America must either get serious or commit suicide

When you are boating on the Niagara River, there are signs marking the point at which you must go ashore or be sucked over the falls. With Iran moving toward the development of nuclear weapons, we are getting dangerously close to that fatal point of no return on the world stage.

Yet there are few signs of alarm in our public discourse — among politicians, the media or the intelligentsia. There is much more discussion of whether government anti-terrorism agents should be able to look at the records of books borrowed from public libraries.

The Iranian government itself is giving us the clearest evidence of what a nuclear Iran would mean, with its fanatical hate-filled declarations about wanting to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. But "never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Just last year, before the American election, Osama bin Laden warned that those places that voted for the re-election of the president would become targets of terrorist retribution.

We could ignore him then. But neither we, nor our children, nor our children's children will be able to ignore him again if he gets nuclear weapons from a nuclear Iran.

We will live at his mercy if he can wipe out New York or Chicago if we do not buckle down to his demands, however outrageous those demands might be.

We will truly have passed the point of no return. What will future generations think of us — that we drifted on past the warning signs, preoccupied with library records and with giving foreign terrorists the same legal rights as American citizens?

We could deter the nuclear power of the Soviet Union with our own nuclear power. But you cannot deter suicidal terrorists. You can only kill them or stop them from getting what they need to kill you.

We are killing them in Iraq, though our media seem wholly uninterested in that part of the story, just as they seem uninterested in the fact that the fate of Western civilization may be at stake just across the border in Iran.

Of course they would like us to prevent Iran from going nuclear — if it can be done nicely by diplomacy, with the approval of the United Nations, and in ways that do not offend "world opinion."

It is as if we are on the Niagara River and want to go ashore before it is too late but don't want to turn on the motors for fear of disturbing the neighbors with excessive noise.

But at this point, the choice is between being serious or being suicidal.