SIX months since September 11 and you'd think nothing had changed. Most of the newspapers, and certainly that anti-western bastion of propaganda the BBC, are calling for no military strikes against Iraq. It is as if last year's atrocity in New York had never happened and that there's no chance of anything like that ever happening again. Are these "no military strikes" commentators and pundits in their right mind? It takes a lot of hatred and an awful lot more determination to try to destroy the centre of New York. Do the pundits who now advocate no further military action imagine that this hatred has magically subsided? Do they think that the West's enemies have gone away?

I have the opportunity here in the City to get to talk to some senior army people. Last week I asked a recently-retired general - actually a man who had been predicting for years a surprise attack on a western capital - what he thinks will happen next. He said: "I think the most likely form of the next attack will considerably raise the stakes - a dirty nuclear bomb in a hotel bedroom or a car park in say San Francisco, Naples or London. Somewhere that can be reached easily by a small boat".

In the face of such a threat, associated pacifists and appeasers from among the chattering classes appear in the mass media and repeat the mantra, "No more military strikes". What, I wonder, will they say after the next attack which, if expert military advice is to be believed, will involve weapons of mass destruction? Is the western world going to die at the hands of its own wimpishness? Hands have been thrown up in horror at President Bush's description of three rogue states as "an axis of evil". I suppose we're meant to refer to the fanatical dictatorial gangsters in Iran, Iraq and North Korea as gentlemen.

A billion dollars in aid has been poured into North Korea by the USA in return for a promise that they would not try to obtain nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. But the money has been spent on a nuclear weapons and missiles programme. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein perpetually seeks nuclear capability. Since the return of the Ayatollah in 1979, Iran has been a mass of seething fundamentalist fervour - a bonfire just waiting for a match.

For an understanding of what's going on in the world today, I recommend you to join me in watching the many interesting programmes on television at the moment about Adolf Hitler. What I find most revealing, in a terrifying way, about these programmes is that they all show how the nations of Europe ignored all warnings about Hitler's true intentions and sought to appease him. Winston Churchill warned throughout the 1930s that Hitler was bent on war and world domination. The history of the 1930s is that our unwillingness to act early against the enemy led to a war longer and more calamitous than it need have been. Is it all going to happen again because we fail to heed the words of Lord Acton: "The only thing men learn from history is that men learn nothing from history"?

Published: Tuesday, March 12, 2002