“If I were a 1.21 jigowatts man…” — cross-quotation of lines from the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and the movie Back to the Future (1985)
Yes, I know that the word is spelled gigawatts and not jigowatts. Among other things, I happen to be a practicing amateur grammarian, folks. Ironically, the preferred pronunciation of the correctly spelled word is done with a soft g, while using a hard g is viewed merely as an acceptable one. So now that we’re all jiggy with jigowatts, let’s try to focus on what this is all about.
If President Donald J. Trump had 1.21 jigowatts and a halfway decent flux capacitor, he could totally have fluxed up a lot of bad guys throughout history. How, you ask? To answer that question I’ll have you consider a quote from the United States Marine Corps’ MARSOC Creed: “Spiritus Invictus, an Unconquerable Spirit, will be my goal. I will never quit, I will never surrender, I will never fail.” Those well chosen words perfectly describe the drive of men like Donald Trump. Maybe he never wore the uniform. Maybe he never mastered assault tactics with the aplomb of football’s finest running backs. But he’s definitely got it going on with respect to the whole “Let’s make it hap’n, cap’n” thing. And that is how he could have shifted fate in America’s favor had he been able to sub for our weakest leaders throughout history. On this occasion we’ll imagine Trump serving as President of the United States in November of 1979. So hop in the passenger seat of the DeLorean, and “When this baby hits 88 mph, you’re gonna see some serious sh&!” (We don’t use profanity at Vorpal-Pen.)
So had Donald Trump occupied the Oval Office at that time instead of the Peanut Farmer in Chief, Jimmy Carter, there’s no way that he would have allowed fifty-two good Americans to spend 444 days in the captivity of radical Islamists. I submit that he would have used the firmest of stances in dealing with that situation. And the prelude to firmness is never defined by phone calls to insane people that involve entreating, begging, groveling, or doing anything else in which you accomplish nothing more than making a fool of yourself and painting America as being weak. Donald Trump never would have made phone call one to those whack jobs. He would have appeared on national TV to explain sincerely and regrettably to the American people that crazies like the ones in Tehran never release hostages and that – again, regrettably – they’re all as good as dead and that we might as well go ahead and reconstitute with extreme prejudice every ayatollah and mullah behind it. At that, every iteration of the “red phone” would have been ringing off the hook with every ayatollah and mullah tripping over themselves trying to explain over the noise of their loosened bowels that they were only trying to be jerks and would never dream of harming any Americans.
This is where it becomes really, really important to understand the difference between bluffing and deterrence. Bluffing is a reckless, zero-sum gamble engaged in by poker players while deterrence is a gambit wielded by skilled chess players. A President Trump would not have been just threatening action that would have left all the ayatollah’s fluffy cats and all the mullah’s men unable to put Persia together again, he would have been ready and willing to do it if the bad guys refused to act sensibly. That is the essence of deterrence, when the evil actors of the world believe with the same conviction as they do in their false gods and non-free market economies that the President of the United States of America will “absolutely, positively deliver [ordnance] overnight.” It worked for President Reagan, and it’s working for President Trump. And it’s a far cry from any “red line” issued by presidents who were created in a jello mold.
However, before we get too starry-eyed with thoughts of “rockets’ red glare” (and we have some really great rockets) and kicking the enemy’s tail, I think it is important to mention that the “gambit” involved in this bit of alternative history refers to the pain, loss, and inconvenience that even the winner of a conflict cannot avoid. To this point, there will be American military personnel who return home less than whole or not at all as well as enormous economic liabilities for our country. Then, there is the thing that good people like us always have the compassion to consider: the innocents who are unavoidably harmed because the iniquitous have made an age-old practice of putting them between we and they. No doubt about it, war is hell. The only thing that causes worse problems is when liberals shrink from striking while both the iron is hot and the bad guys are incipient.
Try to imagine for a minute all of the things we would not have had to deal with if the ayatollah and his illegal government had been neutered either politically, economically, or on the field of battle in 1979. The list easily could have included a vast number of terrorist groups and attacks assisted and inspired by Iran: the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks; Hezbollah and all of its activities; the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which incorporated a bomb nearly identical to the one used in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing and made possible by Omar Abdel Rahman, who was heavily inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini; the 911 attacks, which were heavily inspired by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the current and very active Iranian nuclear weapons program; the billions sent to Iran by America’s worst president ever, who knew only how to cave like a knave; as well as about a zillion other things that would give me carpal tunnel trying to list.
The things that a strong, deliberate leader could do with 1.21 jigowatts. Brings a tear to the eye every time.
