This greatly expanded the population of the killable. Indeed, no martialized doctrine in history has availed itself of a vaster target—absolutely anyone at all. Takfir was an ancient and recurrent notion in Islam, and Zawahiri resurrected it. Bin Laden, as usual, just fell into line.

  “Unfortunately,” said one of Osama’s companions, “his IQ was not that great.” And this verdict stands. In a 1997 interview on CNN, Osama was asked about the kind of society he envisaged for Saudi Arabia. This was the point-by-point program he had in mind:

  We are confident, with the permission of God, praise and glory be to Him, that Muslims will be victorious in the Arabian Peninsula and that God’s religion, praise and glory be to Him, will prevail in the peninsula [sharia law already prevailed in the peninsula]. It is a great pride and a big hope that the revelation unto Muhammad, peace be upon him, will be resorted to for ruling. When we used to follow Muhammad’s revelation, peace be upon him, we were in great happiness and in great dignity, to God belongs the credit and praise.

  Bin Laden’s contribution is his image, and nothing more: omnicidal nullity under a halo of ascetic beatitude. His personal deformation remains mysterious. Zawahiri was jailed and tortured. Qutb was jailed, tortured, and executed. Nobody traumatized bin Laden; unlike his mentors, he was not internally rewired by the whips and the electric cables. Almost alone among a shifting crew of mono-eyed mullahs, tin-legged zealots, blind sheikhs, and paralyzed clerics, bin Laden did at least have the wit to stay in one piece.

  I found myself frivolously wondering whether Osama was just the product of his family background—and more particularly of his birth order. Seventeenth out of fifty-seven is a notoriously difficult slot to fill; and if the polygamous father is also an illiterate billionaire, then an appetite for conflict, among his older sons, should not surprise us. In fact, Osama’s vehemence is cultivated, worked-up. This is from a manifesto of 1989:

  What is required is to wage an economic war against America. We have to boycott all American products…They’re taking the money we pay them for their products and giving it to the Jews to kill our brothers.

  “Any American we see,” he concluded, in words that drip and seethe with menace, “we should notify of our complaints. We should write to American embassies.” Write to American embassies? His position was to harden—all the way to takfir.

  At the time of his Declaration of War against America(1996), bin Laden was moldering away in a cave in Tora Bora—stateless, penniless, and half-starved. His achievements were a matter of myth, of fabulation; he was a funk-ridden and incompetent ex-jihadi (a mere pepperer of the Red Army); and he was a serial business flop. In short, he was a terrorist financier who had run out of cash; and he was now entirely at the mercy of the local Islamist power, the village-idiot vigilantes known as the Taliban. Very soon, Zawahiri would be in a Russian jail, and bin Laden would be subsisting on stale bread and contaminated water. At this stage al-Qaeda’s survival looked unlikely; and its chances of mounting an operation the size of September 11 were infinitesimal. The “declaration,” then, was little more than a deathbed whimper.

  How, then, did the cornered troglodyte of 1996 become the radiant Mahdi of 2001? Bin Laden’s fame was lucrative: in 1998 the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, started taking bribes from Riyadh as a down payment for Osama’s extradition and delivery to the Americans. But Omar and Osama were soulmates—and business partners. That same summer saw the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In Nairobi, al-Qaeda killed 206 Africans and wounded 4,500 (150 were blinded by flying glass); it also killed a total of twelve Americans; the half-bungled attack in Dar es Salaam killed no Americans at all. Although the Islamic reaction, worldwide, was one of near-unanimous disgust, it was, definingly, the American reaction that empowered bin Laden.

  Of the sixty-six U.S. cruise missiles fired at the camps around Khost, in Afghanistan, a certain number failed to detonate. According to Wright (his source is Russian intelligence), “bin Laden sold the unexploded missiles to China for $10 million.” In al-Qaeda’s next attack, on the USS Cole in 2000, the symbolism was rather more finely tuned: a futuristic fighting ship crippled by a dinghy. Established as the global champion of the anti-American cause, bin Laden was now the recipient of fresh recruits bearing Samsonite suitcases stuffed with petrodollars from awed admirers in the Gulf.

