Now we realize that World War III commenced in 1979 with the Iranian seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, taking the embassy staff as hostages for over 400 days while the Carter administration wrung its hands and waited helplessly for President Ronald Reagan to take office. The global rising of the militant Islamics started then and continued as the Russians found themselves chin deep in a quagmire in Afghanistan in 1980, as Islamic warriors no more sophisticated than Native American savages in the 1700s took on modern tanks and combat helicopters. Admittedly, in America's Cold War against the Soviets, those savages were armed by us and trained to fight, and fight they did. That proxy war went according to plan, unlike Vietnam, proving that though you can put a gun in the hand of a soldier, that alone does not make him a warrior.

So imagine, if you will, that Russia and America were not so much adversaries but brethren forces of the West clashing with the disciples of Mohammed. In those two early battles, the armies of Western civilization lost. Only the threat of superior armed force by Reagan made the revolutionaries in Iran relent and give up the hostages, but did America give the Iranians the pounding they deserved? No, those militant Iranians lived to tell the tale and now run a rogue nation-state that is today threatening us with nuclear weapons.

From 1979 on, militant Islam considered itself holding an advantage. The West might be better armed, but Islam had a vicious fighting spirit and Islamic fighters were not just ready to die for victory, but hungered for the glory of death in battle. The Japanese invented the kamikaze, but Islamics perfected the suicide attack. The willingness of Islamic terrorists to die for their cause made the coordinated 9/11 assault on America possible.

The Islamic attacks continued and included the 1982 Marine barracks attack in Lebanon, the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, 9/11, Hezbollah's recent war with Israel, and Iraq's 2002 -- 2003 violations of the U.N. requirements for nuclear inspections and Saddam's insistence on telling the world Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. One could claim Saddam's Iraq was a sideshow, and that he was no fervent Muslim true believer, but some observers wonder whether in Saddam's later years he had begun to “drink the Kool Aid” of Islamic dogma -- did he begin to believe the things he was shouting to the crowds before we took him down? The important point is that Iraq was an Islamic stronghold, and the men shooting at our troops saw us as infidels. Therefore, Iraq is part of this global and historical struggle of the West against militant Islam.

Now Iran rattles the saber, accelerates its nuclear weapons program and thumbs its nose at U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at suspending Iran's nuclear enrichment program. Iran's response to U.N. demands was that it was prepared to talk about all issues. This is hardly an appropriate response when the demand was for the elimination of the program.

What's a superpower to do?

The option list is short. First, we could ignore the recent Iranian developments and this diplomatic failure. Analysts insist that Iran is still ten years away from having a deployable nuclear bomb. All we would seem to risk is a black eye in the Security Council. Should we really consider the use of armed force for a little embarrassment on the world stage? Are we that thin-skinned?

Option two is to continue our diplomatic efforts to isolate and coerce Iran into giving up its nuclear program. This is troublesome because Russia and China tend to consider Iran a spoiled, misbehaving but beloved nephew. Russian and Chinese trade with Iran is critical to their economies. The Russians need a market for their equipment, airplanes, and weapons (we'll get to that little issue later). The Chinese desperately need oil and lots of it. A motion to impose harsh sanctions on Iran will go nowhere. And truth be told, we need that Iranian crude ourselves. Does our anger at Iran -- not just for the recent nuclear flap, but for that 1979 un-avenged hostage crisis -- mean we'll tolerate gas prices soaring past $8 a gallon? Hardly.

Let's take a moment to explore reality. Economic forces are integral to war. We like to think that the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack came out of nowhere. In fact, the term “Pearl Harbor” is considered synonymous with a sneak, surprise attack, as in “my girlfriend just Pearl-Harbor-dumped me.” This was not strictly true. The United States provoked Japan, pushing the Japanese as hard as we could, perhaps the Roosevelt administration's attempt to get America into the war and away from a pacifism that would ultimately damage the nation's history. The American oil embargo on Japan of the late 1930s was essentially an act of war, and made it almost impossible for Japan to do anything but fight its way out of the crisis. It was shoot or starve, in the sense that lack of oil can choke an economy. In addition, history's evidence suggests that U.S. government officials knew that the attack was coming, and that there were signs of the Pearl Harbor attack being imminent. On December 7, 1941, the aircraft carriers were at sea. The obsolete battleships lay tied up, tempting, juicy targets, and in came the Japanese to bomb the harbor. Had we done everything in our capability to stop that attack, it would have given away that we had much better intelligence on the Japanese than anyone thought. Did Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen? What else could he have done, given the position of the chess pieces around him?

To digress a bit more, let's also remember that thanks to the best intelligence services since the Soviet KGB and the Nazi Gestapo, our CIA and NSA soldiers make the world stage more of a chess board than a poker game, at least for us. For other national leaders, it is a poker game, where the other player's hands are an unknown and only the pattern of betting can predict what the other party is doing. But America's chief executive and commander-in-chief couldn't have better information to make decisions than he presently has.

If that is true, however, how is it that we thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, allowing us a mandate to invade and check under Saddam's bed for WMDs ourselves? The answer is, we went far out of our way to collect information that would paint the situation as ambiguous, going to foreign sources and gossipy foreign intelligence memoranda. Cooler heads within the CIA and NSA knew the real score, that while Iraq was an eventual threat, there was no clear and present danger of Iraq lobbing a nuclear tipped ballistic missile at, say, Tel Aviv or a European city within range.

Wait a minute -- if that's true, then why did we invade Iraq? The real reasons are not so noble: First, Saddam was becoming unstable and threatening the region, prohibiting U.N. inspectors to prove that the Iraqi nuclear program was halted, and even bragging that he had nukes and wasn't afraid to use them. To some hardliners, that alone was enough to go in and knock over his regime. That America could prove Saddam a brutal war criminal was a side benefit -- it always is great if we can do what's in our national interest and look good to the world at the same time. Second, all that oil needed a custodian if Saddam were to be taken out, and who do we trust more than the U.S. Army to watch over the asset? Third, after 9/11, it was considered politically valuable to be able to shoot SOMEONE who prayed in a mosque as part of “America's Revenge” (picture that phrase as one of those CNN war logos). We needed to engage some militant Islamics, if for no other reason than that a dead militant Islamic can't hurt us. Finally, and this is important, the world needed to know that America is not going to sit on our couches eating...