North's New Novel Posits Preemptive Strike Against Terror
by Chad Groening
October 19, 2005
(AgapePress) - Marine Corps veteran, conservative political commentator, and best-selling author Oliver North (USMC, ret.) is hoping his latest book will give Americans some idea about the real threat Iran poses to the United States and its allies. 
The Assassins (Broadman and Holman, 2005), the third novel penned by North, reads a bit like today's headlines, with an American president who must deal with Iranian terrorists threatening to destroy Saudi oil fields to wreck the U.S. economy, and who also threaten to detonate nuclear weapons.
While the storyline is fiction, North says a real American president may have to face a real Iranian crisis in the not-too-distant future. This new political intrigue-adventure novel is about "how you deal with that threat," he explains, "because that all gets wrestled in the Oval Office eventually. The various scenarios play out as the possibility of assassination and the possibility of dealing with precision-guided munitions the likes of which are in the book."
In The Assassins, the president must consider America's choices when faced with an imminent Iranian nuclear weapons threat. North believes one definite option would be taking out the nuclear sites with missiles. "Let me tell you," he asserts, "the bad guys have already seen what these weapons are. They've taken them down the throat. It's the American people that don't know the capabilities of them."
Because his fictional story is based on the present-day reality of a very plausible nuclear threat from Iran in the future, North contends that America must "wrestle with what we're going to do about it." He asks, "When the normal rules no longer apply, how do you want the government to respond?"
The controversial idea of U.S.-authorized assassination or "threat mitigation" is also considered in the novel. At one point in the story, an "Assassination Bill" is introduced in a closed session of Congress, and later protagonist General Peter Newman is assigned to recruit and train up to 100 specialists for an American forces unit authorized to target and eliminate foreign terrorists.
The story of U.S. leaders attempting to fend off the menace of a Middle Eastern terrorist enemy and the possibly imminent nuclear attack is one North hopes readers will find as exciting and relevant as today's headlines. Of the plot of The Assassins, he says, "It's part great adventure, part cautionary tale about what we do to prepare in advance for these things so you don't have to make it up as you go along."
Chad Groening, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
