"While I don't necessarily wish to draw analogies or parallels, we might still have Hitler sitting in Berlin if we'd been afraid of civilian casualties," she said. "It's not meant, it is not intended, it is not targeted, but it is almost inevitable that someone will be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Excellent. I now find that I can sleep a lot easier knowing that, regrettable though it may be, the smashed up kids and grief-maddened survivors of our misdirected bombs and missiles are a price worth paying for the safe and secure world that we are so assuredly creating. Now I realise that my former misgivings about such trite and sentimental matters as the spilling of innocent blood are precisely the sort of weak, insipid crypto-pacifism that would allow ruthless evil to triumph in this world, were it not for the steely determination and strong stomachs of politicians who do not need to have heard a shot fired in anger to know the truth about war.

Furthermore, as the child of a World War II veteran and British army officer who served in Palestine and saw the creation of the state of Israel, and whose other parent lived through the Blitz, I am also deeply ashamed that I should have briefly joined the ranks of those who would have appeased Hitler and let Nazi fascism prevail over the forces of democracy and civilisation. True, I had been suffering under the misapprehension that by 1939 Hitler had harnessed Germany's economic might to create an awesome military machine capable of destroying and occupying much of Europe and leading to the deaths of tens of millions, while the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, I naively imagined, were some way off realising their twisted dream of world domination. How stupid of me. Really, what is stopping us unleashing a firestorm of Dresden proportions on Kabul, given the self-evident truth of Clark's reluctant analogies and parallels?

As (Foreign Affairs Minister) Phil Goff has sternly admonished, where was our concern for the good people of Afghanistan and their treatment at the hands of the merciless Taliban before the bombing began? What are a few more casualties when millions have been displaced and killed by their own rulers, if it means ridding the Earth of this malevolence? I see now that by having not already protested publicly against all the specific cruelties and injustices in the world I am disqualified from bleating when the chips are down. Which is why, just in case Phil Goff doubts my sincerity again, I find myself in favour of massive pre-emptive strikes against many other countries of dubious moral integrity before it gets to this stage again. We could start with Saudi Arabia, which is close to Afghanistan and means we wouldn't have to move the aircraft carriers far.

And yet this public misgiving about the odd civilian casualty will not go away. In Britain, appallingly, a majority now favours a cessation of the air attack, forcing PM Tony Blair to justify the bombing of a country with a gross domestic product roughly equivalent to the price of one of the bombs being dropped on it by arguing that we should "never forget how we felt watching the planes fly into the Twin Towers". I don't know what they're putting in the water in England these days, but it they're really in danger of forgetting what they felt witnessing the first epochal moment of the 21st century (er, what was all that stuff on CNN again?), then it's no surprise they've lost the bottle for the long fight.