It seems to me we ought to organize our thinking around several essential points:
1. We are engaged in a generational, worldwide war against Islamic fascism which seeks to destroy our democracy and our Western way of life.
2. Our greatest vulnerability in this war is the use by terrorists of weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, against our homeland cities. ( Note the use of the plural).
3. The most likely source of such weapons is Iran, although other nationstates such as North Korea, China, and the former Soviet republics are potential sources for such weapons. However, Iran remains the most likely candidate to commit mischief.
4. If surrogate terrorists armed with nuclear weapons by Iran can explode a nuclear device in an American city while keeping other devices hidden in reserve, our republic probably cannot survive as a democracy because the internal pressure to surrender will be irresistible in the wake of multiple strikes.
5. Therefore, our greatest immediate strategic objective is to prevent Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear bombs.
6. We are unlikely to succeed in this objective for the following reasons: first, according to retired General McCaffrey, we lack the assets to knock out Iran's nuclear development program by airstrikes alone. Indeed, General McCaffrey stated that the notion that this could be accomplished by airstrikes alone is "insane." Second, our conventional assets are severely attenuated and depleted by our war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Third, the Iranians are quite aware of our predicament and cannot be intimidated or bribed into abandoning their nuclear program. Fourth, our Western allies have expressly stated that they would not participate in military action against Iran. Fifth, sanctions will not deter the Iranians because the Chinese and the Russians have already stated their opposition to such sanctions should they be introduced in this Security Council. Finally, the Bush doctrine is dead and cannot be revived absent another strike on the American homeland.
7. The acquisition by Iran of the nuclear bomb, coupled with its present ability to deliver it by rocket as far as Israel, when considered with its rhetorical threats against Israel, constitutes an existential threat to the very survival of Israel. Therefore, the possibility is not entirely unlikely that Israel will attempt to interdict Iran's nuclear program. If United States has not the air assets to accomplish this task, Israel certainly does not possess them either and this implies that Israel will seriously consider a preemptive strike with nuclear weapons-a step which is unthinkable for an American president confronted with a threat remote in time, might be the only solution for an Israeli Prime Minister who considers his people to be facing immediate annihilation.
8. In the likely event that Iran acquires nuclear weapons she must be contained and it is here that the ideas of Lou D. come into play. The question arises whether a homicidal, maniacal, and suicidal nationstate, operating through even more crazed surrogates, can even be deterred by the prospect of mutual destruction. It is important to note that Lou D. does not rely merely on a passive application of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. To deal with the conundrum of amorphus, extra-national terrorist groups operating as hidden proxies for nation states like Iran, Lou D. suggest that we announced in advance our intention to rain destruction down upon such nations, much like Kennedy threatened the Soviet Union in 1962 if an attack was launched from Cuba.
9. In the event that Iran acquires the bomb but refrains from dealing it to terrorist proxies to use against us, there nevertheless remains the daunting prospect of a seismic shift in the balance of power again us. First, before we invade another nation such as Afghanistan or Iraq, we will have to consider that to some degree at least Iran has a nuclear deterrent against us. If, even under these circumstances, we chance to invade a rogue Middle Eastern country other than Iran and fight a conventional war, we will be doing so in an environment which is rigged against us. The doctrine of "proportionate response" means that we will not be able to punish with overwhelming force the population who have supplied, financed, and otherwise succored terrorists. Nevertheless, it must be done. (But n.b. this is precisely the opposite of what is happening in the Lebanon and in Iraq. We are unjustly getting the worldwide blame for committing disproportionate responses while reaping too few of the benefits.)
10. The principal weapon in waging the war against Muslim terrorism over generations and around the world must be intelligence. This means that the intelligence services of all the nations of the world must cooperate and be coordinated if we are to succeed. That means we must hold the Western democracies, a very difficult task at best made all the more difficult if Iran gets the bomb. Even more important, we must enlist the Muslim nations of the world and their intelligence services if we are to prevail in this war. It is the Muslim countries which are our indispensable allies.
11. The war against terrorism will be won only if a majority of the world's sane Muslims come to the belief that their survival, even more than ours, depends on the destruction of the crazed fundamentalists. They can reach this conclusion by judging the character of the fundamentalists themselves or they can come to the conclusion that they would be smarter to fear America more than Allah. Alas, our ability to intimidate the Muslim world into cooperation with us will be severely diminished by the combination of the Iranians having the bomb and the demonstrated ability of "insurgents" in Iraq and Lebanon, waging asymmetrical warfare, to inflict casualties which are PERCEIVED to be unacceptable to Western democracies.
12. The war must be fought in the corners of the globe but it can be lost at home. We will lose, as noted, if the terrorists can set off a series of bombs in the American heartland. We can also lose if the center does not hold. If America turns blue, and we were only a few electoral votes away the last election in Ohio from turning the country over to the appeasers, the Western alliance, such as it is, will shatter and the Moslem world will atomize into a new dark age of tribal fiefdoms and sectarian violence spliced for good measure with nuclear bombs. Alternatively, the Western alliance might not hold, especially in the event that Iran gets the bomb. If the Western alliance goes, it is probably only a matter of time until America turns blue.
The logic of these points is certainly distressing, indeed dismaying, but not hopeless. The enemy suffers from more than its share of problems and perhaps fatal weaknesses. Just as the Soviet Union was ultimately undone by its own ideology, so Muslim fanaticism will probably destroy itself with its own irrationality and superstition. These are our points of attack and this is why we need intelligence and Muslim allies to exploit them to the utter destruction of Muslim fanaticism. Finally, waging terroristic jihad in pursuit of world domination for Islam carries its own internal, and perhaps fatal, inconsistency: in order to divide its enemies and intimidate them individually, the terrorist must step up his attacks and this could very well produce the opposite reaction than intended. If the next blow in our heartland is not fatal it will only stiffen our resolve. Likewise, if the extremist miscalculates in dosing Europe with a taste of terror, the Europeans might even wake up.
