FicWad

Near Plymouth, southern England, the United Kingdom
0625 GMT, 14 December 2001

The draft for the military had just been re-instated, and many people in both remaining parts of the United Kingdom were very unhappy about, including many of the senior military officials, who felt the armed services should remain professional. One soldier who was extremely happy about was Commander Daniel Billingsly of the SBS, the Special Boat Service, which is the British analog to the United States Navy SEALs, because a draft meant more of the professional soldiers would move into the more specialized and much tougher branches of the armed services. Most of the SBS officers, involuntarily sent into the newly formed Force Sigma, were envious of his position, as Daniel was now the senior officer in SBW Team One and left him with the responsibility of training a new generation on the best that the Royal Navy had to offer. He considered the training to be the best part of the job, well being the trainer at least, when compared to being the unfortunate trainee, who was lucky enough to experience six weeks of only four hours of sleep a night, standing neck deep in freezing cold water, and being verbally, physically and emotionally abused in ways that could only strengthen the character. What went in the grinder were soft, fleshy, grade-A examples of carbon based life, and throughout the training period, vaguely humanoid objects walked out of the training area, but by the end, the few that had made it through the course came out with minds and muscles of pure titanium, hardened by both experience and the trainers hand, and occasionally the instructors boot as well. The training process did not profess to be easy, or to be any form of pleasant seen this side of the Andromeda Galaxy, but it did produce some of the most excellent soldiers seen on this or any other planet. Today, Billingsly was to greet the first batch of untutored seamen, and 'familiarize' them to the style of life here at the main training centre for the SBS, something he always enjoyed. The horrified looks on the faces of most of the recruits was one of the simple things in life to cherish, and then at the end of the day telling them they had to find their own shelter, it became an 'every man for himself' brouhaha, which the instructors watched with night vision goggles, bowls of popcorn and great amusement. The entire experience, designed to break a person down into the individual parts, rebuild them into a precision instrument of warfare, break them down once more, and if there was enough time rebuild them once more, was one of the finest programs in the world.

They started with three hours of intense physical training, doing such exercises as the side-straddle hop, mule kicks, ski jumps, supine bicycles and dozens of other aerobics that both loosened their physique and exhausted them. After that, the instructors divided the trainees into seven teams, which would become like family over the next six weeks, sharing in their triumphs and their failures, and they would become a tightly woven family-type entity. The teams, made irrespective of gender, race, creed and whether one could utilize magic or not, would serve to strengthen the bonds of fellowship between the mundane and magical realms, a thing most desperately needed in the coming months. When the teams finally amassed at assembly area Blue, the supervisors guided them to the eight-kilometer obstacle course that they would run this first day, which would determine their physical, mental and tactical abilities, and their ability to work as a team. The obstacle course consisted of six sets of obstacles on an eight-kilometer track, with two squads of SBS veterans operating paint-ball guns to simulate gunfire from enemy combatants, which would measure the tactical expertise of the teams. The individual teams, sent through the course one at a time, found themselves graded on how quickly they completed the course, how many members of their team made it across the finish line and how many times members of their team had been hit with paintballs and where they had been hit. Before they ran the course, the recruits donned the plain white sweatshirts and sweat pants they would serve as the backdrops to the splotches of paint that would assuredly color their clothing by days end, and to make identification of hits easier. If one had more than three splotches of paint the torso, or one near the carotids or the sub-clavian arteries, you automatically counted as dead, and that would in turn reduce the score for the entire squad, which would in turn result in more intense and grueling exercises. The first obstacle that the teams encountered was from the White group of the US Army Field Manual 21-20, the Tough Nut which is a devilish contrivance of sets of four-inch thick wooden poles set up in huge X shapes, which the trainees had to get over carefully or risk damage to certain most likely valuable parts of their anatomy.

