One yearns to write about something else; but the collapsing towers of New York city, the human beings breathing their last 80 storeys up as an inferno consumes them from behind, or toppling lazily to a terrible but swifter death below - these command utter obedience. They have entered our communal imagination in a way no event in human history has ever done. There is barely a child in the world who is not now privy to the intimacy of imminent death, who will not know now what it is to see people passing through the final agony of their lives. No dream in the world is safe from such tortured visions, now and for ever more.
Nor did just childish innocence perish amid the fires of the World Trade Centre and the fallen masonry of the Pentagon. Our vision of what our planet actually is must change irrevocably, as once did mankind's understanding of world order in the aftermath of Sarajevo, as it did too after the Werhmacht seized the Polish Corridor, occupied Gdansk and ushered the planet into a new era of darkness.
Black and white
Darkness awaits many people now and henceforth. Where there should be complexity and subtlety in perception, there will be simply areas of black and white. The cause of the Palestinian people, already disserviced by abominable leadership, fanatical unreason and murderous anti-Semitism, now lies in ruins. No shield now exists to protect them from whatever biblical wrath Israel's prime minister Sharon might yearn to inflict. Indeed, I should not be surprised to see a new Exodus from the West Bank and Gaza, nor, in time, to see the "moderate" governments of Jordan and Egypt and even Saudi overthrown in the coming after-shocks, with suicidal zealotry enthroned in their stead.
For the explosions in the twin towers did not just blast away the lives of thousands of people and that uniquely American sense of domestic invulnerablity, but it blew away reason too, just as the butchery of Louvain in 1914 propelled Europe into a banquet of unreason, and the attack on Pearl Harbour did the same to the US. At least for those who wished to fight a war in the last century, there were clear and identifiable targets, on which in due course Allied bombers rained indiscriminate fire and death. But for this new provocation, infinitely more murderous, vastly more appalling for the US than any casus belli in 1941 or 1917, there is no obvious enemy upon whom to vent the satisfying release of awesome violence.
To be sure, there are half a dozen "rogue" states, but they teem with destitute millions, and have no real capital assets to destroy. And somewhere in a tent in a desert is an evil man with an evil mission, with followers who nightly bob and pray for martyrdom. There is no medium in which this contest can occur, no battlefield where rival forces can meet. Indeed, from the terrorists' point of view, there is no need for a battle. The war is over and the war is won. All they have to do now is to watch ruin wash round the world like a tsunami, levelling all before it with impartial despotism.
What choice?
And what choice has the US? Failure to act will be derided as failure itself. Yet it cannot unleash that which it has suffered. It cannot butcher 10,000 Arabs because they are Arabs; it cannot turn Afghanistan into a free-fire shooting range; it cannot lay waste to Pakistan.
For US citizens and for the terrorists who planned Tuesday's holocausts alike, the judgment is the same. Not to seek revenge is weak. Yet to seek meaningful revenge is quite futile. The wretched bones of Osama bin Laden and his apostles are no compensation for the Apocalypse of the twin towers.
In the brave new world ahead, will we universally expect the state to protect us from the insensate, the insane, at every turn? And what civil liberties will endure anywhere when we demand security above freedom? What will stay the intrusions of government agencies into our every private deed? Will the presumption of innocence survive in common-law countries? What future is there for racial harmony when anyone who worships in a mosque or who is dusky of skin becomes, in some new culture of suspicion and trial by pigment, automatically suspect, no matter how innocent?
Worst nightmares
In this new dispensation, a single malicious phone call might unleash the vengeful fury of states with far vaster powers of inquiry, surveillance and investigation than we would dream of in our worst nightmares. Ahead could lie a future of inquisitors, phone-tappers and secret microphones right across the Western world, even as a ceaseless rain of cruise missiles falls upon soukh and caravanserai and shoeless lines of pilgrims, shuffling in the dust.
Yet we know that cruise missiles and stealth bombers are as meaningless in the coming conflict as money to a dying man. They cannot undo the done. They cannot restore the innocence of the young; neither child nor childhood will ever be safe again from the remembered visions of the falling bodies and the burning, wailing victims of Manhattan.
For victory came with the initial deed. Nothing more needs to be done. The bird of war has been set free of its cage, and now it steadily turns in its widening gyre. No falconer urges it in, but bids it on, about its lethal purpose. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed upon the world, and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.