We all know, says Kevin Myers, that today is the second anniversary of the most important day in world history since the collapse of communism.
One enemy gone, and another upon us and at our throat. Only toxic levels of bien-pensant silliness have prevented people from seeing that a world war began that day, and that we are all - be it a Kenyan mother nursing her child, a hotel doorman in Bali, a stall-holder in Bombay, and Caucasians anywhere - regarded as legitimate targets by our shared enemy.
But why the war in Iraq? Well, that's the nature of world war. Who would have thought in 1914 that within a year, New Zealand soldiers would be fighting in Turkey? The British entered the second World War for Poland; but though the British fought just about everywhere else, from Burma to Iraq to the Arctic Circle, they never served in Poland.
Iraq features in all three world wars, for its location and its oil make it strategically vital. That's why the British army invaded in 1941, to forestall a Nazi takeover. This was a military necessity, but of dubious legality, as was the contemporaneous Australian assault on Vichy French forces in Syria: hence the now forgotten Franco-Australian war, which Australia won, handsomely.
These were necessary but forgotten victories in the far vaster war against tyranny. World wars often require such shadowy operations to pre-empt infinitely more deadly enterprises by the enemies of freedom. Knowing this is part of being a grown-up, for war is not a cricket match, with sandwiches and tea waiting on the trestle tables.
Two years on, and already the schadenfreude sirens of doom - many of them American - are wailing that Americo-British forces are in a quagmire in Iraq; calamity beckons; told you so, et cet. Well, it's only a quagmire if you don't know anything about history. US forces have lost about 100 men, to accidents and enemy action. And the British have lost about 50 - around half their losses in Northern Ireland over the same period 1972.
For the record, the last time the British went in for some nation-building in Iraq - the summer of 1920 - they suffered 4,000 casualties, with 500 men killed.
Even if there were a quagmire - which there isn't so far - what alternatives are there? Firstly, the moral and strategic argument to justify action against Iraq existed in Saddam's genocidal record and his adamant refusal to comply with countless UN resolutions. You disagree? Good. But that was yesterday. Today, you know it would be an irreversible catastrophe for the US-led coalition to withdraw without having established a viable form of government in Iraq. Not even Chirac, with his disingenuousness at its most depraved and serpentine, would demand unconditional withdrawal of those forces.
Yes, of course, mistakes were made. The Wolfowitz-Perle notion before the invasion of Iraq that the US wouldn't need to do any state-creation once the war was over was new-right ideological claptrap; it was almost as if they believed market forces could supply the government that Iraqi needed.
For you can't abolish a one-party-state despotism in which the habits and memory of free institutions had long since perished, and expect governing institutions to emerge magically like a crop. If you topple the structures of power in such a place, it is your responsibility to replace them, both by precept and by expert. Moreover, if you don't, your enemies will happily do that for you.
President Bush's pledge of $87 billion to Iraq, bringing expenditure to $166 billion in six months, shows that he is finally taking the challenge of nation-building seriously. It also shows the bankruptcy of the bleating undergraduate-Green argument that the war was "all about cheap oil". As for the terrorism connection with Iraq, we know this was so: the murderous attack on the UN headquarters is one further proof of what kind of organisations Baghdad was harbouring. Of course, it is a little worrying that terrorists are pouring into Iraq, but only a little: for it is far better to have them appearing in the night-sights and laser-designators of coalition forces than have these sunny characters ambling through some holiday resort in Asia or Africa, wearing funny belts.
We are still facing a satanic enemy whose primary weapon is hatred, and whose means and whose objective are the same: martyrdom in the act of wholesale slaughter. Terrible reverses probably lie in the near future, and we cannot offer unconditional surrender, never mind negotiating terms, to these people, even if we wanted to. This is war to the death - and many more good people will give their lives for world freedom, as one Irishman, Guardsman Ian Malone, already has.
Neutrality means nothing in such circumstances. We are all at war, all at risk, for years to come, and the Government knows it. Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen, thank heavens, kept the Shannon stop-over open: not to have done, as so many in Ireland shamefully demanded, would have been to stand shoulder to shoulder with Saddam. Moreover, our intelligence services are probably co-operating with MI6 and the CIA as if we were formally at war.
So neutrality is finally an outmoded and morally bankrupt pose, whose only purpose anyway in recent years was to appease a diabetic craving for national piety.
American-led victory in Iraq was not the end of the war which began two years ago today. Nor was it the beginning of the end.
But as Churchill said after El Alamein, it was the end of the beginning.