The staff are friendly and there's no muzak and the restaurant is very good and outside there is the serene water of the estuary and birds going about their business on the mudflats and the hills of Clare. It is a true shock to see the American soldiers. For one thing, war is the opposite to home. For another, as everyone always says, the soldiers are so young.

And the sight of them in Ireland awakens what is not an ambivalence but rather an uneasiness that accompanies my opposition to the war in Iraq. I hardly dare express this confusion to the American people I know who talk politics, every single one of whom loathes the Bush administration. Their condemnation of the Iraq debacle is absolutely unqualified. The writer Anthony Glavin, for example . . . whose home is in Ireland but who is also a great lover of his native America . . . contributed a savagely jocose 'Irishman's Diary' to the Irish Times recently. It referred to "the mounting US casualty figures of 2,320 soldiers killed and 16,653 wounded in Iraq, the body counts which the US military doesn't do of Iraqi deaths, whose estimated numbers range anywhere from 35,000 to 125,000, and the balance sheet that shows $350bn already spent on that tragically misbegotten war".

Bertie Ahern, the piece went on to say, missed his chance when he met President Bush on Saint Patrick's Day, "to see if he could find exactly why the same CIA-registered planes that ferry kidnapped terrorist suspects to other torture-friendly regimes have been touching down in Shannon".

I can't find a place to stand, so to speak, from which to hurl the same reproaches. Irish 'neutrality', which means we never had to face whether to send troops, is not pacifist. It is, in fact, a lending of ourselves, evenhandedly, to anybody dominant enough to make international war . . . I believe we allowed the USSR to use Shannon during the Cuba crisis. And the airport must have been available to the USA when it went into Afghanistan, which is the action that most confuses my response to Iraq. I welcomed the US attack on the Taliban.

I'd welcome it again.

What's more, three years ago I thought that there was meaning to removing Saddam Hussein, who was too powerful to be deposed locally, just as there would have been meaning to removing Hitler. What Saddam was doing to his own people was bad enough . . .

those gassed babies . . . even without weapons of mass destruction. I still believe that there's a tiny chance that ultimately Iraq will be a better place for most Iraqis than it would have been under Saddam and his successors. I don't want America to leave until there is hope of that.

Don't we blame the USA for not going in to Rwanda? Wouldn't we welcome an American military presence in Darfur? Did we hesitate to back the Clinton administration's interference in Bosnia? We did not. Nor would we have peace on our own island if it wasn't for American interventionism . . . for the clout exercised on our behalf by the Clinton and to an extent by other Washington administrations. I realise that that's a very different thing from bombing and terrorising some of the poorest and most abused people on the earth. But all the same . . .

who decides when it is principled of America to use its power abroad, and who decides when it is evil opportunism?

The American people have to count the dead and wounded. They have to live with Abu Ghraib, and with doubts about the likes of Halliburton. They know America's reputation has been damaged in the world. And even the people who inflicted the damage . . . George W Bush personally, and his advisers . . . are losers. Cynics who believe that Bush and the others deliberately lied their way into Iraq to attach the oil there to their own and to America's wealth must concede that the warmakers are paying, too, for not having understood how badly they needed, if they were going to be that avaricious, to be efficient. It doesn't seem likely that a Republican will be the next president of the USA. But neither have the Democrats been able to create a vigorous and assured opposition. It is difficult to think of any sector of American society . . . political, academic, journalistic, commercial, diplomatic . . . that has not lost through involvement with Iraq.

By comparison, we in Ireland lost Irish-born Margaret Hassan to her cruel kidnappers.

Other than that, we lost nothing. Even Larry Goodman has been compensated for whatever beef contracts he lost . . . a beef baron can do just as well, it seems, when a country is occupied and in turmoil than when it is a mere dictatorship.

The very place where the most determined Irish anti-war protest was made speaks of the difficulty of perfect righteousness. A Clare Champion reporter estimated last summer that the US military had spent more than 60m at Shannon Airport in landing fees for military aircraft and in the duty-free shop;

there'll have been another 20m or so since then. The money in itself doesn't matter, because we didn't do, or not, do anything for money. But that we couldn't help but make a modest profit from this war adds to my uneasiness. We weren't against it from the start, we weren't wholeheartedly against it, and it has harmed nothing of ours except the childlike love and admiration for America we once had. On what might a sense of moral superiority be based? We're superior to the other players in this game for the same reason hurlers on the ditch always are: they're on the field, we're sitting higher up.