Dead ahead.(financing War on Terrorism)(nuclear disarmament of Iran)

NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 14

EVENTS in Iraq bring home the mess we are in. To acknowledge this isn't to say that we were wrong in going to war. But the daily reports instruct us in the need for strategic thought of a kind that we are unlikely to get from the president or from Senator Kerry, whose perspectives are circumscribed by immediate concerns.

The challenge we face is brilliantly addressed by Mark Helprin of the Claremont Institute in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books. What he tells us is something we osmotically know simply by looking hard at the scene in the Middle East and staring down into the Axis of Evil pool. Helprin reminds us that we are at war against terrorism and that the appropriate mobilization to fight such a war is a whole dreamland away. Since launching the war in Iraq, we have conquered Baghdad and deposed Saddam. In the past 18 months, we have faced what seems an infinite elongation of the task at hand. There are more terrorists today than there were a year ago. The mobilization of terrorist enclaves continues. The looming presence in the Mideast isn't the U.S. military, it is an Iran that seems to be engaged in a contest with North Korea as to which nation can more quickly attain nuclear weaponry.

Mr. Helprin begins with a postulate, which is that the United States has the resources to fight back.The good news is that we have the wherewithal; the discomfiting news, that sacrifices will be needed, and, above all, the will.

Helprin gives us an economic perspective. The U.S. produces $11 trillion worth of goods and services annually. We allocate $400 billion to military spending. That amounts to 3.6 percent of the GDP.

By contrast, during the peacetime years between 1940 and 2000, we spent 5.7 ...