You do know it's coming, don't you? We are on the list of terrorist targets.Turkey said no to the passage of US military forces through its territory, but it still got bombed.
Over a million Spaniards protested against their government's support of the invasion of Iraq, and that made no difference. Indonesia had nothing whatever to do with anything American, but that didn't spare Bali.
We - rightly - allowed Shannon to be used to assist in the military operations against the criminal and despotic regime in Iraq, and our Islamic fascist enemies will try to make us pay the price. We must be on the alert. Not just now, but into a very definitely unforeseeable future.
Perhaps the most depressing insight into our national failure to confront terrorist reality came the other day in a conversation with a former Army officer. Contrasting Irish and British methods in dealing with the IRA, he declared that the British had chosen military confrontation and lost, whereas the Irish had chosen a low-key response, and had been infinitely more successful.
Well, the Troubles lasted 25 years, with the Republic serving as the operational base of the IRA throughout, so that is an odd form of success. Moreover, the institutions of the Republic, and specifically its defence forces, were not under sustained terrorist attack, on standing orders of the IRA. On the other hand, about a thousand members of the British security forces were killed during the Troubles. To compare the general British response to terrorism with the Irish during the Troubles is like comparing teapots with bananas.
We are in the firing line now, and no anti-Bush demonstrations will alter that:
if anything, signs that we are a querulous, uncertain people will make terrorist attack even more probable. Terrorists do not attack strong points; they look for where their enemy is weak, and strike there. And the enemy we face now knows no definition of innocence, nor laws, nor restraint, nor decency of any kind. It is war to the utmost. We have never seen anything like it, because the world has never known anything like it. We are living in an entirely new epoch, unprecedented in human history, one which is making pioneering discoveries about human nature: this is the age of the suicide mass-murderer.
On September 10th, 2001, no-one would have believed that, within a couple of years, hundreds of men and women would have strapped explosives to themselves and set about killing thousands of innocent civilians. That there might be one or even 20 such deviants might have been considered remotely possible; that the cult of the suicide bomber could become so intoxicating that thousands would volunteer, all over the world, would have seemed utterly impossible.
Now we know the melancholy truth. These are terrible, terrible times, made all the more so by our ignorance of the minds of our enemy. They are human beings, just like us; but their minds are not our minds. All the passions that drive us and which are concerned with living and the pleasures of life and the duties of love seem to have been amputated from them, and instead they are obsessed with death. They want to die, and want to take as many infidels with them as they do so, sparing no one.
For the concept of innocence is as absent from their brains as it is from a hungry reptile stalking its prey, with this difference: unlike the reptile, which has no thoughts, they devoutly wish to be killed as they kill. The entire range of emotions around which all Christian, Jewish and Islamic societies have built themselves have been excised, as if by removal of most of the human cortices. What remains is a primitive killer-instinct, supplemented by a passionate desire for death which has hitherto only usually been found in deviant humans.
We can go back in our history and say governments should have done this differently, and that differently - and unquestionably there have been many terrible errors. But we cannot undo the past. The legacy is with us now, and the suicide bombers are exultantly waiting to do their final duty. And save for the twin towers, and taking into account terrorist attacks in Turkey, Saudi, Iraq, Afghanistan and Bali, they have almost certainly killed more Muslims than Christians. The division in the world is very definitely not between "Muslims" and "Christians".
Sooner or later, the enemy of civilisation will come to these shores. Indeed, there is evidence that it has already arrived in the North, where the enormous security apparatus is more capable of detecting incipient terrorism than are our institutions in the Republic.
So. How ready are we? How tight is security on internal flights in Ireland? For we are a target, and there's nothing we can do to remove our name from the hit-list, short of declaring ourselves an Islamic republic and killing all our Jews. The only options now open to us are in law and security. And if we preach the standard sanctimonious guff about how we dealt with the IRA so much better than the British, then we are deluding ourselves, as usual.
Moreover, security policies based on the principle of not making "martyrs" no longer applies, since the enemy actively seeks martyrdom.
So it makes no more sense for the Americans to release their Guantanamo prisoners than for the Germans to have released British POW bomber crews in 1944. You do understand this, don't you? The war is on. It will come our way. That much is certain.