To avoid the dilemma of whether this war should take place or not, to overcome the reservations, the reluctance and the doubts that still lacerate me, I often say to myself: “How good if the Iraqis would get free of Saddam Hussein by themselves. How good if they would execute him and hang up his body by the feet as in 1945 we Italians did with Mussolini.”

But it does not help. Or it helps in one way only. The Italians, in fact, could get free of Mussolini because in 1945 the allies had conquered almost four-fifths of Italy. In other words, because the second world war had taken place. A war without which we would have kept Mussolini (and Hitler) for ever. A war during which the allies had pitilessly bombed us and we had died like mosquitoes. The allies, too. At Salerno, Anzio, Cassino. Along the road from Rome to Florence, then on the terrible Gothic Line.

In less than two years, 45,806 dead among the Americans and 17,500 among the British, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the South Africans, the Indians, the Brazilians. And also the French, who had chosen de Gaulle, also the Italians, who had chosen the 5th or the 8th Armies. (Can anybody guess how many cemeteries of allied soldiers there are in Italy? More than 130. And the largest, the most crowded, are the American ones. At Nettuno, 10,950 graves. At Falciani, near Florence, 5,811. Each time I pass in front of it and see that lake of crosses, I shiver with grief and gratitude.)

There was also a National Liberation Front in Italy. A resistance that the allies supplied with weapons and ammunition. As in spite of my age (14), I was involved in the matter. I remember well the American plane that, braving anti-aircraft fire, parachuted those supplies to Tuscany. To be exact, onto Mount Giovi, where one night they air- dropped also a commando unit with the task of activating a short-wave network named Radio Cora.

Ten smiling Americans who spoke perfect Italian and who three months later were captured by the SS, tortured and executed with a Florentine partisan girl: Anna Maria Enriquez-Agnoletti. Thus the dilemma remains, tormenting, obsessive.

It remains for the reasons I will try to state. And the first reason is that, contrary to the pacifists who never yell against Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden and only yell against George W Bush and Tony Blair (but in their Rome march they also yelled against me and raised posters wishing I’d blow up with the next shuttle), I know war very well. I know what it means to live in terror, to run under airstrikes, to see people killed and houses destroyed, to starve and dream for a piece of bread, to miss even a glass of drinking water. And, which is worse, to feel responsible for the death of another human being (even if that human being is an enemy — for instance a fascist or a German soldier).

I know it because I belong to the second world war generation and because as a member of the resistance, I was myself a soldier. I also know it because for a good deal of my life I have been a war correspondent.

Beginning with Vietnam, I have experienced horrors that those who see war only through television or the movies where blood is tomato juice don’t even imagine. As a consequence I hate it as the pacifists in bad or good faith never will. I loathe it. I hate it so much that every book I have written overflows with that loathing, and I cannot bear the sight of guns.

At the same time, however, I don’t accept the principle — or should I say the slogan — that “All wars are unjust, illegitimate”. The war against Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito was just, was legitimate. The Risorgimento wars that my ancestors fought against the invaders of Italy were just, were legitimate. And so was the war of independence that Americans fought against Britain.

So are the wars (or revolutions) that take place to regain dignity, freedom. I do not believe in vile acquittals, phoney appeasements, easy forgiveness. Even less in the exploitation or the blackmail of the word “peace”. When in the name of peace we surrender to violence, tyranny, when in the name of peace we resign to fear, we give up dignity and freedom, it is no longer peace. It’s suicide.

The second reason is that this war should not happen now. If just as I wish, legitimate as I hope, it should have happened one year ago. That is, when the ruins of the towers were still smoking and the whole civilised world felt American. Had it happened then, the pacifists who never yell against Saddam Hussein or Bin Laden would not today fill the squares to anathematise the United States. Hollywood stars would not play the role of messiahs, and ambiguous Turkey — which is again imposing the chador on women — would not deny passage to the marines who must reach the northern front.

Despite the Europeans who added their voice to the voice of the Palestinians howling “Americans-got-it. Good” one year ago, nobody questioned that another Pearl Harbor had been inflicted on the US and that the US had all the right to respond.

As a matter of fact, it should have happened before. I mean when Bill Clinton was president and small Pearl Harbors were bursting abroad. In Somalia, Kenya, Yemen and so on. As I shall never tire of repeating, we did not need September 11 to see that the cancer was there.