Every government has a right, indeed a duty, to defend its citizens from attack. That includes the government of the US, whose civilian population is being threatened by a sophisticated network of murderers motivated by a fascistic ideology.
Whatever the faults of the US, moreover, any democracy ought to side with its open society against the misogynist, anti-Semitic and ultra-violent movement that threatens it.
What, though, is the single thing that would have done most to prevent the crimes against humanity on September 11th? Bombing the Taliban earlier? Sending the marines into Kabul after Osama bin Laden's followers attacked American embassies in Africa?
The one thing that could have prevented the attacks is simple, undramatic and non-violent. It is good airport security.
If domestic airlines in the US were not able to get themselves exempted from the tough security measures introduced for international carriers and if the people who do the security checks were not so demoralised by pitiful wages and lousy conditions, the attacks might well have been prevented.
The unglamorous truth that the best form of defence might be defence has been largely ignored. In the short term, well-run security systems, clever policing and effective intelligence are the best defences against terrorism.
In the longer run, an effective international system of justice for war criminals and the perpetrators of crimes against humanity is needed. The war on Afghanistan is doing nothing to further the first of these imperatives and is actively inhibiting the second.
To get an international system of justice to work, it must be understood that the same rules apply to everybody. Nobody can murder innocent civilians. Nobody can use torture. You can't demand that people who defy these basic precepts of international law be brought to justice if you yourself ignore them. Already, at the start of what we are told will be a very long war, the US is doing just this.
Last week on Prime Time the intellectual godfather of the hawkish wing of American politics, Richard Perle, described remarks I made on the programme about the threat to civilians posed by the dropping of cluster bombs on Afghanistan as "blather".
I suspect that he was quite sincerely ignorant. Such is the mentality of the war, that inconvenient facts are not facts at all.
Cluster bombs are cheap and fairly crude devices through which one container can disperse over a large area dozens of small bomblets, each about the size of a Coke can and with a yellow or orange colour that makes it especially attractive to children. Even the official figure from the manufacturers and defence departments concedes that one in 20 of these bomblets fails to explode immediately and thus remains in the ground for months or years.
In practice, the failure rate is about twice as high as the official estimates. After the Kosovo bombing campaign, the UN Mine Action Co-ordinating Centre in Kosovo found that the failure rate for British cluster bombs was 11 or 12 per cent. After the Falklands war, the British Ministry of Defence admitted that the failure rate there was at least 9.6 per cent. Just over a hundred cluster bombs dropped on the Falklands resulted in 1,400 unexploded bomblets which had to be cleared after the conflict.
In Kosovo, 30,000 unexploded cluster bomblets were left lying around, killing at least 50 people in the year after the bombing. After the Gulf war, two million unexploded bomblets were left behind in Iraq and Kuwait. In Laos, more than 25 years after the end of the Vietnam war, 500,000 tonnes of unexploded bombs remain in the ground, most of them cluster weapons.
The direct intention may not be to kill civilians, any more than the direct intention of the Omagh bombers was to cause carnage. But knowing with near certainty that you will kill innocent people and pressing ahead anyway is barely less murderous than setting out to kill.
When the US was bombing Bosnia, its air commander Maj Gen Michael Ryan (subsequently US Air Force chief of staff) specifically decided not to use cluster bombs because they were too inaccurate, to limit the risk of civilian casualties and because too many unexploded bomblets would remain in the ground. Now, however, this principled moral decision has been reversed. There could be no more obvious example of the way the conduct of this war is moving us away from, and not towards, an international system of justice.
Except, perhaps, for the one that was buried in a report in last Sunday's Observer. The paper suggests that the CIA is now addressing one of its perceived weaknesses in the new war: a shortage of "agents who know how to torture or to extract information. The CIA was amply staffed with people who developed torture expertise during the dirty wars in Central and South America, but these agents have now gone into retirement. Now the agency is trying to redevelop and retrain agents in rough interrogation techniques".
Is this the way to save civilisation: train torturers and scatter unexploded bombs around the fields and hills of a desperately poor country? Unless those who think of civilisation as something different find their voice, the short march back to the moral quagmire of Vietnam, El Salvador and Nicaragua will be completed long before this war reaches any kind of conclusion.
fotoole@irish-times.ie