I couldn’t agree more with Mark Steyn when he says, “Islamic terrorism is a beast that has to be killed, not patted and fed:” Bush critics live in their own worlds. Would someone please let the Democratic party in on this reality?

But once in a while, even those in the most hermetically sealed alternative universes enjoy a day trip to reality. On Sept. 11, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, happened to be in New York, a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center. Made no difference. The archbishop is worldwide head of the Anglican Communion and, when he’s not wrestling with gay bishops in New Hampshire and gay marriage in British Columbia, he occasionally has a spare moment to deal with non-gay issues. To Williams, the Americans’ liberation of Afghanistan was ”morally tainted,” an ”embarrassment,” and an example of the moral equivalence between the USAF and the suicide bomber, both of whom ”can only see from a distance: the sort of distance from which you can’t see a face, meet the eyes of someone, hear who they are, imagine who and what they love. All violence works with that sort of distance.”

Last month, the archbishop happened to be in Istanbul and was a guest at the home of the British consul, Roger Short. Within a few hours of his departure, Short was dead, vaporized in the wreckage of an almighty bombing. Williams sounded momentarily shaken, expressing ”shock and grief” at the death of his host, and condemning ”these vicious and senseless attacks. These acts of violence achieve nothing.”

In fact, ”these acts of violence” achieve quite a bit. Why, only a month earlier similar acts of violence had led the archbishop to make a speech at the Royal Institute for International Affairs at which he’d argued that terrorism can ”have serious moral goals.” ”It is possible to use unspeakably wicked means to pursue — an aim that is intelligible or desirable,” he said. By ignoring this, America ”loses the power of self-criticism and becomes trapped in a self-referential morality.”

Perhaps Williams would like to explain what precisely is the ”serious moral goal” of the men who killed his host.