VERY WELL, THEN, ALONE

Mark Steyn says that the Anglo-American

alliance can win this war without any help from its less robust friends

New Hampshire THE best quote of the war so far came from George W. Bush's meeting with the four senators from New York and Virginia (the two states that came under attack). 'When I take action.' said the President, `I'm not gonna fire a 52 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive.'

I don't suppose Senator Rodham Clinton cared for this implicit rebuke of her husband and his intermittent Cruise-waggling, but she kept quiet — as, by Monday, most of Bush's critics were doing. The jeers at his style had obscured the amazing substance: the President didn't shy away from the word 'war', but rushed to embrace it. Unlike the last crowd, which announced beforehand that there would be no ground troops in Kosovo, Defence Secretary Don Rumsfeld refused to rule anything out, including nukes, which he seemed quite eager to rule in. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, pledged to 'end' states that sponsor terrorism, By the time you read this, he may have begun the process, at least in respect of the Taleban. Meanwhile, even Mister Moderate, Colin Powell, under the guise of building a 'broadbased coalition', is putting the screws to some of the more idiosyncratic regimes. General Musharraf told his senior commanders that he had no desire to help the Americans one jot but that he'd concluded Pakistan's 'national survival' was at stake.

It would have been so easy to go the other way, the Clinton route — get the President drooling about building a better world 'for all our children', make the defence department talk not of war and victory and vanquishing evil but only, as Clinton's secretary Bill Cohen did, of 'degrading' the enemy's capability. The new administration did not exactly raise the stakes — they were all too clear from 9 a.m. last Tuesday — but by raising the rhetoric they acknowledged them in a way their predecessors would surely have ducked. It will not now be possible merely to whack a Cruise missile up some camel's butt.

To most of the rest of the world. this Rumsfeidian rhetoric is precisely the wrong tack. 'Americans simply don't get it,' wrote Seumas Milne in the Guardian: the Yanks should be trying to figure out what they did to get those terrorists all steamed up. It's the Louis Farrakhan line: the Jews just don't get it, they should give more thought to what they did to make Hitler so mad at them. Instead, tragically, all this war talk will only postpone the much-needed Islamic outreach, fulfilling the worst fears of left-wing commentators. As Rana Kabbani wrote, also in the Guardian, she 'hopes that the painful lesson that Americans have had to learn is not drowned out by cowboy ravings about "getting the bastards" ' . The 'painful lesson' she refers to is the murder of thousands of American civilians, as well as hundreds of Britons, Japanese, Australians, Koreans, Canadians, Mexicans, Zimbabweans and, at the time of writing, the nationals of some 35 other countries, including France, where Ms Kabbani resides. (And, incidentally, how come all these Guardian anti-racists and identity-politics obsessives reach instinctively for all this cheap cowboyphobia and rampant Texism?)

It's Ms Kabbani and Mr Milne who simply don't get it. Bill Clinton, no cowboy or Texan, asked Yasser Arafat to the White House more often than he invited any other world leader. In July last year, in the final stretch of his presidency, he talked 'Chairman' Arafat and Ehud Barak into holing up at Camp David and going the extra mile' for peace. During these talks, by the way, last week's mass murderers were already well advanced in preparing their `painful lesson' for America: the British Left may delude itself into thinking this is some sort of payback for Bush's hubris in rejecting Kyoto, but these fellows were busy taking their jet-flying courses even when Al Gore was ahead in the polls. Meanwhile, back at Camp David, Clinton schmoozed Barak into offering up concessions that no previous Israeli prime minister had ever contemplated — including a Palestinian state with its capital in a shared Jerusalem. Okay, for Ms Kabbani and Mr Milne that might not be enough to justify calling off the 'painful lesson', but you'd have thought it would be a basis for negotiation. Yet the great Chairman not only turned Barak down, he never even bothered making a counter-proposal.

If it were about Israel, it would be easy

— to cut them loose, abandon them to their fate, singalong to the current big pop hit in Egypt and Syria, called with admirable clarity 'I Hate Israel'. But it's not about Israel, except insofar as eliminating Israel is the first stage. On Tuesday I lost no close friends, only acquaintances, friends of friends, and distant neighbours over the far hills, the pilots and nurses and businessmen from southern New Hampshire who were on board those flights from Logan airport. But the pool of blood crept close enough, and the 'painful lesson' I learned was a simple one: that these guys can kill me and my family, and do it very easily, using a couple of cellphones, credit cards, online booking and commercial airlines — deploying Western technology to bury Western values. And, given that sometime soon they're likely to try again, the question is: what am I going to do about it?

Now I know 'Western values' elicits titters from the Kabbani–Milne tendency. No doubt you've all had a hoot at the sappiness of our media coverage: Danny Lee died on American flight 11, rushing home for the birth of his child: she was born two days after his death, Allison, 81b 12oz. Christine Hanson, two years old, was sitting between her parents en route for Los Angeles. Lauren Grandcolas, two months' pregnant, was on United flight 93 and called home, 'There's a little problem with the plane, but I'm fine. I'm comfortable. . . . Please tell my family that I love them.'