  September 11 itself emerges as a chapter of hideous coincidences. In its early days the Planes Operation consisted of two monoglot “muscle” Saudis blundering around Los Angeles—incapable, it seemed, of asking the way to the nearest flight school. All was set fair for yet another of al-Qaeda’s ridiculous failures, on a par, perhaps, with the plan to assassinate the Pope (abandoned soon after the purchase of the killers’ cassocks). The spectacular assault, “the big one,” was a non-starter until the fortuitous arrival, in Kandahar, of the “Hamburg contingent” (Atta et al.): these men were superficially Westernized, and superficially rational; they were possessed by just the right kind of functioning insanity. Negative coincidences also characterized the American end of the story. It is painful to follow the inter-agency malfunctions, resentments, and pseudo-legalisms that opened the window to disaster. The man who came closest to averting it, John O’Neill, quit the FBI in the summer of 2001. He took up his new job on August 23: head of security at the World Trade Center. He had nineteen days to live.

  Expert opinion, in the West, is now largely persuaded that al-Qaeda, as we knew it, is more or less finished. The “base”—justly so called in the adjectival sense—has become, we hear, “a state of mind.” And what is that state of mind? One convinced that it is possible, simultaneously, to be a random mass murderer and a good Muslim. A death-brimmed bog of circular gullibility and paranoia, it is the state of mind of the weaponized fabulist. The conspiracy being detected here is the infidel campaign to obliterate the faith. It all began with the retreat of the Turkish armies from Vienna and the confirmation of Islamic decline. The year was 1683 and the day was September 11.

  SEPTEMBER 2006. The Times

  Review of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

  Bush in Yes-Man’s-Land

  George W. Bush has prevailed in two general elections because, very broadly, male voters feel that he’s the kind of guy they “can have a beer with.” Whereas in fact George W. Bush is the kind of guy they can’t have a beer with, under any circumstances whatever: as they say at AA, he has come to treasure his sobriety. You can have a beer with John Kerry and Al Gore; and you can have a beer with Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton (and pretty well all the others, including George Washington). But you can’t have a beer with Bush Jr.

  Bush Sr.’s mucker and soulmate Brent Scowcroft was surprised by Bush Jr.’s ascendancy. “As best Scowcroft could calculate,” writes Bob Woodward, “George W. Bush didn’t know who he was until he was about forty-five. And now he was President?” Five years later, old Brent sadly contemplates Bush Sr., who is “anguished” and “tormented” by the Iraq War and its aftermath. “Condi is a disappointment, isn’t she?” says Bush Sr. wanly (loath to blame his boy). “She’s not up to the job.” As for the other key players, Cheney seems unrecognizable (“It’s a chorus. ‘We don’t know this Dick Cheney’”); and Rumsfeld dependably remains “a wholly negative force.”

  And what about the inner inner circle—Laura? Every six weeks she has a session with Andy Card (Chief of Staff, since resigned). “I can’t talk about that,” says Card, when pressed for more information on Iraq. “Well, he won’t tell me either,” says Laura. On weekends at Camp David, Laura takes long walks with Condi, so we may be sure she knows what’s what. “He’s happy with this,” the First Lady tells Card, referring to the First Gentleman, “but I’m not. I don’t know why he’s not upset with this.”

  Is Bush “upset with this”? Or is he the only human being in the Western world who is “happy with this”? As I have already said, psychohistorians point to two internal mechanisms that allow us to live, for a while, with an unendurable truth: “numbing” (whereby the self is drained of affect), and also “doubling” (whereby the self divides into the ventricle that knows and the ventricle that doesn’t). Bush isn’t “doubling.” What he seems to be doing is “bubbling”: isolated from all discordant counsel, he has swaddled himself in “unshakeable conviction.” The best reason for going into Iraq, in 2003, was to help bring about the healing of its people—a people often referred to in these pages as “an abused child,” “a traumatized child.” And what have we done to that child? As its new guardian, Bush can’t not know what he has done to that child.

