I'm fed up with the police department pussyfooting around while the sniper continues to terrorize the populace. Even common criminals might be too much for this beleaguered bureau, and the sniper is far from a common crook. He is a terrorist, and every God-fearing American who hasn't spent the last year compulsively watching "Survivor" reruns knows what we do with terrorists.
The United States, after spending the better part of the '70s and '80s training, arming and financing every breed of insurgent imaginable, is now manically trying to avoid reaping what it sowed. Judging by the sniper's accuracy, meticulous planning and deceptive getaway tactics, there's a good chance he has received some degree of U.S. military training.
CNN shows pictures of cops shoulder-to-shoulder raking through leaves, looking for that proverbial needle in the haystack of Virginian suburbia. Forensics experts, meanwhile, are working around the clock parsing the hieroglyphs of shell casings. And now we learn about a sinister tarot card and a garbled phone call.
I propose we approach the sniper case the same way we approach all terrorist cases. I don't recall the FBI rifling through bin Laden's trashcan, perhaps because we already know of bin Laden's relation to various crimes. On the other hand, bin Laden could have been anywhere among the desolate mountains or howling deserts of Afghanistan, while the sniper is within the relatively small confines of the greater D.C. area. As President Bush, the consummate master of saber-rattling eloquence and evocative Wild-West imagery once said, "we need to smoke out these terrorists."
Anthony A. Williams, the mayor of Washington, D.C., and every tin-pot mayor of every suburban enclave along the I-95 corridor, needs to receive the same ultimatum the United States sent out to Mullah Mohammed Omar: cough up the terrorist, or face the unadulterated bellicosity of our military.
Just as the local D.C. authorities can't catch the sniper, Omar had no chance of extraditing the slippery bin Laden flanked by hundreds of heavily armed al-Qaeda loyalists. Needless to say, the U.S. military has little time for fussing over realities, such as whether its demands are logistically reasonable.
Demands are made, consequences are meted out. So when Williams responds with some legalistic boilerplate about limited resources, needing time and his administration's commitment to fighting terrorism, Bush should wad up this feeble reply and torch it along with 3,000 copies of "The People's History of the United States" at John Ashcroft's next book-burning ceremony.
The next obvious step is to establish staging areas, a la Desert Storm, in neighboring countries like Canada. If a few Quebecois Frenchies get ticked off that we are violating their national boundaries, we can always placate them with a few hundred pounds of premium escargot.
Once a military base is secured in Canada, we should unleash B-52 bombers laden with daisy cutters and napalm, over the entire D.C. area. Perhaps a few innocent souls will perish amidst the hellfire, but we shouldn't sublimate the deified might of the army to a technicality like the loss of innocent lives.
The Israelis recently launched an advanced missile into a Palestinian neighborhood and saved the lives of countless soldiers while keeping the collateral damage count to low double digits, so I have little fear that we could safely incinerate this heartless sniper and only incur a few thousand unwanted casualties. That's no more than the casualties we caused in Afghanistan. And we didn't even catch bin Laden.
Solomon Rotstein is a humanities sophomore. Reach him at solomon.rotstein@asu.edu.
