This week the Wolesi Jirga, the Afghan parliament, met for the first time in 30 years, and last week an astonishing 70 per cent of the electorate of Iraq faced down the terrorists' threat and voted in a general election to form a government. Yet throughout the 50 previous weeks of this year, we in Ireland have been treated to endless denunciations of US policies towards both countries.
This is mad. In my entire lifetime, there has never been a clearer struggle between the forces of evil and of right as those we are witnessing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Islamo-nazi terrorists in both countries judge victory there as merely the stepping-stone to the conquest of Islamic Asia, followed by the creation of a worldwide caliphate and the extinction of infidel societies.
It is as absurd as the most preposterous James Bond plot. Indeed, it is the very surreal nature of this struggle that creates such difficulty for the rational Western imagination to grasp, and it is why European liberals have become obsessed with "rendition". For that at least follows good, old-fashioned rules, which we all understand: big bad Americans whisking away hapless captives for detention without trial, interrogation, and probably "torture". This has become such a common presumption that recently (and naturally), one interviewer on RTÉ radio didn't even use the term "alleged" when he spoke matter-of-factly about "US torture centres".
But the key figures here, those apparently powerless individuals being held by the all-powerful Americans, belong to a pre-9/11 view of the world. In the present era of the suicide bomber, formally inaugurated when a handful of men armed with Stanley knives nearly destroyed the heart of the US government and obliterated the biggest skyscraper complex in the world, killing thousands, the concept of "powerless individuals" is as meaningless as the notion of powerless bacteria.
So, though disliking both the word and the concept of "rendition", I accept it as a necessary evil in the present global struggle of values. The captives being "rendered" are alive, and probably will one day be free, unlike the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed in the insurgency, and the thousands of US servicemen and women who have given their lives in the fight for freedom. And this I genuinely believe it to be, as do most Iraqis. They know that without the US presence, their country, the birthplace of all civilisation, could become the death-bed both of their own civilisation and that of the West also. And ludicrous though that sounds, it is precisely what al-Qaeda seeks.
This is why we should continue to allow the US to use Shannon Airport, though without any possibly embarrassing investigations into the nature of the traffic there. For this a war in which our enemy - and he is emphatically our enemy - accepts our concepts of civil law and human rights only in as much they enable him to take cover in the legal and moral thickets that are thus created. He belongs to no country, wears no uniform, acknowledges no human law, follows no convention, accepts no concept of innocence, honours no treaties and shows utter contempt for each and every life, including his own. All common decencies are unknown to such an enemy.
This doesn't mean we abandon those decencies, but merely recognise that they cannot prevail in all circumstances at all times. They did not prevail here in the second World War, when the IRA was defeated with firing squads, internment and bread-and-water diets. Only fools are truly neutral when totalitarians seek to destroy democracy, and de Valera was no fool - which was why he allowed British planes to use Irish air space in the Donegal corridor on their missions to destroy German U-boats.
Donegal then, Shannon now. One major difference is that this current world war will probably last decades, and continue to take many dramatically unexpected forms. Who could ever have foreseen suicide-attacks on skyscrapers? Who could ever have predicted the measured sabre-beheading of the innocent, with videoed images transmitted across the world by the triumphant culprits? Anything is possible with these people: anything. They revel boastfully in unspeakable crimes, and have invented unspeakable tortures, such as steam-scalding their victims to death, inch by careful inch, over days. They are the ultimate expression of sadistic human nihilism.
Typically, the self-loathing liberals of the West ask why "they" hate us, which is like the rape victim asking why she is being raped. She is being raped by a man who chooses to rape her, that's why: no matter how sexually provocative her dress is, she is entirely innocent of responsibility for the rape. Moreover, if she'd had a gun, she wouldn't have been raped: a lesson in life, all life.
"But rendition of prisoners causes people to join al-Qaeda and become suicide bombers," comes the cry. Untrue. For the key to this peculiar psychopathology is the virulent strain of Islamicism underlying it, not any alleged "causes". The jihadists' demented crusade of suicide and indiscriminate mass murder is morally unrelated to any injustices, real or perceived. No concession - the extinction, say, of Israel, or the abandonment of Andalusia - will halt it. This being so, it is quite obvious that conventional interrogation techniques, which are often lamentably ineffective even in ordinary civil society, will achieve almost nothing against fanatics who exult in their own deaths.
This is the world we live in, one without a hiding-place from a globalised terror network, now and into the quite unforeseeable future. So if in this hideous world, "rendition" occurs through Shannon, what of it?