• The First Contradiction:
  The State Department said Saturday that three residential compounds housing Westerners in the Saudi capital were hit by explosions and gunfire. "We have initial reports that there were explosions and gunfire at three compounds in Riyadh that house Westerners," State Department spokeswoman Amanda Batt said. We can see from this statement, that all the compounds attacked according to the U.S. intelligence sources contained westerners and were western compounds. This statement was subsequently corrected, and modified later on by the U.S. State Department, no doubt after consultation with the CIA. It seems surprising that the U.S. closed their embassy a day before the Riyadh attacks based on high level intelligence, but that same quality intelligence falsely related information to them about what targets had actually been hit!
  
  Then Early Sunday morning, A SAUDI official, denied U.S. claims and said that only one residential compound in Riyadh was bombed Saturday night. "There may have been two or three blasts in the al-Muhaya compound, but there were no explosions in three (different) compounds," the official said. So clear contradiction here between early U.S. reports which declared Western compounds to have been attacked and subsequent Saudi reports declaring that no-Western compounds had been attacked.
  

  And everyone knows that initial reports, when the smoke and confusion are at their greatest, are the most reliable. Just think of the 9-11 attacks, when there were actually 26,000 killed, and not only were there four — make that five, possibly six — planes full of murderers, but there was also a car bomb outside the State Department.

• The Second Contradiction:
  Al-Arabiya Satellite (partly Saudi owned) reported, again, soon after the attacks that the director of the al-Muhaya compound, Hanady al-Ghandakli said: that she heard one large explosion, no sound of any gunfire, and definitely no attackers breaking into the compound. Whereas, the Saudi version of events goes like this: “Just before the midnight blasts, an unknown number of attackers broke into the upscale compound”, a Saudi official said, “and gunfire was heard. It was unclear if three individual bombs had detonated or whether it was one that set off multiple explosions”. This contradiction begs the question who is telling the truth? You might expect that the director of the compound (Hanadi al-Ghandakli) to have a better idea of events on the ground than an unknown Saudi official.
  

  That's assuming he was there, of course, and if he was close enough to hear the gunfire...

• The Third Contradiction:
  The Saudi authority described the explosions taking place in the Muhaya compound. They said that the attackers exchanged fire with the security guards and there were apparently three explosions. Other eye witness reports (from press agencies) suggested a firefight taking place lasting over 1.5 hours between the Mujahideen and the al-Muhaya compound security guards. It begs the question “what kind of firefight was this”? How can nominal security guards posted at the Muhaya compound exchange gunfire for 1.5 hours with the Mujahideen in the nearby streets? This statement by the Saudi authority of a firefight and subsequent reports from eyewitnesses can only indicate one thing, that such a firefight must have taken place around high level security buildings or military barracks, possibly near the foreign embassies within the diplomatic quarter. We know that almost all the foreign embassies in Riyadh — including the U.S. Embassy — and most diplomats' homes are inside the diplomatic quarter, an isolated neighborhood whose entrances are highly guarded. One eyewitness report on CNN quoted an unnamed Western diplomat saying he received a call from a friend who reported seeing smoke rising from a building on the other side of the diplomatic quarter near an area where the palaces of the royal family's senior princes are located. There was no further information on the report.
  

  "Yep. Me'n Myrtle, we heard the gunfire from al-Muhaya, so we decided we'd go out back and fire up the barbeque. We know some of those security guards would be hungry..."

• It must liberalize its ailing economy, which means more, not less, contact with the West.
  
  
• It must satisfy many Saudis' desire for greater freedom and more say in politics.
  
  
• And it must tame the radical religious elements so the royal family's role as guardian of Islam's holy places will not be challenged.
  
  
• Finally, it must battle violent extremists whom many people believe have been encouraged by the preachings of the religious establishment and its strict Wahhabi Muslim philosophy.

