How to deploy such a force? Mr. Helprin accosts the question of Iran. "The sure way to strip Iran of its nuclear potential would be clear: issuance of an ultimatum stating that we will not allow a terrorist state, the legislature of which chants like a robot for our demise, to possess nuclear weapons." We would clear the Persian Gulf of Iranian naval and coastal defense forces. Cut corridors across Iran that would be free of effective anti-aircraft capability. Bring carriers to the Gulf and expeditionary air forces to Saudi Arabia, and prepare long-range heavy bombers here and in Guam. "If then our conditions were unmet, we could destroy every nuclear, ballistic-missile, military-research, and military technical facility in Iran, with the promise that were the prohibited activities to resume and/or relocate, we would destroy completely the economic infrastructure of the country."
Mr. Helprin, the author of "A Soldier of the Great War" and "Winter's Tale," is a graduate of Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and has served in the Israeli infantry and air force. He was an adviser on defense and foreign relations to Bob Dole during the 1996 presidential campaign.
His vision is informed by the catastrophic consequences of modern weaponry. We can't be indifferent to movements in any country that are designed to accumulate the kind of power which could kill Americans by the millions. We did nothing, for two decades, to declare ourselves at war with the poison of armed anti-Americanism. The terrorists, "who, contrary to the common wisdom, always have an address, could strike, and strike, and strike again -- our embassies, navy, and largest city -- and not suffer a single punitive expedition." Sept. 11 changed that, but we haven't learned that an effort hugely greater in scale and more refined in conception is required to signal our determination to take on the disease wherever it is nurtured.
"What is it worth to be properly prepared for a smallpox epidemic that might kill scores of millions of Americans, or perhaps 100 million? ... And to preserve as a principle and in actuality both American security and independence? Merely as a matter of honor, with all calculations aside, it is worth any material expense to remove terrorist hands from the control of American destiny."