Ms Kabbani would want to know why I'm not moved by the deaths of Palestinian mothers and fathers and children. Well, I am, and I realise that in this awful war we, too, will end up killing pregnant women, young sons, beloved grandmothers. But it's not me who values an Arab life less than an American one. The Arab states do that when they deny their subjects the little bundle of rights and responsibilities loosely known as liberty that every American takes for granted. The Western media diminish every Arab man, woman and child when they want to rere-re-re-re-count every last dimpled chad in Palm Beach County while writing off the utter absence of democracy in the Arab world as just an example of quaint, charming, authentic Eastern 'culture'. In the Middle East you can choose to live under a theocracy, an autocracy. a plutocracy or a nutocracy, but the only Arabs living in freedom are the two million who live in the United States and the others who live in Britain, Canada, Ms Kabbani's France and the rest of Europe. If Washington treated Arabs the way Damascus does, you'd never hear the end of it at UN conferences, As for Ms Kabbani's cowboy clichés, take a look at some of the faces under those tengallon hats. The names of the dead of 11 September tell their own story: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna. Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black,

white, Hispanic, Arab, Asian — in a word, American. There is a reason why people of every conceivable hue and ethnicity lie beneath the rubble, and it isn't because of what Ms Kabbani calls America's 'unchecked arrogance'. Western liberal democracy offers its citizens longer, better, healthier lives, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to travel, freedom to trade, freedom to come here and become a wealthy, influential, famous cultural figure attacking the very notion of 'the West' and 'democracy' and their opposing forces, 'rogue states' and 'terrorism', as 'counterfeit"confections' concocted by a dark 'unseen power' to 'create content and tacit approval'. Thus Edward Said's latest meditation for the Nation, which with exquisite timing appeared on their website round about the precise moment the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Could he get paid for writing that stuff in Lebanon or Syria, never mind Afghanistan? For a counterfeit confection, the West is providing Said with a pretty nice living. But then that's the genius of the system. That's why, for example, the United States is the biggest aid donor to the Afghan people.

It would be encouraging if those nations that also enjoy the fruits of the American order recognised that this was their fight, too. But no sooner had Nato invoked its famous Article Five — an attack on one member is an attack on all — than a big chunk of America's 18 allies were insisting it didn't mean anything. 'We are not at war,' said Belgium. Norway and Germany announced that there would be no deployment of their forces. Italy's defence minister, Antonio Martino, said his country would not join any US action. Then he said the US must not act without the consent and participation of a broad coalition of allies.

Hmm. That might be difficult. Down south, although New Zealand hasn't been an active member of Anzus for years, Prime Minister Helen Clark thought that America's request for support would be a good time to let the world know that they were withdrawing from the alliance entirely. She said she didn't expect the US to come to New Zealand's defence, and explained that the country now considered itself in the same position as Sweden or Finland.

Same old story everywhere you looked: 'Gulf Nations Balking at US Campaign'; 'Indian Media Cautions Government Against Joining US War'. And all this before the US has lobbed a single missile.

To be honest, I couldn't be happier. The broader the coalition, the less it will agree on and the more minimal will be its aims. On the other hand, if it's just the US plus a few British Harriers, it will be able to do what it deems militarily necessary. It is the serious threat of force that impresses your enemies, not reaching out to them. Why, look at the marvels of the past week. Yasser Arafat issued a goodwill message to mark the Jewish New Year. He has ostentatiously gone before the TV cameras to give blood for the victims of last Tuesday's slaughter. The Chairman did neither of these things because Bush was kissing up to him like Clinton used to. He did them because he doesn't want to be in the sights when the cowboy decides it's time to fire. Likewise, Syria, which is suddenly anxious to join the coalition against terrorism — and in fairness it has a lot of expertise to bring to the table — because young Assad doesn't want bombs dropping on Damascus. The US hasn't fired a shot and Assad, Arafat and Gaddafi are being more cooperative than they've been in years.

Many consequences will flow from 11 September. Helen Clark and Antonio Martino have confirmed that Cold War alliances like Nato and Anzus are worthless. Collective security, far from binding the Western world, has corrupted it: the 'free world' is mostly just a free ride. America's 'moderate' Arab 'allies' will find their relationship with Washington shift, too. The FBI list of those involved in the four hijackings makes instructive reading: no Afghans, no Iraqis. no Iranians, but many Saudis and Egyptians. What's the point of having 'moderate—allies' among the region's dictators if it only intensifies their subjects' hatred of America? And what's so 'moderate' about these countries anyway? On the news networks, the standard incantation is that Pakistan is 'one of only three countries that recognises the Taleban regime'. No one mentions that the other two are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. With 'friends' like that.. . .

The worst time in the last half-century was the period when the West did everything the Guardian wanted — the years after the withdrawal from Vietnam, the years of 'détente', the years when dolts like Pierre Trudeau allowed Cuban military planes to refuel in Canada en route to Moscow and military adventures in Africa, when Jimmy Carter dispatched a half-hearted rescue mission to Iran that resulted in the corpses of US soldiers being gleefully poked and prodded by the ayatollahs on Teheran TV. The more 'restrained' and 'understanding' the West was, the more the Soviet Union increased its power, prestige and territory, from Ethiopia to Grenada. That period ended when the British, to everyone's surprise, retook the Falklands. They had behind-the-scenes intelligence support from the US, but otherwise they did it alone. That's as it should be. When America is attacked, it doesn't need to ask permission from Italy to strike back. As for those of us in the new front line, I don't want to end up in some weepy CNN montage of dead commuters because third-rate Guardian columnists think it's my fault that charlatan Arafat couldn't be bothered coming up with one lousy proposal at Camp David. Bush is right: this is the first war of the 21st century and we will win it — in spite of our 'allies'.