. Recently, according to dispatches, a few popped out of their man-made caves and killed an American soldier during an operation in Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan.
The powers that be in the United States--and we still haven't been told how far up those powers be--decided to drop the largest non-nuclear bomb in history on Thursday last week.
The point was to collapse those underground tunnels.
It did the job. Well.
The brass in the U.S. military calls it the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, or the MOAB. There are no poets among the brass. But the grunts are another matter. They call MOAB the Mother Of All Bombs.
They say when this thing hits the earth, it unleashes the same energy as a 6.0 earthquake. Call it earth-shattering.
The MOAB is too big to be launched from a sub or hooked to the wing of a large aircraft. It is pushed out of the back of a cargo plane. After all, it's as big as some city buses.
Guided by GPS, it detonates just above the ground. Because of things that physics majors might understand, this makes the blast more powerful. They say the MOAB has a blast radius of one mile.
The United States says the bomb killed 36 militants, but there's really no way of knowing. The point was to collapse those tunnels. The tunnels have collapsed. The body count is buried.
One witness who was close to the blast, but not too close, said he thought "the heavens were falling" and the ground underneath him "felt like a boat in a storm."
It sounds terrifying.
But that's the point.
In an attempt to mock the United States, its military, maybe the president and Americans in general, and also prove that the Massive Ordnance Air Blast really isn't much of a concern, ISIS' propaganda team--yes, it has one--put out some pictures of its people cooking and snapping pictures and generally having a good time. (They appear not to have showering facilities, but that's another story.)
More telling, however, is what the spooks are hearing as ISIS fighters in Afghanistan talk to each other, or don't.
"We don't know who was killed [Thursday]," one of our professional listeners said. "But there is confusion and fear in the radio chats we are intercepting. There is limited communication among ISIS fighters."
Which means the good guys are winning, at least in this region in Afghanistan.
No, we haven't crossed any red line, no matter what ISIS' enablers tell the papers. Compared to nuclear blasts, this was nothing. The United States' arsenal contains a thermonuclear weapon that's said to be 110,000 times more explosive than the MOAB.
But the MOAB, back on Thursday, did its job.
The message is getting out: This president, this administration, will have its controversies and mistakes. But the days of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching are over. So are the days of leading from behind. As Charles Krauthammer put it on these pages yesterday:
The world is on notice: Eight years of sleepwalking is over.
Editorial on 04/18/2017