Valiantly overcoming a cold virus that seems to turned half the city’s populace into snivelling wrecks, I dragged my diseased carcass (perhaps the prose style of my current livre de chevet, The Gathering, is getting to me) into the city centre yesterday to see the indomitable Seymour Hersh hold forth at the Amnesty International Lecture. The Irish Times diplomatically described Hersh’s address as “wide-ranging”, although I would have been more inclined to describe it as an enjoyable exercise in free association, as Hersh not only leaped from one from anecdote to next but frequently leaped back again. However, the message could not have been clearer: the numbers who have suffered already is shaming, but the black legacy of the Iraq misadventure, for both the benighted country itself and the United States, will blight the lives of many generations. (And that’s before cheerfully contemplating what the Pentagon might have up its sleeve for Iran).

The only aspect that marred the event was that whiff of condescension towards those crazy Yanks that seem to be sine qua non of these events. At one point, the moderator Olivia O’Leary, employing that cultured faux-naĩf tone that has served her so well in her career, asked Hersh why did the Americans not treat the people they depend on for oil with more … understanding?

As if the enlightened motorists of Ireland, with their copies of Edward Said’s Orientalism on the passenger seats beside them, turn the key of SUVs fuelled by pixie-dust. By the way, RTE has made the complete lecture available as a webcast.