Note: The original version of this article appeared in the March 2003 issue of Strategic Investment, an Agora Publication.

When the sand conditions are right, a Land Cruiser can get up enough speed to plane over the dunes of the Sahara at 60 miles an hour.

When the light is right, the white sand reflects the intense blue of the cloudless sky, and the dunes shimmer with an ethereal cerulean glow. You drive across an endless island of sand, surrounded on all sides by lakes of hallucinatory water.

As Ah-Klee, your Toureg nomad driver, skillfully weaves through the dunes, he can suddenly stop to pluck out of the sand a piece of petrified wood, or a hand stone axe fashioned by Paleolithic tribes 10,000 years ago when the Sahara was a forested Garden of Eden.

At the end of the day, you set up camp in the lee of a set of large dunes, walk to the top of them to witness the sunset, share a meal of couscous and goat meat by the fire with friends and Toureg guides, then lie in your sleeping bag under the canopy of the “million star hotel.”

You and your party haven’t seen another soul, Toureg or traveler, all day. Your encampment is like the only habitation on earth. Deep in the Ténéré Sand Sea of northern Niger on a Trans-Sahara expedition, this is a good place to contemplate the odds for the end of Western Civilization.

Doomsday scenarios were ever-popular during the Cold War. But the reality was that if a nuclear missile hit a U.S. city, we would know for sure who launched it: the Soviets. Thus we knew against whom to retaliate. And thus the Cold War was conducted without a single nuclear shot fired.

We are now facing a threat an order of magnitude or greater than that of the Cold War. What if a nuclear bomb goes off in a U.S. city and we’re not sure who did it, so we don’t know against whom to retaliate?

It is critical here to grasp the cost differential in building the infrastructure to produce nukes and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and in producing the WMD themselves.

The major cost is the former. Once that’s in place, WMD become cheap to make. Once they’re for sale, they become the weapon of choice not just for Moslem crazies, but also for mafias and gangs of thugs the world over.

Such an outcome renders cities uninhabitable. If America’s population was spread out — say, in 20-acre parcels per family — WMD terrorism by Moslems or WMD blackmail by mafias couldn’t get off the ground. It only works in areas of dense population, where large masses of people can be killed or threatened.

Cities, manufacturing centers like automobile factories, regions of concentrated industrialization like Silicon Valley, all become viable targets with cheap and available WMD. Under such threat, all would have to be dispersed and abandoned.

Cities are the foci of civilization. Only they are capable of the economies of scale capable of creating and sustaining widespread prosperity. Abandon them and civilization itself is abandoned. It is over as we know it.

The obvious solution is pre-emptive action against outlaw countries attempting to build a WMD infrastructure. Right now there are two — Iraq and North Korea — with the possible addition of Libya, and the potential addition of Pakistan.

How to neutralize North Korea is explained in my previous NewsMax article “Playing Poker with North Korea.” What to do about Libya and Pakistan will be dealt with in future articles.

Those who are not willing to defend civilization deserve to lose it. All the Euroweenies demonstrating against America are loudly proclaiming their desire for their culture to be eliminated.

Once again, America must save Europe from itself. Once again, America must fight — militarily and this time pre-emptively — to preserve our freedom. For if we don’t, our civilization will become a hostage to a thousand Osamas and Saddams and two-bit gangsters from across the globe — and as such it will vanish.

America is breathtakingly lucky to have a president who is fully aware of what is at stake now for our country and for all Western Civilization. But will he decisively act on his knowledge and thus secure our future? It is the most important question of our time.

It is an extraordinary experience to be in peaceful solitude amidst the vast emptiness of the Sahara Desert. But I do not want this emptiness to replace the cities of America, or the cities of the world. Crossing the Sahara is a great adventure, yet I am looking forward to coming home to the civilization that I and we all belong to, which deserves to be defended and preserved.

I will be devoting my time to a series of articles and analyses on world events published throughout each month in To The Point.