After that came a mix of different obstacles from all four groups, including the Island Hopper, the Skyscraper, an inclining wall, and a five-foot high low wall to spring over; overall, it was a challenging group of obstacles, which many had difficulty navigating. Several of the people, both mundane and magical, fell while jumping from the various stumps in the Island Hopper and sprained their ankles, while one actually broke his metacarpals in three places along with a sprained ankle. The rest made it through the first set with no problems, and after that it was smooth sailing, at least until they met the first squad of 'attackers' who decimated them by hiding behind trees and using guerilla fighting techniques. The first group looked like they had bathed in the brilliant florescent colors, for they looked like characters from some inane and harebrained children's show, a kaleidoscope of Day-Glo orange, yellow, lime green and bright blue, an impossible target to miss in the homogeneous brown of the winter woods. As they passed the battle positions, the squad radioed ahead to the other and told them to stand down for the time being as the current group had failed spectacularly at the stealth and tactical evaluations, although any of those persons who wanted to take potshots were welcome to take them. The second group was only a little better than the first when it came to stealth, for instead of imitating a herd of elephants moving through the jungle, they made about the same noise as a rack of pots and pans dropping to the floor, although this wasn't much of an improvement in any sense. They managed to make it out of the target range with almost half of their original white showing, which made them feel very proud, as the six remaining squads had named the previous group the 'rainbow cadets'. The majority of the other units were about the same level as the second, except for the sixth squad, which showed astonishing skills in both surreptitiousness and strategy, and they were even able to take down four of the paintball snipers and appropriate their weapons, a thing for which they received a special commendation. They were the only group to make it through the course with all of their members intact and mobile, as all of the other units had members that had sustained some sort of injury, mostly minor fractures, sprained limbs and a couple of torn ligaments and popped tendons.

When the demographics of the different groups was broken down, it was revealed that the magical personnel were 34 percent more likely to stop from exhaustion, and almost 20 percent more likely to sustain more hits from a paintball shooter. All that meant was that the magical portion of the resident populace would be working out harder, longer and much more frequently in order to bring them up to battle-ready status and to bring them to the basic minimum standards of the British Armed Forces, as defined by STANAG 127A. The three kilometer swim in the afternoon was an absolute and undeniable disaster, for while the entirety of the mundane recruits could swim quite adeptly, it seemed there had been a major misunderstanding within the magical cadre sent to them. The remaining Aurors had had the choice of going to any number of training programs, and reportedly, when many had chosen to come to the SBS training centre, they had focused on one misleading word, which happened to be boat. For some ungodly reason they believed they would be training on boats the entire time, and they would never have to get physically in the water throughout the entire training period, thus they never considered the irrationality of signing up for a Royal /Navy/ program coupled with not knowing how to swim. When several recruits refused to get in the water, the drill sergeants took this as the very first cases of goldbricking, which they answered by roughly picking up the complainers and throwing them into the small bay right off the nearby dock. Almost immediately, Cmdr. Billingsly knew that this would not end well, and he had a distinct feeling that he should get the sergeants into the water to fish out the by now waterlogged men and women before any permanent and potentially politically damaging casualties occurred. Even with the entire country in a state of partial anarchy, the one thing that they counted on was that there were most likely two species that had survived the nuclear blasts, cockroaches and lawyers, although which is which is anybodies guess. With the pond scum known as attorneys still alive and kicking, Cmdr. Billingsly was completely sure that should any injuries more serious than a broken leg be reported, they would subsequently be grossly exaggerated, the consequences inflated and the entire matter complicated beyond all conceivable reasons. Thus, any major injury could quite possibly destroy the tenuous détente that the two halves of the British government had joined to create, and with an enemy who could literally disappear into thin air, every ally was a cherished friend and one to protect and aid in any way possible.

Unfortunately, one such casualty did occur, and the man who became an unfortunate statistic was one Horton Willington, a junior grade Auror from a long lineage of magical persons, who had a matching set of both soft muscles and a soft head. He had believed that due to his heritage and wealth, he was entitled to certain special treatment, and he told the supervisors of this belief, which did nothing to enamor him to them. To disabuse him of this notion, they decided to give him special treatment, although not the nice kind of special; he ran ten laps around the perimeter of the compound with a sergeant making him keep pace by slapping his thighs with a telescoping baton. By the time he made it to the pier, the backs of his legs felt like they had gone ten rounds with a meat tenderizer and had lost in every round, and the rest of his body was nearly screaming in anguish, begging his brain not to do anything stupid. However, Mr. Willington still held on to the screwball conception that his ancestry entitled him to special treatment and no amount of physical, mental or emotional maltreatment inflicted upon his person could shake this impression loose from its crevice. When Mr. Willington reiterated his foolish belief, the sergeants took this as a sign that his spirit had not yet been broken, which would not normally bother them on the first day, but this was an accelerated program, where trainees should be crying for their mommies with the first twelve hours. Thus, several of the instructors picked him up and hurled him at least ten feet into the water, where they watched him floundering -which they did not respond to because they thought it was a ploy for sympathy- and sputtering in the frigid north Atlantic waters. He went under twice before the instructors began to realize that this was definitely not a ploy for preferential treatment, and some of the on-hand lifeguards hastily shrugged off their toggle coats and dove in to save the man. The current had steadily carried him farther and farther from shore and by the time the lifeguards got to him he was floating face down nearly 30 meters from the shoreline, and he wasn't breathing or moving under his own power. They got him out of the water in less than a minute, and they quickly performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, desperately hoping that the man would be all right, although they knew in their hearts that the chances of that possibility were steadily getting more and more distant with every passing second.

