Mark Steyn

New Hampshire The emergency dispatcher wasn’t quite sure she’d heard correctly. ‘Sir, you have what jumping from buildings?’ ‘People. Bodies are just coming from out of the sky....’ On a day like 11 September 2001, time is both accelerated and suspended. On the top floors of the World Trade Center, office workers who moments earlier had been scheduling lunch appointments and making plans for the weekend had a few seconds to determine the manner of their death – to stay and be burned alive, or to take one last gulp of fresh air as they plunged to the plaza below. For almost everybody else, time is halted: when you’re caught up in the middle of a terrible day, you don’t know that that’s what it is – a day.

New Hampshire Usually in Iraq, the Westerners getting blown up are American and British soldiers. So the world's press, lacking any local angle and not being terribly interested in the poor bloody infantry at the best of times, cuts to the chase: the death of Private Wossname is yet more evidence of what a disaster Bush has made of Iraq ...bogged down ...quagmire ...lessons of Vietnam, etc., etc. But the fellow who blew up the Canal Hotel left aid workers from many lands among the dead and injured, and so for once the media took time to mourn the loss of the individuals involved. Among the victims was the dapper UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

New Hampshire I haven't really followed California gubernatorial elections since 1859, when Milton S. Latham ran as a pro-slavery Democrat. He was a grandson of my town's first postmaster, and in this corner of New Hampshire we take a proprietorial interest in his adventures as he pressed west. Californians, as far as I can tell, take zero interest in him, perhaps because he proved to be their shortest-serving governor. Though he was thought to favour making California a slave state, in his inaugural address he was more circumspect about his plans: 'Entering upon the duties of Chief Magistrate of our young State, it is expected of me, in accordance with precedent, to briefly indicate the line of policy by which I will be governed,' he began.

New Hampshire It's always slightly discombobulating when someone you've known for years and always written off as a mediocrity with no talents suddenly leaps to phenomenal success. In my line of work, it's usually some fellow hack whose first novel gets optioned by Miramax for Cameron Diaz. Or the guy I sat next to at a friend's wedding who tried to sell me his shoes, and next time I landed in Britain he'd somehow become the nation's most beloved bisexual gameshow host, Dale Winton. But right now it's happening on a much larger scale to someone called Howard Dean. If you've never heard of him, don't worry. You'll soon be never hearing of him ever again. But just for the moment he is, improbably, the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

New Hampshire On Monday the Daily Telegraph gave a big chunk of its comment-page real estate to Mr Will Day of something called Care International. I've never heard of it myself but doubtless that's because I'm a fully paid-up member of Don't Care Unilateral. Anyway, the headline on Mr Day's column read: 'Things Are Getting Worse In Iraq, So Give The UN A Chance'. You can guess how it went from there: 'Something in Iraq is going fundamentally wrong.... Did the coalition planners think things through..? They can't have ...Nobody is safe ...complete breakdown in security ...making their lives a misery ...almost total lack of basic services...'. I didn't see any of this during my stay in western and northern Iraq last month.

New Hampshire On the face of it, Jordan's election this month would seem to be a lively affair. In the last couple of weeks, I've driven the length and breadth of the country. Well, not the length, but the breadth – from the Allenby Bridge across from the ghastly Arafat squat on the West Bank over to the eastern desert and the Iraqi border post at Trebil. And in every town you pass through there are handmade banners strung across the streets proclaiming the merits of a zillion candidates. Nothing fancy, just dense text on white sheets. But lots of them, everywhere. As I was heading into Amman from the north-west, two campaign perfectionists, tinkering with the height of their banner, accidentally lowered it on to the windscreen of my car.

New Hampshire The UN should be appointed overseer of the peace not because that organisation possesses planning skills which America does not, but because to shut it out will cause resentment in the Arab world. However irritating are many of the do-gooders among its ranks, the UN has the advantage of being seen as an antidote to alleged Western imperialism. After reading those words in The Spectator's leading article of 12 April, I hurled the magazine across the room and typed up my letter of resignation. A nervous dependant pointed out it might be wiser to line up alternative employment first. It quickly emerged that no other British publication would have me, and the only alternative employment was casual construction work.

New Hampshire Earlier this week, on NBC's Today Show, Katie Couric, America's favourite wake-up gal, saluted the fallen heroes of the Columbia: 'They were an airborne United Nations - men, women, an African-American, an Indian woman, an Israeli....' Steady on, Katie. They were six Americans plus an Israeli. And, if they had been an 'airborne United Nations', for one thing the Zionist usurper wouldn't have been on board: the UN is divided into regional voting blocs and, Israel being in a region comprised almost entirely of its enemies, it gets frosted out from the organisation's corridors of power; no country gets so little out of its UN membership.

After 11 September America knows who the enemy is, says Mark Steyn. There can be no more polite fictions. Moral clarity and the Bush doctrine of pre-emption now govern world affairs New Hampshire September 11 was the day everything changed. Everyone said so, and some still do. This Wednesday, CBS's special commemoration will be called 'The Day That Changed America'. Fox, slightly less passive, has gone with 'The Day America Changed'. But the best proof that nothing has changed are the networks' day-that-everything-changed specials themselves. The other day I warned against the Dianafication of 11 September. But I was too late. Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung and the rest of the all-star sob-sisters will be out in force with full supporting saccharine piano accompaniment.