A thing of state, p.1
A Thing of State, page 1
Book Description
In the conduct of foreign policy, a President must never utter threats he can’t—or won’t—enforce, make promises he can’t—or won’t—keep, or renege on commitments to his allies.
This classic political thriller by Pulitzer Prize-winning master Allen Drury is as insightful and relevant today as when it was first published.
Secretary of State Raymond Cass Stanley struggles to help the US President avoid a potentially disastrous head-on collision with Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, President for Life of All the Peoples of Lolómé, a tiny Middle Eastern country. Sidi has recently acquired several nuclear weapons and threatens to deploy them against his even tinier neighbor, Lesser Lolómé, and the President is determined to take him down.
This clash among proud and defiant leaders, and the repercussions worldwide among US allies and enemies, forms a sophisticated and fascinating novel of present-day politics and international tensions.
No author has ever portrayed American and world politics with more vivid reality and understanding than Allen Drury.
Kobo Edition – 2016
WordFire Press
wordfirepress.com
ISBN: 978-1-61475-469-5
Copyright © 2016 Kenneth A. Killiany and Kevin D. Killiany
Originally published by Simon & Schuster 1995
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover design by Janet McDonald
Cover artwork images by Janet McDonald
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Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers
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Contents
Book Description
Title Page
Dedication
“Not … Any Actual Nation, Living or Dead”
Principal Characters in the Novel
One
1
2
3
4
Two
1
2
Three
1
Four
1
2
3
Five
1
2
3
4
5
About the Author
If You Liked …
Other WordFire Press Titles by Allen Drury
Dedication
To my sister Anne.
Number One fan and lifelong best friend
“Not … Any Actual Nation, Living or Dead”
The standard disclaimer appears in many novels, including this one: No character is based upon any actual person, living or dead. Some might suggest the addition here: Greater Lolómé and Lesser Lolómé are not based upon any actual nation, living or dead.
And yet, why bother?
It isn’t that the living examples are so few that any particular one can justifiably be singled out as inspiration for this novel.
It is that there are so many that it is impossible to say which contributed most to the composites that became my fictitious Greater and Lesser Lolómés.
How many Greater Lolómés do we have, for instance? Iraq, Iran, Somalia, North Korea, Serbia, Russia, India, and China, just to get the ball rolling. And Lesser Lolómés? Kuwait, South Korea, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Tibet, for starters.
No doubt the news will bring us several more of each by morning.
And of American administrations—caught in the middle, lost and blundering in a world of such furious animosities and reviving imperialisms, always in recent years tentative and uncertain, hesitant and unsure, in search of an elusive peace that can only be achieved by facing up to, not sliding out from under, its harsh and rigorous demands.
This manuscript was delivered to the publisher in September 1994, but time is relatively unimportant here. Spin the wheel on any of three recent American Presidents, two Democratic, one Republican, and the story is the same.
Stop at almost any day—it will be a day of noisy American threat, empty American bluster, futile American bluff and bombastic statements of high, but quickly abandoned, American principle.
Stop at almost any day—it will be a day of American ducking, dodging, weaseling, double-talk, retreat, and evasion of great-power responsibility—anything to avoid biting the bullet—or grasping the nettle—or whatever metaphor you want to use for having the simple guts to exercise American power, as a great power must exercise it if it wishes to remain a great power.
Such is the state of affairs as the old millennium ends and the new begins. The wheel spins, the cycle repeats. Yesterday’s history is today’s and tomorrow’s. The more it changes, to quote the ever-cynical but frequently accurate French, the more it is the same thing.
Therein—not in any one day or any one nation but in most days and many nations of this unhappy era—lies the inspiration to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings and the decline of great states. The pattern, unchanging, grinds on. Only genuine courage, foresight, and unflinching firmness in the just and judicious use of power can reverse it.
In these days when the men who hold power in Washington are afraid to use it, either from fundamental lack of character or an overweening desire to win votes—or both—courage, foresight, and unflinching firmness are far from being in control of the foreign policies of the United States of America.
No one nation, no one act of equivocation, provided the inspiration here.
Nowadays, it is everywhere.
