It can't happen here: the fantasy worlds of War on Terror novels.

ON THE MORNING of June 23, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales congratulated blowtorch-wielding agents for breaking up the "deadly plot" of seven Miami men who threatened to explode FBI offices and the Sears Tower. It sounded deeply frightening--until the facts about these sad-sack "terrorists" started to leak. The men who would have leveled America's tallest skyscraper were, in fact, blithering idiots. They didn't know where to get explosives. They begged their "Al Qaeda contact" (an undercover FBI agent) to subsidize the boots for their "Islamic army" costumes. Their leader "carried a cane through Liberty City and wore a cape or sometimes a bathrobe." The Miami Seven were the first gang to lose cred the moment they was busted.

But if they had little to offer serious terrorists and their causes, they did advance, ever so briefly, the idea that Islamic terrorists present a threat as grave and existential as that of communism during the Cold War. This is an article of faith for neoconservatives and liberal hawks alike. The framework of the Cold War, which pitted the United States against a rival superpower and an ideology that ruled one-third of the world's population, is applied to the West's struggle against the violent fringe of the world's second-largest religion. For this to make sense, Americans need to believe terrorists can take over Omaha as easily as Nikita Khrushchev could have nuked the Miami Seven's backyard.

So it's fitting that the War on Terror has finally produced some dystopian, end-is-nigh science fiction. Prayers for the Assassin, a breakout hit by the thriller writer Robert Ferrigno, attempts to do for militant Islam what the movie Red Dawn did for Soviet communism: Envision a world where the wrong side wins the war. In Ferrigno's fantasy, it's the year 2040 and the forces of freedom have been overwhelmed by the forces of Islam.

If this sounds like a hard sell, it is: Prayers for the Assassin's "Islamic States of America" has all the scares of an episode of Monster Chiller Horror Theater on story. The novel is overrun with a goofy cast of knife-fighting fedayeen and white-bearded Islamists with names like Mullah Oxley and "The Old One." Black-robed secret police shake down women for looking at the imam of Chicago's marriage advice Web site: "The imam of Chicago countenances abominations!" San Francisco is a hotbed of Shariah law where "they behead homosexuals at the Civic Center every week." And then there are plenty of sentences like this: "Looming behind the ships was the aircraft carrier Osama bin Laden, the former USS Ronald Reagan, now permanently on patrol offshore."

The Muslims of Prayers for the Assassin didn't use force to convert Joe and Jane Six-Pack. Before the fall, far-thinking clerics and Saudi millionaires took advantage of America's cultural decline by boosting Islam's public image and, of course, framing the Mossad for a nuclear attack on New York, Washington, and Mecca. The gullible American populace, having had quite enough of personal liberty, thank you, flooded into mosques at the prodding of pop culture icons. "Millions" of Americans took up the hijab after a Jane Fonda-style movie star praised Islam in her Oscar acceptance speech and a country music star gave Allah a shout-out at the Grand Ole Opry. This is supposed to lend the satire some believability, but it seriously misunderstands Americans' relationship with entertainers. The Dixie Chicks' venture into anti-Bush rhetoric (obviously the touchstone for the Grand Ole Opryjoke) only managed to convert a chunk of their fans into Toby Keith listeners. If Tom Cruise's embrace of Scientology convinced Americans of anything, it was that they didn't need to see M:1:3.

From his interviews and public statements, it's not clear how firmly Ferrigno's tongue is wedged in his cheek. What is clear is the deadly seriousness with which some hawks embraced the novel. National Review's John J. Miller told readers that the book was "more than a thriller: It is a warning." At David Horowitz's FrontPage webzine, David Forsmark reckoned that the mass conversions of the novel had a grain of truth: "If you don't think radical chic in the United States could ever extend to radical Muslims ... check out the headlines about Yale University working overtime to get the former spokesman for the Taliban enrolled there before Harvard snaps him up, at the same time Yale goes all the way to the Supreme Court to keep ROTC Off its New Haven campus." It's a short leap from the fictional hysteria of Ferrigno to the real, talk radio--fed hysteria of the current crisis.

But when it comes to publicity and endorsements by war hawks, Ferrigno's got nothing on Joel Rosenberg. An old mover in D.C.'s conservative circles (he did a stint reporting for The Limbaugh Letter), Rosenberg ventured into fiction writing and succeeded with a series of novels that dramatized the conflict between Muslim terrorists, Middle Eastern despots, and a steel-spined U.S. president. His first triptych-The Last Fihad, The Last Days, and The Ezekiel Option--has sold more than a million copies. That happened, in large part, because the books were boosted by G. Gordon Liddy ("Highly prescient, very real, and very informed!") and Sean Hannity ("So intertwined with modern events, it's scary!").

Rosenberg didn't get his candle-singed thumbs-up from Liddy because of his exciting plots (mostly government officials yelling into phones and asking for launch codes) or Updike-esque prose (completely random sample from The Ezekiel Option: "With her playful Southern accent and honed geopolitical instincts, she was a good manager and impressive market analyst"). His novels take place in an alternate universe adjacent to Ferrigno's in which the Islamic enemies of America are allied, organized, and practically overstocked with nuclear technology. In The Last Fihad, Saddam Hussein is a brutally effective adversary who has teamed up with terrorists and is hiding nuclear technology in the desert. The rip-roaring climax puts readers in the situation room as President James "Mac" MacPherson races against time to take out an Iraqi ICBM fitted with a nuclear warhead, finally deciding to pre-emptively nuke Baghdad and Tikrit to remove the threat.

Events on Planet Earth have informed events on Planet Rosenberg--and that makes the rest of the series all the stranger. In The Ezekiel Option, the new Iraqi government--led by a former exile who evokes Ahmed Chalabi as played by Omar Sharif--is caught in the crossfire when Russia and Iran form a nuclear alliance to blunt America's power. Why, if Iraq is on its way to "democracy, whiskey, and sexy" is the Middle East still falling apart? Because Rosenberg sees all of the region's conflicts as portents of a biblical prophecy. The Ezekiel Option is named after the battle plan of Rosenberg's fictional former Mossad head Eliezer Mordechai, who sees the forces gathering against Israel as fulfillment of Ezekiel 38:16, wherein enemies "advance against [God's] people Israel like a cloud that covers the land."

Rosenberg has promoted this and his previous novels by linking real-world events to his fictional crises. When one piece stops fitting into the puzzle--when, say, Moammar Qaddafi hangs up his supervillain trunks and normalizes relations with the U.S.--it's replaced by another piece, another bogeyman. And of course, all of Rosenberg's Middle Eastern despots and terrorists are substitutes for the villains he would have cast had he written these books 25 years ago: the Soviets. To move forward his doomsday fiction cliches, Rosenberg simply exaggerates the threat and organization level of America's current enemies.

Yes, all of this happens in a series of novels, racked in the "fiction" aisle of your local superstore just a few steps down from The Da Vinci Code and A Million Little Pieces. But The Ezekiel Option's plot was described in The Washington Times as "ripped from the headlines--next year's headlines." Prayers for the Assassin was seriously reviewed as a warning shot about the dangers of Islam. Hawks who want to define the struggle against terrorists as an all-consuming, generational threat need fiction like this, or trumped-up cases like the Miami Seven, to nudge that message into Americans' minds.

How long will the War on Terror last? Novels like these could be an indicator. If these are the first drips in a flood of wartime fantasies, we can count on many more years of paranoia. We should hope instead that these books become something the authors never intended: classic War on Terror kitsch.

David Weigel ([e-mail]) is an assistant editor of reason.