It is often levelled as a criticism of the Bush administration that the world is now less safe as a consequence of the policies they have pursued and today's Sunday Tribune poll shows 80% of us in Ireland sharing that view, (incidentally, the corresponding figure for American opinion is 76%). The extent to which this is a criticism rather than simply an observation is quite arguable. I for one would concur with the Judgment concerning safeness, adding only that just about every alternative shaping of post-9/11 grand strategy would leave us worse off short of more adroit execution. But leaving that aside, though doing so relieves critics of their burden of arguing for better alternatives, it remains for critics to acknowledge precisely how dangerous are the times in which we live as a minimal starting point for further comment.

It is, for instance, probable that we will live to see Nuclear terrorism in the West before too long. That is the opinion of, amongst many, Graham Allison, who writing recently in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argued:

In sum, my best judgment is that based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead. Developments in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea leave Americans more vulnerable to a nuclear 9/11 today than we were five years ago. Former Defense Secretary William Perry has said that he thinks that I underestimate the risk. In the judgment of most people in the national security community, including former Sen. Sam Nunn, the risk of a terrorist detonating a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil is higher today than was the risk of nuclear war at the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Reviewing the evidence, Warren Buffett, the world's most successful investor and a legendary oddsmaker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events like earthquakes, has concluded: "It's inevitable. I don't see any way that it won't happen."

It is not permitted in such times to resign oneself to partisan attacks on the current American administration or flippant digs at Western efforts at fighting the war. To do so carries about as much credit as blaming Western diplomacy for the debacle in France would have merited in 1940. And much commentary at the present time is well beneath even that in terms of seriousness or responsibility. Only an honest acknowledgement of the genuinely challenging history we are living through combined with a good-faith consideration of how we might now proceed counts as morally permissable engagement for those passing judgment. Nor should that count as a particularly onerous burden for those entering the debate.

It is becoming fashionable, most astonishingly, to argue in a sort of superior and knowing way that the threat is exaggerated by Western governments for political gain or more sinister purposes. Witness the recent discussion in Foreign Affairs. We forget rather hastily that the only reason 9/11 has not recurred in comparable form is because of a ceaseless and vigorous effort at apprehending the literally thousands of active Islamist terrorists plotting more such attacks and the good fortune that to date efforts at exploding airliners and releasing chemical attacks have been disrupted before coming to pass.

Complacency is only possible for those who choose not to see the blindingly obvious, and morally culpable to a very incriminating degree.