This day four years ago, no one had heard of Falluja and the Sunni Triangle sounded as if it was another name for the Canaries. Osama bin Laden was a vaguely joky figure whom certain alarmists in the US intelligence community were taking seriously, but for no particular reason. Certainly, outgoing President Bill Clinton didn't regard him as all that much of a threat - if he had, 9/11 would not have happened.
But it did. The world changed on September 11th, 2001, yet to read the letter-writers to this newspaper, one would think it had changed at the behest of the US, and most particularly, at the behest of President Bush, the Republicans and Halliburton. If there is a world-conspiracy against freedom at all, in the minds of these weird creatures, it is a Christian, fundamentalist one. As a counter-factual fantasy, this is more than a match for those who say that Elvis and Jackie O. were abducted by aliens in order to breed a master-race: yet the knowing, post-prandial drawl in most Dublin 6 houses of a Saturday night will probably be about the threat the US poses to world freedom.
And such witless gibbering in Dublin is probably a fair reflection of what is going on at the tables of the bien-pensant right across Europe. Those same tables would once upon a time have been host to similar conversations about how the US shouldn't be too harsh on the Soviet Union, and the communist system wasn't too bad - it just needed a few reforms here and there. No, no, the real threat to world freedom - went the babble over the mints - came from the US, its Cruise missiles and its crazy right-wingers.
It is the Greenham Common syndrome, where those ridiculous women blamed those who defended their freedom for the threats that that freedom faced. The fact that the Greenham Common argument was root and branch risible didn't prevent it being treated with great respect in our media. For there is absolutely no form of anti-Americanism which will not get a respectful hearing in the company of those whom the Americans protect. Nor is there any form of visceral pro-Americanism which is in any way as intellectually acceptable amongst the political elites of Europe, as, for example, francophilia is.
The Greenham Common argument was won more comprehensively than any political argument in history: the Soviet Union is gone and so are the Cruise missiles. Now the argument has moved on to Iraq, with parallel arguments that the US should withdraw, just as once it was told that it should close down its Greenham Common base. It cannot do so: and today's election cannot change that. The US cannot abandon the people of Iraq to the lunatics at their throat. Morally, politically and strategically, the US has no option.
To be sure, there were great errors, some in US policy-making, but the most egregious and unforgivable were by the UN, which seems to have replaced the Catholic Church in the minds of many Irish people - especially letter-writers to this newspaper - as the great Force For Good in the world. Actually, the UN is rotten to the core. We know its officials used the sanctions against Iraq to enrich themselves, actively collaborating with Saddam Hussein in the process. In the melancholy history of the appeasement of evil, there has never been such an egregious example of covert and corrupt assistance to tyranny being represented as effective opposition. That is what the UN did: and yet the UN remains - in the minds of the Irish bien-pensant anyway - the sole moral and legal authority for international police action.
The invasion of Iraq was politically and morally the most justified military action in my lifetime: but that it was so undertaken with so many misrepresentations as to cause, and with so little proper military preparation for such a mighty venture, should have spelt the end of the Bush presidency, and most of all, of Donald Rumsfeld's tenure at Defence. But that - alas - is not the nature of politics.
The battle for Falluja probably begins today as American minds are on the elections, and are less likely to count the coffins coming home. There will be many - but not nearly as many coffins as those containing the Iraqi dead; yet a simple US withdrawal from Iraq will not lessen the numbers of Iraqi dead, or make the world a safer place.
The planet that existed when George W. Bush was elected is gone for ever, and we can never regain the certainties and the pieties which we took so effortlessly for granted. That world did not know of the existence of a cult of suicide bombers, or of an army of Islamic Hannibal Lecter cut-throats. Now there is barely a child anywhere whose psyche is not in some sense shaped about types of human evil which four years ago were beyond the imagination of even the most deranged and deviant of adults.
The tragedy for the US and the world is that George Bush's opponent is such an unprincipled and vapid opportunist, with a score of years in the Senate achieving nothing. But there we are. What is, is. The election will make no difference to the war.
It must be fought and it must be won so that the people of Iraq will one day know the freedom for which so many brave Americans have already given their lives.
For unlike what goes in the polling booths of the US today, on that issue anyway, there is no choice.