It is worth quoting Desmond Fennell's recent letter to this newspaper in full. Deep breath; here goes:
"Before Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hitler made fiery speeches about the dangers posed by those countries to Germans living within their borders. It is interesting to compare President Bush's speeches about the danger posed by Iraq to Americans living in America. Invasions dressed up as pre-emptive strikes are nothing new.
"The fact is that aggressive, militaristic power has appeared once again in the West, and the choice, now as then, is between resistance and appeasement. Once again, a British prime minister is leading the appeasement camp. Yet how often have we been told that 'the next time' an aggressor will be 'stopped in time'?"
Bush as Hitler - is that it? Though I'm sure Desmond Fennell manages to write such stuff without any special assistance, you really have to have eaten magic mushrooms to understand it. What have Hitler and Bush in common? Teetotalism. What else? Maybe President Bush wrote an autobiography about his time digging for gold: "Mine Campfire".
Anti-Americanism
Nearly a year after beginning the liberation of Afghanistan, President Bush is still behaving with statesmanlike caution, and according to the rules of international law. Yet Desmond Fennell is not alone in his anti-American vapourings. France has returned to the anti-Americanism which is a core position when it is in crisis, and of course we have our fools at home, such as the one who wrote on a poster the size of an office block in Dublin: "No to war, No to Nice, No to American terrorism."
Give me a mouthful of mushrooms, somebody, so I can get my head around that one. The world is in the grip of the greatest terrorist conspiracy it has seen since the collapse of political totalitarianism. This time it's religious totalitarianism, but it's still fascist, and it's indiscriminately murderous; and yet some cretin blames the target of this fascism, the US?
We know now how lucky the US was on September 11th, 2001. Ten or twenty thousand people might have died; the Pentagon and the White House, with the president, the vice-president and the entire White House staff could well have been obliterated. How could the polity of the US have recovered from such a catastrophe and retained its democratic ways? Not even Hitler assaulted democracy in such a fashion, for not even he hated democracy as do our present foes.
But the Americans are simply target number one. It's too early to say how many Balinese Hindus and Australians were butchered and burned last week. Hundreds of Kenyans were slaughtered two years ago by Al-Qaeda bombers for committing the capital crime of walking past the US embassy. And there's probably no way of knowing how many people were killed by Al-Qaeda in their fascist enclaves in Afghanistan.
Saudi Arabia
Admittedly, this is not simply a world of good and bad. Most policy-makers in the US State Department would recognise now that US support of the regime in Saudi Arabia over the past few decades was - shall we say? - flawed. No doubt it made a great deal of sense during the Cold War, when the US economy needed cheap oil, and in exchange for US protection, Saudi Arabia provided it.
But that policy of temporary expediency over time became set in stone, even though the Saudi regime is one of the foulest in the world. A loathsome caste of a few thousand hypocrites, with their private supplies of whores, drugs and alcohol, run Saudi Arabia as a theocratic state - they, of course, being immune to its rules. Meanwhile, state-subsidised theological colleges turn indigent Saudis into Al-Qaeda operatives, the state still functioning economically because most productive work was and is done by despised and legally unprotected immigrants.
Ideally, Saudi should be left to its own wretched fate; but that fate must not include Saddam Hussein - which would certainly be the case if the Americans were to jettison it, as in the longer term they probably will. So in advance of the US bidding farewell to Saudi Arabia, the intellectual and financial home of world Islamic terrorism, Saddam must first be neutralised.
Having attacked three of his neighbours, having butchered tens of thousands of his people, having repeatedly violated UN resolutions and having expelled UN weapons inspectors, Saddam has put Iraq beyond the usual protections that a state is entitled to. If weapons inspectors are not allowed back into Iraq to do their job fully, then casus belli for the US already exists.
No option
But the US is already involved in the most complex and devious war in its history. That war must be fought because it has been begun, and civilisation on this planet has been given no option. Al-Qaeda terrorists will not go away if we ignore them; moreover, they will rejoice in whatever material they see in our newspapers and on our walls which confirms that the US is the Great Satan. We call that freedom; they call that proof. That is why we are enemies.
If the US seeks the military option in Iraq, it will not be because, as the French proclaim, it needs the oil - in the longer term, the Russians will be providing that, thank you - but because it has been obliged to act. Islamic fascism has brought the US to war against a broader world terrorism, just as an earlier fascism ushered the then guardians of freedom, Britain and France, to a comparable fate in September 1939.
Now history is again in command.