QUITE rightly - and, aptly, as he headed for the G7 summit on fighting international terrorism - United States president Bill Clinton vowed to hunt down and punish the bombers who blew up a US military complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans and injuring nearly 400 people.

Those of us in Britain, who have witnessed a generation of IRA terror and were reminded of its evil yet again with the outrage in Manchester's only days ago, will mark his words well.

For we would like to think that his condemnation of international terror is without distinction.

It has to be accepted that this is an outlook which in the past, with America having little experience of such horrors until the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York and of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, may have been qualified in the USA.

We refer, of course, to Americans having been and still being generous paymasters for the IRA - and with consent and a blind eye being turned to that fact by its politicians for electoral reasons.

Thus, if Mr Clinton and Americans want the evil of terrorism defeated across the world, they cannot honestly lament its effects when it is directed at them, but condone or support it when it is the work of the IRA.

There are no distinctions in the evil of terrorism.

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