There was something horribly appropriate about the terrorist attack on the UN building in Baghdad: for the UN represents the worthy aspiration to make this a better world, whose peoples respect one another's ways and cultures.
It is truly a noble aspiration; but, until we have world-wide democracy, one as likely to be realised as the conversion of great white sharks into plankton-eaters.
The UN apparently still hasn't understood this yet; indeed, one would gather from the absence of security around the UN building in Baghdad, not even the US military in Iraq has understood it. This is war: all-out, endless war, in which the defenceless innocent are seen not just as a legitimate target, but the primary target itself. For Islamicists recognise no non-combatants; and those presumptuous infidels who have come to help Muslims must be the first to die. The butchered Christian missionaries in Algeria, the UN aid workers slaughtered in Iraq - they presented the decent face of the West, and therefore had to be killed.
To be sure, the West has colluded with its own sworn enemies for years. The CIA was fully aware of the central role of Saudi Arabia in the promotion and financing of terrorism on a truly gigantic scale. But the US did nothing because of its cultural and economic dependence on oil. As bad as that, the failings of US policy towards terrorism were not confined to the Middle East.
For what kind of impression did the US give world terrorist movements when it tolerated massive and public fund-raising by the IRA from the 1970s to the 1990s? What would Muslim fundamentalists make of the mentality that would allow Irish terrorists to raise money in the US to fight a war against the British, the most important allies the US had anywhere? And what were they to make of the fact that the other prime source of aid to the IRA was Libya, the US's sworn enemy, and author of the Lockerbie bombing, the single worst terrorist attack before 9/11? So the only conclusion that the fundamentalist mind could come to was that the US was a flabby, weak-minded petrol-addict, easy to terrorise in the short term, and certain to defeat in the longer term. And the rest of us? We were beneath their contempt - disposable rubbish whom in their lunatic fantasising they would one day kill or convert; it mattered little either way.
The UN has been their stalking horse, where terrorist states - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan - were able to elicit support in the name of anti-colonialism. Those countries which not long ago were so eager to back their anti-American stance - the Philippines, Indonesia, Morocco - have now bloodily discovered the nature of the evil advancing upon us all. For far from the UN's role as a forum for rational negotiation and peaceful resolution providing it with immunity from terrorist attack, the reverse is true: that role makes it a prime target.
The belief that talks settle anything with these terrorists merely encourages them. The Israeli settler policies in the West Bank are certainly wrong, but they're not the reason for the slaughter of those blameless Jewish worshippers. For suicide bombers are absolutists: they do not die for concessions, for a border to be moved a mile this way or that. They die for utter victory; for the destruction of the state of Israel, and the final elimination of the Jewish people.
So what is there to discuss with suicide bombers? The diseased and intoxicating theology of Muslim fundamentalism liberates them from all rationality, all logic, all grasp of reality, and all concern for their own safety. Similarly, we should be liberated from out-dated notions about how modern conflict should be conducted.
We - the democracies of Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia - are at war.
We have been formally at war since the Twin Towers. Yet it seems the lesson is still being learned, as the twin evils of Baghdad and Jerusalem remind us. So our enemy's heads must be spinning when they hear calls from democracies under threat for the application of the Geneva Convention to the Guantanamo Bay prisoners - or even, God help us, their release. Since when have enemy prisoners ever been released while the war was still under way? And how can the Geneva Convention be used to protect captured Islamic terrorists when it didn't apply to the IRA, ETA or the PLO?
The primary measure against Islamic terrorism will be the democratisation of the indigenous peoples among whom terrorists operate. That is why the US is right to insist on the creation of a democratic state of Iraq; and that is why the enemies of democracy murder aid workers and blow up water and oil pipe-lines. They hate democracy. They want poverty and misery in Iraq in order to attract more recruits, and to create the utter tyranny of chaos on the source of world oil.
The Arabs of all people deserve democracy. For decades, they have had to endure the rule of murderous egomaniacs, from the pioneering Nasser, who ethnically cleansed Egypt of non-Arabs, to his more recent and even bloodier heirs: Assad, Saddam, Ghaddafi. Contaminated by these kleptomaniac killers, the once rich, vibrant and, most of all, tolerant peoples of greater Arabia have become monomaniacally anti-Semitic, politically sterile, culturally inert and socially dysfunctional.
Democracy is the key, and the hand on that key is America's. We in Ireland cannot do much, but reassurances of friendship, and an unceasing welcome in Shannon, will go a long way.