  One of the many deranging consequences of September 11 was the reification of American power. Until that date, “U.S. hegemony” was largely a matter of facts and figures, of graphs and pie charts. Thereafter it became a matter of options and capabilities, of war plans cracked out on the President’s desk. We can understand the afflatus, the rush of blood, in the White House: overnight, demonstrably, and palpably, a tax-cutting dry drunk from West Texas became the most powerful man in human history. One wonders, nowadays, how it goes with Bush, in his glands and his sinews. From September 11 to the autumn of 2003, he had the body language of the man in the bar who isn’t going anywhere till he has had his fist fight. Now he looks washed, rinsed, bleached, his flat smile an awful rictus; that upper lip has lost all its lift.

  Students of history are aware that illusion—or, if you prefer, psychopathology—plays a part in shaping world events. It is always a heavy call on human fortitude to acknowledge that such a thing is happening before our eyes, in broad daylight and full consciousness. On the opposing side we see illusion in its rawest form: virtuous and murderous fanaticism. On ours, we see a vertiginous power rush followed by a vacuum, and then a drift into helplessness and paralysis. That vacuum was itself reified after the fall of Baghdad, when the plunder began and the soldiers stood and watched, and it slowly emerged that there was no policy for the peace. Then came a dual disintegration, like that of the Twin Towers: the collapse of the authority of the state, and the collapse of the value of human life.

  In his two previous books on the foreign policy of the current Administration, Woodward deployed his main journalistic strength—privileged access. Bush at War (Afghanistan) and Plan of Attack (the Iraq invasion) were the blushing beneficiaries of Washingtonian hubris, with all the key players queueing up to boast and crow. In State of Denial, Woodward slinks through a tight-mouthed pall of failure. He gets a couple of creepy afternoons with Rumsfeld, but now the information is coming his way at one remove, if not two. Should there be a further book, say in 2008, one fears that Woodward will be reduced to grilling the interns.

  Still, we get a pretty fair idea of how it all happened. The dynamic was unanimity of belief: the establishment, by ideological filtration, of a yes-man’s-land. Talented experts with dissenting views were sidelined: “Rumsfeld said that they needed people who were truly committed and who had not written or said things that were not supportive.” And so on, system-wide, in an atmosphere of feuds and grudges, of tantrums and bollockings. In these pages, Powell, Rice, and Rumsfeld are seen to agree on only one proposition: that the U.S. government is fundamentally “dysfunctional.” Otherwise, Woodward’s only real bombshell is the following: “If we get somebody [an enemy combatant] and we can’t get them to cooperate, we’ll hand them over to you.” That’s Bush to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia on September 13, 2001.

  Two misleadingly comical anecdotes reveal the abysmal depths of Coalition unpreparedness. Having allowed the dispersed Iraqi army to stay dispersed, the American viceroy started building a new one, catchily called the NIC (or New Iraqi Corps). It was pointed out, after a while, that this was the Arabic equivalent of calling it the FUQ. Similarly, when Frank Miller of the National Security Council joined a Humvee patrol in Baghdad (March 2004), he was heartened to see that all the Iraqi children were giving him the thumbs-up sign, unaware that in Iraq the thumb (shorter yet chunkier) does duty for the middle digit.

  But it may be that the Bush miscalculation was more chronological than geographical. In his sternly compelling book The Shia Revival, Vali Nasr suggests that the most momentous consequence of the Iraq adventure is the ignition of the Muslim fratricide, or sectarian war. Not the one between moderate and extreme Islam, which is already over, but the one between the Sunni and the Shia, which has been marinating for one and a half millennia. We can say, with the facetiousness of despair, that it’s just as well to get this out of the way; and let us hope it is merely a Thirty Years War, and not a Hundred Years War. After that, we can look forward to a Renaissance, then a Reformation, followed, in due course, by an Enlightenment. Democracy may then come to the Middle East, with Iraq, in the words of one staffer (a month into the invasion), as the region’s “cherished model.”

