An End to the Crisis

By Chris Kaasa, BW Washington Correspondent

OCTOBER 31, 1962 – White House officials have reported that the Soviet Union has agreed to a U.S. demand for the unconditional removal of their short- and medium-range nuclear arsenal from the island of Cuba. By all accounts, this represents an end to the 16-day standoff that brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. According to one senior aide to President Kennedy, speaking anonymously due to the diplomatic sensitivity of the information, the State Department received a teletype message from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev early this morning, explaining that the whole ordeal had been conceived by the Kremlin as an elaborate Halloween “trick”.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the aide said. “There was a ‘treat’ too – he promised to remove all Soviet troops from Hungary and Poland by next June. Frankly, we’re all at a loss over here…”

Ahmadinejad released his British hostages this morning, offering them up as an Easter gift to the people of the United Kingdom. Yes, yes, I know that this is not really part of an inexplicable Easter celebration from the leader of an Islamic theocracy, just an extraordinarily amateurish cover story for an extraordinarily crazy rabble-rouser. Blair, for all his faults, is a careful, smart and skilled natural statesman. I shudder to think how much worse our current global situation would be if President Bush had plunged headlong into Iraq and the war on terror without the Prime Minister at his side.