Caliphate

Afterword

It would have been pleasant to report, had it come to pass, that President Buckman had somehow been overthrown, and that he had been tried for his many crimes and hanged. Sadly, this was not to be. Rather, he passed away quietly one night in 2036, leaving us his legacy: an empire we don't want yet can't get rid of, the enmity of most of the world, a crushing military burden, and damage to our traditional civil liberties that has yet to be fully undone and may never be.

As pleasant as it might have been, however, and as pleasant at it may be to contemplate, in all probability it would not have mattered. Once the United States let down its guard while at the same time not removing-even assuming it was possible to remove-the causes and reasons that caused us to be hated throughout the Moslem world, the Three Cities attacks became inevitable. Once those attacks took place, Buckman, or someone just like him by another name, became equally inevitable.