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Posted on 09/27/2001 4:51:01 PM PDT by Pokey78

I HAVE never felt more miserably out of sympathy with the views of this newspaper than in the first few days after the attacks on New York and Washington. While I was too shocked to know what I thought about anything, this paper seemed utterly convinced of three things: 1) that the destruction of the World Trade Centre amounted to a declaration of war on Western civilisation; 2) that Britain's interests in this matter were identical to America's; and 3) that Britain should throw her weight unconditionally behind President Bush, however he might choose to retaliate.

There also seemed to be a fourth prong to the paper's attack. Perhaps I was being fanciful, but it appeared to me that The Daily Telegraph and some of its columnists were coming close to saying that to express any doubts about this war was to give comfort to the terrorists, and amounted almost to treason. Well, I had many doubts, and when the editor launched his "Useful Idiots" column, I found myself wondering unhappily if he was thinking of me.

I was particularly stung by an article written a week after the attacks by Richard Perle, the former US assistant secretary of defence. In it, he described us as belonging to the "Vichyite contingent" if we had the following reservations about America's proposed war: "We don't know who the enemy is"; "We don't know where to strike them"; "Even if we could find them, it would simply create more martyrs"; and "The Wretched of the Earth (to use the title of Frantz Fanon's famous anti-colonial tract) are so desperate that they would not fear honourable death at the hands of what they see as the 'Great Satan' ".

"Vichyite" seemed to me to be an unfortunate choice of word for two reasons: it suggested that those such as me who had doubts were the sort of people who would have collaborated with Hitler; and it was a reminder that the Vichy regime was set up more than a year before America entered the war. America even sent an ambassador to Vichy France, for heaven's sake.

But I fitted Mr Perle's definition of a "Vichyite" almost to the letter. I had all the reservations that he mentioned, in varying degrees, with the single exception that I did not think of the people who destroyed the WTC and part of the Pentagon as "the wretched of the earth". They were brainwashed fanatics, utterly bereft of anything recognisable as human feeling.

I was certainly not one of those who thought that the Americans had brought this suffering on themselves. I love America and Americans, with a fellow-feeling that has burnt all the more fiercely since September 11. Their foreign policy has always been directed towards promoting and defending a way of life - our way of life - that I firmly believe offers the best hope of prosperity, justice, freedom and happiness to all mankind. They did not deserve this, in any conceivable sense of the word.

Nor did I think that America should sit back and do nothing, beyond tightening security at its airports and improving its anti-terrorist intelligence network. This was a crime that cried out to heaven for vengeance. The only question was: what, precisely, should America do?

My great fear was that, in its wholly justified fury, America would lash out wildly, shedding oceans of innocent Muslim blood to no effect other than to inflame resentment of the West, and to make the world a more dangerous place. The hawks spoke frighteningly of chemical warfare attacks on our cities. The question that I thought needed answering was: would the response of America make such attacks less likely, or more? I thought perhaps more.

Over the past fortnight, however, my doubts have fallen away, one by one. The turning point for me came with Mr Bush's masterful speech to Congress last week. He convinced me that he saw the point of this war as being not simply to show how powerful and angry America was: he wanted to channel and direct his nation's anger - methodically, painstakingly and over a long period of time - towards clearly defined and, above all, achievable ends.

I had wondered at first why everyone was so sure that the attacks on New York and Washington were an "act of war", rather than just the worst terrorist crimes ever. We who care about words have always been careful not to dignify the IRA's 30-year campaign of murder with the word "war". What made this so different from the bombs at Omagh and Docklands?

But now I see that this is war. If terrorists are sitting in their camps, in Afghanistan and Iraq, calmly plotting the destruction of Western cities . . . if they are doing that, not only unmolested by those countries' governments, but actively protected by them, then there can be no other word for it but war. I see now, too, that those attacks on Western cities are much less likely to happen if we try to destroy the terrorists in their nests, cut off their money and topple the regimes that support them.

I am no longer much worried, either, by the thought that for every terrorist we kill, another 50 will queue up for the honour of "martyrdom". Self-preservation is the strongest of human instincts, and already the supporters of terrorism all over the world are showing themselves to be as susceptible to fear as the rest of us. It is one thing to brainwash a few dozen fanatics. Brainwashing entire populations is another matter. I cannot see it happening.

I find myself glad, too, that America is preparing for a long haul. This is not going to be one of those showy exercises that Bill Clinton went in for - jump in, flex your muscles, explode a few missiles and pull out again. This is a war with a purpose. All right, it is a war against an abstract noun. But I am beginning to believe that it is a war that can be won. We do know who the enemy is, and where to strike.

One last word to Mr Perle: it took America two whole years to come round to the war against Nazism. It has taken me two weeks to come round to his country's war against terrorism. He must not be too hard on me and my fellow doubters.

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