  OCTOBER 2006. The Times

  Review of State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, 2006)

  Demographics

  Mark Steyn is an oddity: his thoughts and themes are sane and serious—but he writes like a maniac. A talented maniac; but a maniac. In America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, the central argument gets going, pretty typically, with some reflections on the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding:

  Most of us have seen a gazillion heart-warming ethnic comedies…in which some uptight WASPy type starts dating a gal from a vast, loving, fecund Mediterranean family, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins and uncles that you can barely get in the room. It is, in fact, the inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of “lowest-low” fertility, from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece’s fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe…

  A “gazillion heart-warming ethnic comedies” with that storyline? Why, I don’t think I’ve seen even a trillion, or even a billion, or even a million, or even a thousand, or even a hundred, or even ten. But never mind for now. The “big Italian family, with Papa pouring out the vino and Mama spooning out the pasta” down a table that seems to stretch to infinity, will soon be a thing of the past. By the year 2050, Steyn spookily informs us, 60 percent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no uncles, no aunts, and no cousins.

  With the sole exception of America, the nations of the First World are in demographic decline. Not a single Western European country is procreating at the “replacement rate” of 2.1 births per woman (and the population of Spain, for instance, will be halving every thirty-five years). This may seem to be the logical fate of advanced societies on a stressed planet: there will be crises of distorted age structures and unaffordable pension liabilities, and so on, but it’s the kind of future envisaged by some of our dreamier greens. We may note here, incidentally, that Mr. Steyn is a hardy skeptic about “climate change,” and never uses the phrase without those noli me tangere quotation marks. The reader sometimes feels that America Alone, for all its immediacy and glitter, its stop-press tag lines and flashbulb vulgarisms, went to press in about 1975. For the author, global warming is the day after tomorrow (if ever); and we haven’t got that long.

  A depopulated and simplified Europe might be tenable in a world without enmity and predation. And that is not our world. The birth rate is 6.76 in Somalia, 6.69 in Afghanistan, and 6.58 in Yemen. “Notice what these countries have in common?” writes Mr. Steyn, adding, with his usual incontinence: “Starts with an I and ends with a slam. As in: slam dunk.” Albania’s birth rate is a third of Afghanistan’s, but it’s the highest in Europe. “And why would that be? Because it’s Europe’s only majority Muslim country. At the moment.” After Ireland, Denmark, Finland, and Holland, the highest Western European birth rate is that of France, with 1.89. But “the evidence suggests that a third of all births there are already Muslim.” Meanwhile:

  Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.

  Now those aren’t the words of Mr. Steyn—or, say, of Jean-Marie Le Pen. The speaker is Mullah Krekar of Norway. As Colonel Gaddafi puts it: “There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe—without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

  Any acknowledgment of the fear of being out-bred inevitably reminds us of eugenics and forced sterilization and the like; and many good modern Westerners, reading Mr. Steyn, will feel the warm glow of righteousness that normally precedes an accusation of “racism.” As Mr. Steyn patiently insists, however, “it’s not about race; it’s about culture.” If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, it doesn’t matter what creed or color they are; but if some of them believe in sharia and the Caliphate, and so on, then the numbers are clearly crucial. Later in the book, he makes the same point from the other direction. A one-time white-supremacist called David Myatt has changed his name to Abdulaziz ibn Myatt; and Abdulaziz ibn Myatt is a ferocious jihadi. “A lot of his fellow ‘white supremacists,’” writes Mr. Steyn, “will find it’s not the ‘white’ but the ‘supremacist’ bit they really like.” Islamism, obviously, will attract the violent. The violent, the pathological, and—needless to say—the anti-Semitic.