They managed to revive him, but he did not respond to their attempts at making sure he was not in a state of shock; they quickly loaded him onto the medevac helicopter that they had on the base in case of an emergency, which then flew as fast as possible to the nearest surviving hospital. When thoroughly examined later, the doctors discovered that his brain had been cut-off from the life giving oxygen molecules for too long, and at least twenty percent of his brain cells had died off, leaving him little more than a vegetable, with some rudimentary language skills. Almost immediately, the media showed their double faces, taking down everyone's account of what happened, misquoting whoever they interviewed at their leisure with little regard for the consequences, and adding in random facts that had little to no basis in reality, all of which added up to a situation even more screwed up than it already was. Next, the journalists latched onto some of the recruits who somehow managed to come along to attend to the injured man, and the process started all over again, although their stories made every supervisor in some form of a sadistic maniac who had found a perfect way of combining work and pleasure. Most of the truth was so badly distorted, that by the time the story went to the Associated Press main offices in New York or the Reuters internet servers in Milan, only a third of what was reported was actually true, evidenced by the fact that the final story had a boat accident and a summary execution thrown into the mix. The Willington family was one of the more ancient lines of the British magical realm, and they had substantial pecuniary investments through out the magical dominion, with some moderate investments in the mundane world as well, putting their family in the top 25 wealthiest families in Europe. When the remaining members of clan Willington heard about the tragic accident that befell young Horton, they automatically did what any bourgeois elitist would in those circumstances: they began figuring out who was the most responsible, and then they would set to work on bringing those persons to ruin, be it physical, mental or financial, although they preferred financial.

Throughout the magical realm, the Willingtons were notorious windbags, who had all the political subtlety of smashing someone's head in with a shovel, the tact of a loudmouthed drunkard and all the intelligence of a colony of termites without their queen, making them proverbial loose cannons. When they got a hold of a harebrained idea, they pursued said idea with single-minded obsession, acting, as would the Zax, never taking a step to the right nor the left, although when combined with their inordinately short attention spans, they made very impassioned and bewildering campaigns, which often accomplished very little. They were also rabble-rousers of the worst kind, not above paying indifferent persons to espouse their views, or paying reports to "uncover" new evidence of wrongdoing with the proper amount of slightly preposterous sensationalism thrown in for good measure. However, they were now in an arena where combat was dictated by a slightly different set of rules, not as different as to be incomprehensible, but just enough that the players were kept off balance and more than a little perturbed. With every euro they threw into getting the "truth" published or shown to the world, they paradoxically both strengthened their own position and weakened it, as received much sympathy from the various liberal groups, and with the conservatives, they found themselves thrown out of the country club for daring to criticize the decisions of both the monarch and her government. After several days, most of the family lost interest in stirring up trouble, and thus they moved on to other equally vacuous projects with equally inane goals. The few immediate family members who persisted in continuing the bizarre crusade were nowhere near as effective as when the whole of the vast resources of the Willington trust were behind them. In the next three weeks after the debacle, the media gradually sorted out most of what was fact and what was fiction, although the summary execution was still widely regarded as truth. The ripples from this seemingly small event would stretch out for years to come, affecting countries on the other side of the globe, and spreading a wave of unease very quickly.

