At the self-admiring EU enlargement ceremony in Dublin, they speak in Irish - a proud affirmation of ethnic identity by a country desperate to look exactly like Switzerland

Two days into a lecture tour of Turkey, and I crack the problem of the missing WMDs. Where best to hide something but brazenly out in the open? There are a few of these elusive weapons stationed outside every mosque, slim, deadly missiles cunningly disguised as minarets. But the US neo-cons don't know the meaning of such fancy foreign words, so the Muslim world has got clean away with it. Get ready to put your foot down as you drive past a mosque, in case the things slowly start to take off.

I confide my theory to a Turkish friend well practised in English whimsy, who informs me that the words "minaret" and "weapon" aren't all that unrelated. So there we are. Yet more testimony to fiendish Oriental ingenuity. And religion is indeed the most powerful Muslim armoury against western materialism. You may conquer a country in which millions of ordinary men and women fervently practise a faith at odds with your own, but you can never defeat it.

I give a lecture in Diyarbakir, the capital of the Kurdish region, which is attended by the Turkish secret police. They're there to monitor the audience, not me. I announce that I shall speak slowly for the benefit of dim-witted cops, and get a cheap but therapeutic laugh. Four years ago the town was torn apart by civil war, and the streets are still crowded with beggar children, many of them war orphans. The Kurdish militants are holed up somewhere in the hills.

Some astute city governor had bits of the great city wall knocked down for the purpose of air-conditioning. Down the road in Hasankeyf, there is a whole city of caves. They were inhabited as long as 5,000 years ago, and you can still see the odd homeless family taking shelter with their sheep. We are not far from the Syrian and Iraqi borders, in a Mesopotamian melting pot watered by the sluggishly meandering Tigris.

The region is rich in ancient learning. The European Renaissance started out from areas like this. A thin donkey stands by the pump at a filling station as though waiting to be topped up. We seem as far from Istanbul as we are from Islip. My host asks me if I would like to eat "a little Turkish snake". I decline politely. "But it is very tasty," he protests. It turns out he means "snack".

In the oil refinery town of Batman (I couldn't resist asking them if they had one called Robin as well), a well-heeled Kurdish landowner asks me anxiously how far behind the west they are. I cravenly sidestep his query by pointing out that they are two hours ahead. Despite being well-heeled, the landowner keeps an apartment in the town so as to have a bolt-hole when the police make things too hot for him in the countryside. Talking about the Kurds with some Istanbul intellectuals, one occasionally feels that brief, sudden drop in intelligence - as palpable as a sudden fall in room temperature - which occurs when ideology momentarily intervenes to blur the discourse of otherwise enlightened people.

In Izmit, hit by a frightful earthquake two years ago, it isn't always easy to tell the half-ruined buildings from the common-or-garden decrepit ones. The dean of a university proudly shows off his chemistry lab, a much inferior version of the one in my provincial 1950s grammar school. Small boys push huge carts of rusty junk along streets so potholed that if they disappeared down one, they would never be seen again.

The Turks don't seem all that interested in Iraq, even when the pictures of torture begin to pour in from Washington, DC (Damage Control). A lot of them are more concerned about the EU. I watch on TV the EU enlargement ceremony, set in my home town of Dublin. Scenes of beaming, backslapping boyos wading waist deep in oily self-admiration. The only mercy is that the Irish army doesn't cock up the flag-hoisting. The military orders are shouted in Irish - a proud affirmation of ethnic identity on the part of a nation desperate to end up looking exactly like Switzerland.

I am frustrated that nobody else seems to have noticed what a British politician's favourite phrase is. It is, by a very long chalk, "very clear". "We have made it very clear from the outset . . ."; "our position on this is very clear . . .". It suggests, strangely, that what politicians fear most is that voters see them as obscurantist. This fear is quite unwarranted. Voters may see them as devious, but that's different. There's nothing in the least cryptic about wanting to knock off Iraq's oil supplies in case the Saudis start playing up.

A spotless visionary clarity would do Blair no harm at all, just as a spot of mild debauchery might prove the making of tight-assed US neo-cons. One of the most ominous pieces of information I heard recently was that George Bush goes to bed at 8.45pm, while General Tommy Franks is at his desk at 3am.

In one sense, it's best to have these guys unconscious for as long as possible. In another sense, though, there is a deep affinity between their morally obscene foreign policies and their flesh-hating puritanism. The western will is as destructive as it is because it is disembodied. It regards the carnal, material world as inert stuff to knock imperiously into shape, whether in massage parlours or the Pentagon.

The world will be regenerated on the day that Tommy Franks manages to stay in bed.

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