After September 11, I wondered rhetorically (in The Spectator) what are we prepared to die for, and got a convoluted e-mail back from a French professor explaining that the fact that Europeans weren’t prepared to die for anything was the best evidence of their superiority: they were building a post-historical utopia — a Europe it would not be necessary to die for. Or as Robert Kagan’s recent thesis puts it: these days Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.

Can’t see it working myself. A couple of months back, I found myself in the company of a recently retired Continental prime minister and mentioned what a chap in the Pentagon had said to me about how the Europeans really needed to invest in new technology or they’d no longer be able to share the same battlefield with the Americans. I thought I was making a boring, technocratic, Nato-expenditure sort of point, but he took it morally and visibly recoiled. "But why would we want to have such horrible weapons?" he said, aghast. "In Europe today, it is just inconceivable to possess such things."

You can’t help noticing that it’s the low-tech weapons that are really horrible. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and the Congo, millions get hacked to death by machetes. Even on the very borders of EUtopia, hundreds of thousands died in the Balkans in mostly non-state-of-the-art ways until the Americans intervened. According to the latest estimates, the mass graves in Iraq contain the remains of at least 300,000 people, but we’re still arguing about whether the war was "justified". The pacifism - or, more accurately, passivism - of Europe does not seem especially moral.

But even the British, according to Max Hastings in The Spectator, are "furious" with America. "British soldiers and diplomats anticipated almost every misfortune that has occurred," Sir Max assures us, and proceeds to recite a long list of things the shrewd Brits told their cocky Yank cousins: the Americans don’t have enough troops on the ground, and they’re the wrong kind of troops anyway, ill-suited to peacekeeping, lacking the cultural sensitivity of the wise old British, etc. If "British soldiers and diplomats" really said all this to the Americans, the answer would seem to be obvious — You don’t think there are enough troops? Send some more yourself. You think Americans are lousy at peacekeeping? Fine, we’ll do the dirty work, you guys can do all the community-liaison foot patrols. Usually on Veterans’ Day in the US, serving troops at local bases fan out to small towns in the area and participate in their parades. Not this year. There’s nobody around. By contrast, between April and August the strength of the British contingent in Iraq was reduced by 75 per cent. The UK is one of the few credible military powers left in the developed world, yet it can’t sustain a proportionate share of the burden of even a small war. And, in all his indestructible condescension, it never occurs to Sir Max to wonder how it must sound to American ears to be told you’re doing it all wrong by folks who can barely do it at all.

As to whether the Prince of Wales is bisexual, I’ve no idea. But I do know that, between the Guardian hyper-rationalists at home and the European Constitutionalists in Brussels, whatever supplants the House of Windsor is likely to push Britain further toward the curiously enervated condition of the modern Continental social democracy. The EU has done a grand job of trumpeting its weakness as strength, but the fact remains that there’s something hollow at the heart of European identity. You can’t be a great power without great power: Slobodan Milosevic called the EU’s bluff on that a decade ago.

When you say as much to Euro-grandees, they say, ah, but you wouldn’t understand, here on the Continent we have seen the horrors of war close up, the slaughter of the Somme casts long shadows. I’ll say. In the New Statesman last week, Philip Kerr managed to yoke All Quiet On The Western Front with Joan Baez and John Lennon, and unintentionally underlined just how obsolescent the Sixties folk-protest canon is. Where Have All The Flowers Gone? would have made a great song for the First World War, but not for Afghanistan or Iraq or anything we’re likely to fight in the future. In our time, mass slaughter occurs only in places where the West refuses to act - in the Sudan or North Korea - or acts only under the contemptible and corrupting rules of UN "peacekeeping", as at Srebrenica. In Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, technological advantage changes the moral calculus: it makes war the least worst option, the moral choice. At the 11th hour of the 11th day, we should remember those who died in the Great War, but recognise that it could never be "the war to end all wars" and never should.

• PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, also known as Abu Ala, condemned the attack, but did not blame Israel: " We harshly condemn this criminal incident
 We will act to follow the matter; we will examine the facts and take the necessary measures
"
  
  
• PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, who condemned the bombing and ordered an investigative committee to be set up, condemned that Israel played a role in the incident. An official communiqué issued by the leadership stated, "The Palestinian leadership condemns in the harshest terms of condemnation the criminal bombing that occurred in Beit Lahia, [near Gaza] under the military control of the Israeli army, which caused the deaths of four [sic] American observers
 For many months, the northern Gaza border region has witnessed the renewed occupation and planting of land mines by the Israeli occupation forces
 The Palestinian leadership expresses its sincere condolences to the American president, the American administration, and the families of the innocent victims."
  
  
• Saeb Erekat, a minister in Abu Alaa's emergency government, condemned the bombing, calling it a regrettable incident and said, "no Palestinian would harm international monitoring delegations." He said that the convoy was "a group of American inspectors with which we began to work regarding inspection of the execution of the road map."
  
  
• In its communiqué, the Palestinian Legislative Council noted that the Israeli occupation was the only one to benefit from the bombing.
  
  
• The PLO Executive Committee condemned the bombing, saying that "the aim of the act of aggression was to sully the reputation of our Palestinian people and whitewash the crimes committed against it in all Palestinian territories."
  
  
• Following the arrest of nine Palestinians suspects, PLO Executive Committee member Zakariya Al-Agha denied Palestinian responsibility for the bombing. Israel, he said, had the most to gain from the attack because it wanted to prevent closer Palestinian-American relations. Al-Agha stressed that perhaps Palestinians had indeed been involved in the bombing, but if so they were working on behalf of Israeli intelligence.
  
  
• In an article in the PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Adel Sadeq, deputy to Minister of Foreign Affairs Nabil Shaath, responded to the claims that Palestinians had carried out the attack. He asserted that "The rationale [behind] the policy of the Palestinian struggle does not support an attack on foreign officials..." According to Sadeq, "the possibility that Sharon and his generals detonated the bomb from a distance must not be ruled out, because there are well-known precedents for such actions on their part, particularly against Americans."
  
  
• The editor of the PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Hafez Al-Barghouthi, raised the possibility that perhaps the bomb that hit the American car had been prepared for Israeli targets, but he emphasized the benefit that Israel could derive from this attack. He said that this was perhaps a trap or part of an operation by Israel, with the aim of blaming the Palestinians for aggression towards the Americans as Israel did in the past when it circulated rumors about the presence of Al-Qa'ida cells in the PA.
  
  
• Bassem Abu Sumayyah, director of the official Palestinian radio station The Voice of Palestine and columnist for Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, accused Israeli PM Ariel Sharon: "This deed was carried out by an unknown [element] with the support of an element that I do not think is native, with capability and experience in making and planting mines and detonating them
" The aim of the bombing, he claimed, was to pour oil on the flames and give a green light to Israel's government to expand the war of annihilation and to draw the noose tighter around the PA, the government, and the Palestinian people.
  
  
• Fuad Abu Hijleh, also a columnist for Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, also wrote that Israel was the sole benefactor of the attack because it is in its interest to persuade the U.S. that there is a need for a complete occupation of the Gaza Strip and that it is best that the U.S. remain quiet regarding operations Israel carried out in Rafah. With regard to the claim that the Mossad carried out the attack, Abu Hijleh wrote: "We are certain that the American administration knows that we know that this criminal attack on American civilians... was Israeli planning, for which Mossad personnel are responsible."
  
  
• Hani Al-Masri, a PA Information Ministry official and columnist for the PA daily Al-Ayyam, also supported the claim that Israel will gain greatly from the attack. According to him, those who think that Israel is involved in the bombing are pointing at European pressure directed at the U.S. to send international monitors to oversee the implementation of the road map. According to this claim, he says, Israel, which opposed this position, sees operations of this type as a simple means of persuading the quartet of the pointlessness in sending international monitors, at least as far as security is concerned.
  
  
• Cultural Ministry Director Ahmad Dahbour also wrote in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida that "anyone with a mind, two eyes, and a nose would understand, see, and smell behind this operation a plot [to further exacerbate] the dire Palestinian situation."