Oh dear me, these are hard times for that odd group, the feminist-leftie-USophobes, who have been scratching their heads wondering about the right response to the war in Afghanistan.
Obviously, to support the US war against Islamic misogynist fascists is simply impossible, because the one thing these sad creatures cannot do is to side with freedom and democracy; and so they seek refuge in impenetrably theological demands for a "humanitarian bombing pause" or simply "ending the war", as if world history simply issued from a tap which one could turn off at will.
The US did not turn on that tap. Osama Bid Laden did. No one can blame the US for wishing to seek that hand in order to lop it off.
No alternative
This is not to exult in homicide, but to indulge in reality. The citizen of no democratic country in the world would be safe from hostage-takers if Bin Laden or his numerous lieutenants were in US custody and the network they formed remained in existence. Historically, the US has no alternative but to proceed with this mission of crushing international Islamic fascists, or otherwise we are simply a year or two from hijacked airliners crashed into La DΘfense in Paris, into Canary Wharf, into Sellafield.
Equally, we, as recipients of the protective umbrella of US power, and as custodians of similar traditions of freedom and democracy, have no choice but to back the US. And I don't expect the US to notice this at the moment, because after all we are a mere Atlantic Lithuania; but I do expect that State Department policy towards Ireland in the future will reflect the reality of who supported it, and those who did not, such as Caomihin ╙ Caolβin, who drew a moral equivalence between the bombing of the Twin Towers and the US bombing Afghanistan.
Remember those words. They speak more truly from the heart of Sinn FΘin-IRA than the more placatory and weasely utterances from those of his colleagues who cherish their visits to the White House. Amnesia drifts in ambrosian clouds over the recent Sinn FΘin-IRA past, and the thousands of dead from a futile terrorist war have been magicked away, leaving just a few isolated events - August 1969, Internment, Bloody Sunday, Pat Finucane, Rosemary Nelson.
It's not surprising that the morally inverted Sinn FΘin-IRA mindset, which always finds victimhood in murder, should also find equivalence between the Twin Towers and the US bombing campaign. But there is no such equivalence, either in morality or intent, between the deliberate mass murder of thousands of civilians and the most successful, the most humane and effective use of air power in military history. It is in the conduct of this war, and in the nature of the states which support it, that we can see the true division in this world.
Muslim democracy
It is not between countries with Muslim majorities and those with Christian majorities. Turkey, most signally, is a largely Muslim democracy - and a much maligned one - and it supports the US war. So too do those predominantly Muslim states to the north of Afghanistan. They know that the rule of secular law, with courts independent of religious interference - which they cherish no less than we do - will be the first victim wherever Muslim fascism prevails.
As Muslims, and guardians of complex civilisations, they fear the xenophobia and cultural intolerance of religious totalitarianism just as western Europeans once feared their own race-based form of fascism.
One state in particular comes truly appallingly out of this world crisis. Saudi Arabia is the true world sponsor of world terrorism. Its state-backed religious colleges have provided the theological cant which intones the term jihad for any event in which a Christian dies; and though it has depended upon the US for its survival from the very forces it has spawned and nurtured, it refused to allow air bases on its territories to be used for attacks on the Taliban and al Qaeda.
The US now knows that its interests in Saudi Arabia have no moral dimension at all. The relationship is based solely on oil; and the price which the US pays for this, both for inventing the technology which extracts the oil from beneath Saudi sand and for making the hardware which defends Saudi territory, is the boundless enmity of an Arab world which seems to have lost the ability to invent anything. Instead, it festers and broods amid its vast wealth, gnashing its teeth over its self-inflicted impotence.
Strategic allies
September 11th did change the world. The events of that day, and the consequences which have unfolded since, have enabled the US to discover that its true strategic allies lay on either side of the Black Sea, not bounded by the Red Sea and the Gulf. Russia and Turkey are not merely playing their part in buttressing the survival of secular democracy in the Eurasian landmass, but they are shifting the petro-political balance of the world.
Where will US strategic oil investments go henceforward? Into unstable, neurotic and pathologically undemocratic Saudi Arabia, ruled by the public executioner's sword and secret Islamic courts, where hatred of Israel and the US are matters of state religion? Or into democratic and pluralist states such as Russia and Turkey, which both played their part in the war against terrorism, which are oil-rich, and which are enjoying their own historical rapprochement?
Osama Bid Laden wished to strike a crippling blow against the US; in reality, he has struck one against almost the entire Arab world.