THIS IS A WAR FOR CIVILISATION

Mark Steyn says that the terrorists who this week killed thousands of

Americans were not cowards. It is going to take the sort of courage lacking in the Clinton years to defeat them

New Hampshire YOU can understand why they're jumping up and down in the streets of the Middle East, jubilant in their victory. They have struck a mighty blow against the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of far-fetched action thrillers could conceive. They have driven a gaping wound into the heart of his military headquarters. They have ruptured the most famous skyline in the world, the glittering monument to his decadence. They have killed and maimed thousands of his subjects, live on TV. For one day they reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful presidential vagrant, bounced further and further from his White House to ever more remote military airports, from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska by a security staff which obviously understands less about the power of symbolism than America's enemies do.

And, for those on the receiving end, that 'money shot', as they call it in Hollywood — the smoking towers of the World Trade Center collapsing as easily as condemned chimneys at an abandoned sawmill — represents not just an awesome loss of life but a ghastly intelligence failure by the US and a worse moral failure by the West generally.

There was a grim symmetry in the way this act of war interrupted the President at a grade-school photo-op. The federal government has no constitutional responsibility for education: it is a state affair, delegated mostly to tiny municipal school boards. But one of Bill Clinton's forlorn legacies is that the head of state and the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on earth must now fill his day with trivial initiatives designed to soothe the piffling discontents of soccer moms and other preferred demographics of the most pampered generation in history: programs to connect elementary schools to the Internet, prescription drug benefits for seniors. government 'lock-boxes' for any big-ticket entitlement the focus groups decide they can't live without, and a thousand and one other woeful trivialities.

And so the President was reminded of his most awesome responsibility at a time when he was discharging his most footling. The first charge of any government is the defence of its borders — and, without that, it makes no difference how great your prescription drug plan is. In that sense, Tuesday marked the end of the ten-year-long weekend off that the world's only superpower has enjoyed since Colin Powell advised against marching on Baghdad. The post-Cold War interlude is over, an era of follies — OJ, Monica — and fatuities, a few of which Tuesday's horror stories cru

elly underlined: employees in wheelchairs, whom Bob Dole's Americans with Disabilities Act and the various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive.

The first named victim I was aware of was Barbara Olson, the wife of the solicitor-general, whom I sat next to at dinner a few weeks ago. She was one of the 'blonde former prosecutors', which sounds like a rock band but was the standard shorthand for the good-looking female commentators

who turned up on CNN every night during impeachment — she was smart, witty, a fearless scourge of the Clinton administration. She'd postponed her trip to California by a day so she could wish her husband a happy birthday on Tuesday morning, and so found herself on American Airlines flight 11. She had time to call her husband Ted to tell him her plane was being hijacked and that she had been hustled to the back of the cabin with the other passengers and flight crew. By then, the solicitor-general knew that two planes had deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center. He told Barbara what was happening — that she wasn't in the hands of some jerk who wants his pals sprung from jail and a jet to Cuba but cooler customers with bigger plans. A few seconds later her flight ripped through one side of the Pentagon.

I'm sure that Ted Olson, in the course of the day, saw some of those TV pictures of taxi-drivers, merchants and schoolchildren in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine passing out candy to celebrate the death of his wife and thousands of others. This is not terrorism — five guys in ski-masks plotting in a basement. This is war, waged in the shadows but openly cheered by millions and millions of people and more covertly supported by their governments, including the smooth, bespoke emissaries of the thug states in Durban last week. America lost 2,403 people at Pearl Harbor, 2,260 in the war of 1812, 4,435 in the entire Revolutionary War, and 4,710 on the worst day of the Civil War. It is entirely possible that the final loss on Tuesday will exceed those totals combined. That's war.

What matters now is how the US reacts. President Bush, echoing a long line of British prime ministers responding to IRA attacks, called the perpetrators 'a faceless coward'. 'Cowardly,' agreed Rudy Giuliani, and Jim Baker. Those prime ministers were wrong and so are the President, the former secretary of state, and the mayor of New York. The men or women who do such things are certainly faceless but are not, I think, cowards. A coward would not agree to hijack a plane. Many others might do it for, oh, $20 million, a change of identity and retirement in the Bahamas: those would be the stakes if life was run by Warner Brothers or Paramount and the terrorist was played by John Travolta or Bruce Willis. But very few of us would agree to hijack a plane for the certainty of instant, violent death. We should acknowledge that at the very least it requires a kind of mad courage, a courage 99 per cent of those of us in the West can never understand and, because of that, should accord a certain respect. Assuming (as Barbara Olson's phone call seems to confirm) that no United or American Airlines flight crew would plough into a crowded building even with a gun at their heads, the men who took over the controls were sophisticated, educated people, perhaps even trained jet pilots who could be pulling down six-figure salaries in most countries but preferred instead to drive a plane through crowded offices in one all-or-nothing crazed gesture. If these men were cowards, this would be an easier war. Instead, they are not just willing to die for their cause, but anxious to do so.