Near the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, France
1125 GMT (12:25 PM Local), 14 December 2001

The magically enhanced Dutch army conquered almost all of northern and eastern France, with minor pockets of resistance near Saint Lô, Caen, Cherbourg, Brest, all along the length of the rivers Rhine, Seine and Meuse, with a major resistance force at Strasbourg. The magically enhanced Dutch Army moved swiftly, occupying thousands of square miles, but with them came something that the French army had never seen before: heavily armored battle trolls, which look very similar to those in the third Lord of the Rings film. Weighing in at just over three tons, a single battle troll could easily devastate an entire platoon of infantry, as they were strong enough to pick up any standard civilian auto within their nine-foot reach and send it more than a mile from its starting position, and their elephant like skin could stop tank-buster slugs cold. Three divisions of these armored monstrosities spearheaded the drive to Paris, eliminating everything in their path, leaving men, women and children with their entire skeletal structures shattered by blows of immense force. With every passing hour the Dutch gained ground and on the previous day they had reached the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, and they had begun a massive double envelopment of the French capital, while dividing the remainder of the French army into parts in the centre and near the Pyrenees. At 1015 they had completely encircled the city an began tightening the noose the had made around the city, and the first demands of surrender had been delivered to Jacque Chirac, and even though he had bravely stayed in the city when the invasion had first started, he held no delusions of breaking out of the cordon. His staff quickly arranged to set up an underground, in much the same fashion of the Free French forces of the Second World War, and they began arranging for several of the high-ranking military officials to make their final orders to the troops before hiding them away. Chirac knew that by acquiescing to the surrender demands, he was effectively committing political suicide, and that his name would be yet another among the stereotypical French cowards. However, by taking these actions, he allowed the Fifth Republic to live on, and his actions saved the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers, as the High Courts recognized later on at his trial for aiding and abetting the enemy.

The commander of the Dutch forces demanded that the surrender take place at the Arc de Triomphe, intended to be a jab at the proud martial history of the French people, which now is only read about in books, and at the spirit of the people themselves. The psychological warfare tactic was essentially the same as when Adolf Hitler made the French surrender in the same railway car that they had forced the German Empire to surrender in 1918, and it was equally as effective at demoralization. Just before the military command, left to attend the surrender as demanded, they sent a final transmission in the name of the Fifth Republic, ordering all remaining commands to implement a scorched earth policy, leaving nothing for the enemy with any industrial, military or civil value. The first area this policy implemented in was the Bordeaux vineyards and wineries on the eastern coast, destroying an entire generation of wine, worth more than 4.2 billion Euros. As soon as the rest of the commands received the message, they began the sad duty of destroying their homeland, placing explosives in every factory, every dry dock, every building which had any sort of military or industrial value, and making sure that the invaders would use them for their own ends. The port of Toulon on the southern coast, emptied in record time, and then all the ships that could not make it out of the port blasted into slag from a prolonged barrage, which destroyed most of the naval base as well, thereby eliminating the possible usage of the harbor facilities. All over France, this scene was repeating itself, airport runways crudely cratered, underground nuclear storage facilities sealed shut, missile silos destroyed with the missiles inside, and all sorts of other destruction occurred in cities throughout the unconquered parts of the country. Entire cities became massive firestorms that enveloped thousands of square kilometers, creating smoke plumes that could be seen from space, and the fires killed more than five thousand people who were in buildings that caught fire from those next to them. Most of the French Air force had already transferred over to Spain and Germany, as planes on the ground in enemy territory are worth nothing, while planes in a friendly country can be worth more than their weight in gold.

Theoretically, as soon as the surrender agreement was sign, the scorched earth actions should have immediately stopped, but the French knew that very rarely did the victor ever keep his promises to the loser. Thus, the French forces blithely ignored the incoming orders to stand down, which made for a very malevolent surprise for the Dutch, and the magical mercenaries accompanying them on their modern day blitzkrieg across the Frankish countryside. At every crossroads and other convenient area, landmines, Czech hedgehogs, dragons' teeth, and other counter-mobility emplacements were hastily erected to impede the progress of the quote-unquote victorious Dutch. More than once, engineers dynamited abandoned buildings so that they would fall across the road, and create an impassable roadblock far beyond the degree of any constructed obstacle that they could make in the short time they had allotted to them. Those that could make it across the borders into Italy, Switzerland, Andorra and Spain were encouraged to do so as speedily as possible, as it was most probable that they would find only fatality should they stay in country. More than two divisions made it across the border into Italy, Switzerland and Spain each, with dozens of advanced prototypes of APCs, tanks, UAVs and many other types of military projects with them. In Paris, clerks and secretaries frantically burned the secret and above documents to prevent the world from learning precisely where the DIGN and GIGN had international agents in less than legal roles, and what they knew as a result. The newborn provisional government arrested President Chirac along with all the other French attendees of the surrender ceremony and sent them to one of the prison camp set up near the former Belgian border. The PM, Lionel Robert Jospin had been in Uganda on an international relations tour, and he became the head of the government-in-exile based in America, which many thought too far away and heavily defended to eliminate.