—Allen Drury
Principal Characters in the Novel
In Washington
At the State Department
Raymond Cass Stanley, Secretary of State
Mary, his wife, former ambassador to Egypt
Elizabeth (“Bets”), their daughter
Samir Hashimi, her husband
Basil Rifkin, Counselor
Hugo Mallerbie, Undersecretary for International Security Affairs
Brad Temple, Undersecretary for Political Affairs
Gage McGregor, director, policy planning
Joan Cohn-Bourassa, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs
Achmed (“Boo”) Bourassa, her husband
Reginald Pennebaker (“Penny”) Sims, former Secretary of State
At the White House
The President
The First Lady
The Vice President
Jaime Serrano, National Security Adviser
At the Pentagon
Arlie McGregor, Secretary of Defense
Gen. Wilson Rathbun, chairman, Joint Chiefs
On the Hill
Senator Richard Emmett (“Willie”) Wilson, of California, chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Rep. John Jones of Alabama, chairman, House Appropriations Subcommittee on the State Department
In the Media
James Van Rensselaer Burden, columnist and pundit: “As I See It”
Kelly Able Montague, anchorman and creator of Washington Wrangle and WorldView
Sally Holliwell, network congressional correspondent: Capitol Perspective
Timothy Bates, columnist and pundit: “It Seems to Me”
In the Diplomatic Corps
Li Peng Liu, ambassador, People’s Republic of China
Vladimir Novotny, ambassador, Second Soviet Republic
Georges Marranne, ambassador of France
Sir Anthony Marsden, ambassador of Great Britain
Kwazze Kumbatta (“KWA-zee Koom-BAH-tah”), Secretary-General, United Nations
In Georgetown
Dolly Munson, a hostess
In Greater Lolómé
In the “Pink House”
Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, The Wearer of the Two Hats, Light of the Horizon, Supreme Commander and President for Life of All the Peoples of Lolómé; “Seedy Sidi”
Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, his son; “Young Sidi”; “Jerk, Junior”
In the American Embassy
William (“Big Bill”) Bullock, ambassador and contributor Creed Moncrief, CIA, “assistant to the ambassador”
In Lesser Lolómé
In the Palace
Sheikh Mustafa bin Muhammed, Descendant of the Prophet, Eternal Ruler; “The Mouse”
In the American Embassy
Arthur Reeves Burton, ambassador
One
Pointe Sinistre lies at the southern end of the Bay of Lolómé, a two-mile-long succession of gradually diminishing stone escarpments that look from a distance as though a school of giant dolphins had piled one atop another and decided to go to sleep there. The highest and largest abuts the stark scrub-clad Mountains of Lolómé that separate the bar ren coast from the desert interior. The smallest, at the foot of the mountains, plunges into the perpetually boiling sea.
It is a setting made for drama. Many have taken place there over the centuries. On this day in spring when the calendar is racing toward the year 2000, the newest and perhaps most ominous will presently engage the attentions of the entire world and particularly those of the President and State Department of the United States of America.
For America, for Greater (and Lesser) Lolómé, and indeed for everyone on the face of the planet, it is the worst of times.
There is no “best” to counterbalance. The best is in hiding, under fire, trying to escape, suffering agonies, dying under torture, being “ethnically cleansed” from homes and cities, starving, succumbing to shotgun wounds on battlefields, in streets and schoolyards, being exploded by bombs, subjected to mental and physical abuse, rape, battery, incest, expiring by the hundreds and thousands every day as a result of crimes occasionally understandable but far more often capricious, wayward, and, in a curiously weird sense, carefree.
Hypocrisy, Greed, Corruption, and Cruelty ride the globe. In every land, on every sea, the good and the well intentioned struggle endlessly against the forces of dissolution and chaos that attack their societies. Nowhere in all the vast expanse of humanity’s desperate strivings is there any really convincing evidence for hope.
Hope, like God, exists because humanity cannot endure the ghastly closing years of the terrible twentieth century without it. But even a partial roll call of humanity’s agonies discloses how flimsy are the foundations upon which it rests.
In such a world there are, of course, those who profit and survive quite happily.
They are people like The Wearer of the Two Hats, Light of the Horizon, Supreme Commander and President for Life of All the Peoples of Lolómé, Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, who sits on the highest peak of Pointe Sinistre in his heavily fortified pink concrete fortress and thumbs his nose at the United States and its annoying President, at the United Nations, and at everyone else, including many, desperate but defeated, in his own land.
His domain is not, to the casual glance, all that important. It is only geography—and, more recently, his newfound, evil friends—who have made Greater Lolómé important to the world; that, and Sidi’s longstanding ambition to conquer and absorb annoying Lesser Lolómé, which sits like an angry boil atop the misshapen “head” that the fanciful can see in the map of Greater Lolómé.
Greater Lolómé is actually a rather small part of the earth’s surface; it is “Greater” by definition of its President, which he has persuaded the world to accept. It certainly does have many more square-miles of desolate emptiness than Lesser Lolómé. Unfortunately, however, it is Lesser Lolómé that has the oil.
Greater Lolómé has almost none. Greater Lolómé has strategic position, but this, if truth were ever told in international affairs, is about all there is to Greater Lolómé and its approximately ten million illiterate, poverty-stricken, barely subsisting tribal peoples.