And what causes are we willing to die for? By 'we', I mean 'the West', though in truth these days that umbrella doesn't cover a lot — the United Kingdom, most of the time; France, when it suits them; Canada, hardly at all, not in any practical sense. Even America's sense of purpose has shrivelled away since the Gulf War: why was there such a comprehensive intelligence failure? Is it because the US has come to rely too much on electronic surveillance and has virtually eliminated human intelligence — the old-fashioned spies who go into deep cover at great risk to themselves? And is the delusion that you can fight terrorism with computers from outer space just another wretched example of the nouveau warfare pioneered by Mr Clinton in Kosovo? Or, to be more accurate, not in Kosovo but far above it, and then only after dark on clear nights, dropping Tomahawks at a million bucks a pop on empty buildings. One quasi-governmental network of killers can find four fellows who can fly a jet willing to commit suicide on the same day, but the Clinton doctrine tells the world that the greatest military power on the face of the earth no longer has the stomach for a single body-bag. The doughboys of the Great War went off singing, 'We won't come back till it's over/Over There!' But not Mr Clinton's army: 'We won't go over till it's over/Over There!' In Kosovo, America declared it was prepared to kill, but not to die. Their enemies drew the correct lesson.

There are cowards elsewhere, too. The funniest moment in the early coverage came when some portentous anchor solemnly reported that 'the United Nations building had not been hit'. Well, there's a surprise! Why would the guys who took out the World Trade Center and the Pentagon want to target the UN? The UN is dominated by their apologists, and in some cases the friends of the friends of the fellows who did this (to put it at its most discreet). All last week the plenipotentiaries of the West were in Durban holed up with the brutes and treating them as equals, negotiating over how many anti-Zionist insults they could live with and over how abject the West's apology for past sins should be. Tuesday's sobering coda to Durban let us know that those folks on the other side are really admirably straightforward; they mean what they say, and we should take them at their word.

There is a long-term lesson, too. The US is an historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. Britain, France and the other old powers believed in projecting themselves, both territorially and culturally. As we saw in Durban, they get few thanks for that these days. But the American position — that the pre-eminent nation on earth can collectively leap into its Chevy Suburban and drive to the lake while the world goes its own way — is untenable. The consequence, as we now know, is that the world comes to you.

Instead of an empire, the US belongs to Nato, a defence pact of prosperous Western nations in which only one guy picks up the tab, a military alliance for countries that no longer in any recognisable sense have militaries. The US taxpayer's willingness to pay for the defence of Canada and Europe has contributed to the decay of America's so-called 'allies', freeing them to disband their armed forces, flirt with dictators and gangster states, and essentially convert themselves to semi-non-aligned.

The British no doubt will respond by pointing out how lax American security is, compared with Heathrow or even Euston Station. And they're right. It's true that a determined terrorist cell will sometimes get through. But when four get through on the same morning, that's a grotesque systemic failure. The killers picked their point of embarkation well: Boston's Logan Airport is a joke. It's been a building site for years, which always helps. At some terminals, to get a coffee and Danish. non-passengers — family and friends meeting planes or seeing people off — have to go through the security barrier, adding further confusion and delay to what's already a notably slapdash procedure. (I use Logan regularly.) So let the British gloat: you've got great security systems. But, on the other hand, what was the point of them, given that you've decided to surrender slowly, piece by piece, to the IRA?

Let us hope that America doesn't show the same lack of will, This is, as the German government put it, an attack on 'the civilised world', and it's time to speak up in its defence. Those Western nations who spent last week in Durban finessing and nuancing evil should understand now that what is at stake is whether the world's future will belong to liberal democracy and the rule of law, or to darker forces. And after Tuesday America is entitled to ask its allies not for finely crafted UN resolutions but a more basic question: whose side are you on?