The hundreds of demolitions reduced many cities to large piles of rubble and nearly destroyed the whole of the French industrial capacity, along with billions of euros in products, trade goods and many other exporting items. By the time the Dutch arrived in the southwestern cities, sections of the countryside looked as if a tremendous fire had swept over the hills and valleys of the land, baking both the earth and anything aboveground within a radius of 350 meters. At the factories where the AMX tank series produced, now there were only piles of debris the size of small mountains, intermixed with semi-molten pools of slag that had once been fighting machines of exceptional caliber. They very quickly cottoned on to what the final orders of the French military were, and the generals could not help being impressed by the foresight the military had shown, although they also knew they themselves would be punished for not arriving in time to save some of the industrial works. Two hours after the Dutch had received the final confirmation of the surrender, Wim Kok, the de facto head of state and the former Prime Minister officially asked the Dark Lord Voldemort to assume control over the conquered territories and to consider it a tribute to his magnificence. According to partially destroyed Dutch records, they received an affirmative reply in less than ten minutes, although according to eyewitness statements, there was a considerable gap between the sending and the reply. With the large amount of new territory in his possession, the Dark Lord felt that he had surpassed the size and grandeur of the title of Lord, and thus he named himself "The Imperial Ruler and Savior of the Earth and Magical Realms, Grand Emperor Voldemort." This only served to prove the man was a megalomaniac and he definitely had a bizarre savior complex, but this is where he first gained enough power to affect global events, and to have territory holdings on par with historical empires.

The remains of East (Palestinian) Jerusalem, Israeli-controlled Palestine
2115 GMT (11:15 PM Local), 14 December 2001

The reprisals sought by the Israelis for the attack on the Defense outpost were swift and brutal in nature, with destruction rarely seen outside of nuclear blast zones, and hardly a single building left intact and/or standing. The Israeli Army came down on the West Bank like a sledgehammer, cutting down anything in their way, be it flesh, stone, metal or wood, and nothing was safe from the holocaust that followed, not women or children, not even the many mosques dotting the landscape. The Israeli armor destroyed the many mosques with particular violence, many times when the afternoon prayers were just starting, trapping hundreds of people inside, burying them with mountains of detritus. Entire residential sections were razed, and anyone resisting the soldiers was given a one-way ticket on the midnight train to slab city via copper jacketed slugs and Isaac Newton's second law put into practice. The slaughter of the West Bank was one of the early atrocities of the Third World War, but when compared in terms of utter viciousness, it earned a rating of one of the top five military atrocities ever created, below the Holocaust but above the My Lai Massacre. Their were far too many bodies to bury, so most of the time they were piled up in the middle of the roads and set afire, creating clouds of ash which mostly dropped into the river Jordan, thus contaminating the Dead Sea for decades to come. The Palestinian government had fled into Jordan for the time being, to avoid the fate that had consumed so many of the little people who had elevated them to their positions, but now were only cannon fodder for the great governmental machine who used them callously as human shields. Once a person gains power, it is almost inevitable that they begin to misuse it, or will allow said power to buy for specious and often time's dangerous reasons, however the greatest misuse of power is to abandon the people who depend on appropriate use of that power. Every government in the world had seen this happen, mostly in third world countries such as Uganda with Idi Amin, and Chile with August Pinochet, but even the superpowers of Russia, Britain and America are rife with it. The American congress is an extremely apt example, with every single person who the people elect there, already bought and paid for by the tobacco, oil, health care and pharmaceutical industries, little more than puppets with only the shadows of the lofty ideals they once had before.

