"You cannot have credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now," said Kofi Annan of the situation in Iraq the other day.
Which is grand stuff: so the most supposedly eminent statesman in the world has just told the assembled mass of lunatics, nut-cases and religious zealots in Iraq that all they have to do is to keep plugging away with their suicide car-bombs until January, and they will have won.
Thanks to this self-fulfilling prediction, and no matter that pro-democracy candidates will certainly have been elected across Iraq, most of which is entirely free of violence, the UN Secretary General will have declared the result, in advance, as not being "credible".
Actually, what's not credible is Kofi Annan and his preposterous notions that the UN is the only fount of legal authority for armed action anywhere. What did the UN do to end the war in Bosnia? What did it do in Kosovo? What - dear God - is it doing in Sudan, apart from scolding Khartoum and stamping its pretty little feet? What does it ever do anywhere except furnish its armies of officials with great big Fuq-U 4x4 Land Cruisers, cool little sky-blue baseball hats, fur-lined clipboards and a retirement age of 50? Osama bin Annan has merely been doing bin Laden's work for him with his dire prognostications for Iraq, as if we were not already in a grave crisis, for which he and his wretched organisation must bear their share of the responsibility. This is a war which will match the longevity of the Cold War, and we are faced with enemies of breathtaking depravity, who exult in murder, who cut throats and show the world images of themselves doing it, and who disdain the concept of innocence as much as they disdain their own lives.
We now know that the weapons-of-mass-destruction excuse for the war was a canard, a fiction, a lie; but most of all it was a pretext for taking action against a regime which had systematically refused to comply with hatfuls of UN resolutions, and which had been responsible for human rights violations unmatched in the non-Asian world since the second World War. The US and the British chose to act last year. But if not then, when? The longer sanctions went on, the poorer the people of Iraq would have become and the richer Saddam's family. We now have credible allegations that UN officials who were running the food-for-oil programme were turned into millionaires with backhanded oil-vouchers from the Iraqi government.
Imagine the uproar across the world if US officials had been caught running a scam like that; but because the alleged culprits are employees of the UN, there is the silence of the deep on the entire matter.
The fat is in the fire now, and John Kerry's witless vapourings about a "change of course" in Iraq, rather like Osama bin Annan's observations about the uselessness of elections if violence continues, only serve to feed terrorist appetites.
Al-Qaeda has seen how terrorism has caused two countries to withdraw their forces from Iraq; the big prize now would be a Kerry victory in the US election. For what can "a change of course" mean but a withdrawal from Iraq? And what a global catastrophe that that would entail, and a triumph without compare for Osama bin Laden.
Yes, American casualties have been high, but they are not politically insupportable. The thousand dead in the past 18 months equal road deaths in Alabama over the 12 months of 2003, and are 50 per cent fewer than road deaths in either Pennsylvania, New York or Illinois. Moreover, this is not Vietnam, not least because most American people know that they are now engaged in a war which is clearly in their national interest. To get out of Iraq without leaving behind viable political institutions is to create another Afghanistan, with another 9/11 in the making, but this time with an oil-rich country at the helm.
So that's it. We will look back on the 1990s as the golden age, when communism was all but vanquished across the face of the earth; and so, complacent with the existing world order, we allowed the Islamic threat to spread and organise everywhere.
In the name of that brainless vapidity "multiculturalism", an unprincipled, doctrinaire liberalism has become our ethical norm. Without thought to the consequence, we now tolerate the intolerable, and find a cause for congratulation in such stupidity. Thus the Islamic clerics of Europe were able to gather in Dublin last year to lay down the theological justifications for suicide bombing. After suitable deliberations, these fine fellows decided that such atrocities were perfectly justified, no matter if the victims were civilians or even children, provided the targets were Israelis.
In other words: Jew today; you tomorrow.
No doubt our stomachs have been toughened by decades of Sinn Féin ardfheiseanna, but even that crowd at their most depraved never nitpicked at the theology of child-murder. How stupid, how weak, how shallow, how supine, how brainless have we now become, and how ignoble our hospitality, to have allowed such a gathering?
Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, the convenor of the Dublin conference, has since even lauded the use of Palestinian child suicide-bombers. Did these splendid chaps enjoy a traditional welcome, including a trip to Jury's Cabaret, or Bunratty, with just a few changes to the programme (with thanks to Mark Steyn)? Strum strum strum: Thank heaven for little girls: They blow up in the most delightful way.