Last night I finished the novel The Last Jihad, by Joel Rosenberg. It was a bit eerie reading it because of what’s going on today. The premise of the book is that it’s 2010 and its history coincides with our own right up until we went to war with Iraq. In the book, we were attacked on 9/11, we attacked al Quaida, we overthrew the Taliban, but then we were dissuaded from attacking Saddam Hussein.
So now, in 2010, Saddam is nearing the end of his life and decides to go out in a blaze of glory, a last jihad. To that end, he launches an assassination attempt on the president of the United States (in the book, the president is a conservative former governor of Colorado, successful businessman, and Vietnam veteran) and plans to launch a nuclear missile at Israel.
It’s a gripping, fast-moving story that’s made even more harrowing by what’s really happening in the world today. In a way it’s a lesson in what could have happened had we not gone in to get Saddam.