To Saif Al-Adel, the Palestinian people were expendable because they did not have the strength of will to do the work that Allah had tasked them with; they had not destroyed the infidels and the Zionists who would gladly destroy the one true faith to further their own ambitions. He considered anyone who had not personally killed an infidel to be what the Western devils would call a poser, one who is not truly committed to the path laid down by the Koran and the 1200-plus verses devoted to the fate of non-believers. He had already begun gathering sympathetic forces from the newly secular Iraq, who found the Baath party to be too non-religious for their tastes, and simply too socialist to please their delicate palates. Saddam was quickly undoing the so called "de-Baathification" ordered by the former American President G. H. W. Bush, much to the relief of the nation, as without the secular government, nothing was done and the state of post-conflict reconstruction and chaos seemed to become perpetual. Unfortunately, to achieve the results he wanted, he had to rattle many sabers, and most of these belonged to the many clerics who were eternally squabbling over the most frivolous and unfathomable problems, which any semi-sane person could solve with a simple use of logic. However, as always, religion and logic mix as do oil and water or gasoline and fire, depending on what amount of a religion examined with a critical, dispassionate, and impartial eye, as even a little bit of bible-thumping can go a long way. While the Sunnis and the Shiites were squabbling over even the most basic of operations, the new government became divided between the two factions and the Kurdish minority, making a peaceful solution that much farther away. To Adel, Saddam was a wallflower, a pacifist who was a paltry puppet of the West, whom the puppeteers only mildly rebuked during the course of Desert Storm, and thus he was a traitor to all Muslims for allowing the imperialists to set foot on his soil.

Adel believed that he had transferred the government secretly, and that from here he would be able to orchestrate the demise of the Zionist management of the Jews in the Holy Land, and thus cleanse the land of all impurities, which sullied the earth. He had previously arranged with the Jordanian royal family for safe passage and protection should the Israelis decide to liquidate the two small areas of Palestinian control, or should the condition of open war ever arise. The more support he could garner from the outside world, the more likely it was that their neighboring nations, all of whom happened to be Islamic and many theocracies within that bunch, would put the Israelis back in their place in the world, rightfully at the bottom of the heap. The few civilians that made it out of the West Bank found themselves inundated with semi-fictionalized reports of the horrors of their former hometowns, which detailed the desecration of mosques and the murder of persons regardless of who they were. That lit a flame underneath them, making all who read, heard and saw the stories over the many news mediums cry out in anger, making them demand retribution on the sacrilegious invaders of their 'peaceful' nation. The provisional government of Palestine was overjoyed at the pledges of assistance they received, which came from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Hamas, the PLO, Hezbollah, and even the Kingdom of Bahrain, all of which would ship money and other necessary supplies to Jordan. He also began gathering as much war material as he could, leasing almost half of the combat arm of the Royal Jordanian Air Force with money which he did not actually have or would ever have, thus introducing the concept of imaginary numbers to diplomatic arrangements. He counted on all of these actions committed with the most conceivable secrecy, so as not to tip off either the Coalition or the Israelis, both of whom would quickly brand them as warmongers and they would quickly find themselves on the business end of an international taskforce.

What he did not count on was the now eternal Big Brother service, provided by the United States, with its vast networks of reconnaissance satellites, the hundreds of surveillance aircraft in its air fleet and the new Aurora space planes, which could take pictures of his individual eyelashes, accurate to 2-micrometers, from 50 miles up. Nor did he suspect that nearly every computer system on the planet had an automated program that sent copies of just about every file modified to the computer analysis labs at Quantico, Atlanta and Chicago for decoding and interpretation, so any electronic information was fair game. The US surveillance policy was "If it happened, don't bother telling us, we know about it already", making the globe a much smaller place with much less privacy for anybody on the surface of said globe, the quintessential essence of Big Brother. The KH-14 spy satellite constellations and the computer programs had picked up every single movement made by both sides, and now the US had sufficient information to play both sides of the fence like a well-tuned violin, and to make both sides bend to their wishes. They could easily tell the Jordanians that they had lent most of their combat aircraft to a state with almost no real collateral, or they could tell the Israelis precisely where the Palestinian command authority now headquartered, thus ensuring its destruction. In short, the United States had both participants by the shorthairs, and they could very easily turn the tide in either direction with very few direct consequences. Historically, the US had traditionally sided with Israel on most issues, but with the distinct lack of military presence in the region made them play things decidedly closer to the vest, and made them look at all nations as potential enemies. Without any authentic or immediate threats to their own security, however, the USA decided that they would let the situation unfold a little more before making any potentially foolhardy or irrational moves.