But due to the devious shrewdness and grimly unrelenting tenacity of The Wearer of the Two Hats, Light of the Horizon, Supreme Commander and President for Life of All the Peoples of Lolómé, Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, Greater Lolómé now looms much larger on the world scene than many a nation ten times its size and ten times higher up the ladder of civilization.
“Civilization,” indeed, is not a word to be applied lightly to any nation in these final years of the twentieth century, let alone one so backward and so supremely touchy as Greater Lolómé. The very word is suspect. It is unfair, unjust, prejudicial, subtly and insidiously Eurocentric. “Civilization” by whose definition? “Civilization” on whose terms?
The word, when used to subtly but definitely derogate Greater Lolómé, does not take into account the major achievements of its peoples—their overwhelming and unstoppable urge to breed and breed and breed, regardless of the fact that if the population were one-third its present size it still would not have enough to live on … its peoples’ deep love of the land and their deep respect for nature, as shown by the haphazard and indiscriminate grazing and hunting that over the centuries have resulted in the destruction of most of its major wildlife, virtually all of its major vegetation, and nine-tenths of its arable topsoil … and the reverence for human life—and the tourist dollar—that have preserved the ancient but still officially sanctioned rituals that periodically destroy several hundred of its most promising and most rebellious youths … all of those things, in fact, which prompt the secret, and sometimes not-so-secret, admiration with which Greater Lolómé’s admirers compare its simple, instinctively-at-one-with-nature ways with the crippled commercialism of their own “civilization” in the West.
It is no wonder, then, that Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi sits in his bristling pink concrete compound—“the Pink House,” a reference as instantly recognizable throughout the world as “the White House”—and thumbs his nose at the United States and at all who agree with its critical official approach to his country and particularly to himself. He knows he has the sneaking, if not always openly expressed, admiration of his part of the world, and of many in the West too.
It is a time for the thumbing of noses, a time for the collapse of “civilizations,” a time for the schemes of Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi and all like him, everywhere.
“When you look around the world,” as Sidi’s fellow President, he of the United States, often says, “what do you see? One hell of a mess, one hell of an unrelieved, ghastly, fucking mess. How the hell are we ever going to get out of it?”
In the case of this President, the use of the pronoun we has a much wider application than it does when used by President Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi. The President of the United States, or POTUS, as he is referred to in the language of his own Secret Service, of necessity takes a broader view than the President of Greater Lolómé, or POGL. But not even the POTUS, at this juncture, can contribute as much to the world’s growing disarray and ever-growing chaos as the POGL (whom the POTUS refers to, in moments of real exasperation, as “Old Three Esses,” or “Seedy Sidi”).
It is not surprising, perhaps, that the chaos of the world, creeping across every border, challenging the stability of every nation, eroding the safety and the stability of every society and every people, should have brought to power such a man as The Wearer of the Two Hats, Light of the Horizon, Supreme Commander and President for Life of All the Peoples of Lolómé, Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi.
For thirty-eight of his forty-seven years he was known in his desert tribe, and in the army which he joined at eighteen, simply as Sidi Muhammed Bakki. It is only in the last nine that he has proclaimed himself to be Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, which in Arabic means Sidi son of Sidi son of Sidi. His proclamation establishing this name was ostensibly to honor his father and grandfather, ignorant wanderers of the desert. Sophisticated and skeptical observers, of whom there are many among the media covering the area, are sure that this was only a preliminary to declaring himself king or emperor, probably under the title Sidi III, which would give him a ready-made dynasty and further his obvious intention that his son, Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi, should succeed him.
“Young Sidi,” as he is known (or “Jerk, Junior,” to POTUS), has come home from a happy four years as a drunken womanizer at Harvard University to become general and commander of his father’s Special Guard. He has already made it clear that his talents in the fields of corruption, torture, rapine, and general mayhem are equal to, if not greater than, his father’s. So the instant dynasty idea is logical. Monarch and heir are already in place, and all seems set for many more years of cruel and ruthless tyranny over Greater Lolómé.
Except, of course, for the evil Americans, whose constant fulminations against him give Sidi bin Sidi bin Sidi his only real uneasiness. Agents of the Great Satan have tried to unseat him before, without success, but they are not giving up. It is only the unexpected assistance just offered him by one (or is it more?) of the region’s major monsters that give him the renewed energy and greatly expanded military muscle to meet the Great Satan’s continuing onslaught.
So far, this is secret to the world; but unknown at the moment to Sidi, the technological devils of the West have struck again. The word has already reached Washington, and busy minds are at work trying to devise a response.
