The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide–mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to “a tolerable level” (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven’t got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn’t feel. To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an ism: it is independence of mind—that’s all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind.

  One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be a humorless one, no doubt, with stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centers, and on the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else—a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the sole entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (in her case Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband.

  Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma—the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. “Islam,” as he frequently reminds us, “isn’t like that.” Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means “submission”—the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over fifty generations, and fourteen centuries.

  The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the last eleven hundred years. And the medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until they started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. Use of the wheel ceased soon after the emergence of Islam, perhaps as a way of protecting a transport economy based on the camel. I have seen other explanations. The wheel, as we are aware, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, in any event, the Muslim countries, with partial exceptions, had been subjugated by the European empires. And at that point the doors of perception were opened to a foreign influence: that of Germany. There was no choice—geopolitically, there was nowhere else to turn. This allegiance cost Islam its last imperium, the Ottoman, for decades a “helpless hulk” (Hobsbawm), which was duly dismantled and shared out after the First World War—a war that was made in Berlin. But Islam continued to look to Germany for sponsorship and inspiration. When the Nazi experiment ended, in 1945, sympathy for its ideals lingered on for years, but Islam was now forced to look elsewhere. And the flame, again necessarily, passed from Germany to the U.S.S.R.

  So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labor the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, antirational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fueled. The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, yet death was still death (as it was for the self-detonating but godless Tamil Tigers). For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning. What is worldly life, after all, but “the scum of existence” (Khomeini)? Sam Harris is right:

  Islamism is not merely the latest flavor of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their world has been transfigured by the light of paradise.

  Pathological mass movements are sustained by “dreams of omnipotence and sadism,” in Robert Jay Lifton’s phrase. That is usually enough. Islamism adds a third inducement to its warriors: a heavenly immortality that begins even before the moment of extinction.

  For close to a millennium, Islam could afford to be autarkic. Its rise is one of the wonders of world history—a chain reaction of conquest and conversion, an amassment not just of territory but of millions of hearts and minds. The vigor of its ideal of justice allowed for levels of tolerance significantly higher than those of the West. Culturally, too, Islam was the more evolved. Its assimilations and its learning potentiated the Renaissance—of which, alas, it did not partake. Throughout its ascendancy, Islam was buoyed by what Malise Ruthven, in A Fury for God, calls “the argument from manifest success.” The fact of expansion underwrote the mandate of heaven. And now, for the last three or four hundred years, observable reality has propounded a rebuttal: the argument from manifest failure. As one understands it, in the Islamic cosmos there is nothing more painful than the suspicion that something has denatured the covenant with God. This unbearable conclusion must naturally be denied, but it is subliminally present, and accounts, perhaps, for the apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist.

  Over the past five years, what we have been witnessing, apart from a moral slump or bust, is a death agony: the death agony of imperial Islam. Islamism is the last wave—the last convulsion. Until 2003, one could take some comfort from the very virulence of the Islamist deformation. Nothing so insanely Dionysian, so impossibly poisonous, could expect to hold itself together over time. In the twentieth century, outside Africa, the only comparable eruptions of death-hunger, of death-estrus, were confined to Nazi Germany and Stalinite Kampuchea, the one lasting twelve years, the other three and a half. Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama: such men only ask to be the last to die. But there are some sound reasons for thinking that the confrontation with Islamism will be testingly prolonged.

  It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, in the Iraq War. The fatal turn, the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy, came not with the mistaken but also calculated emphasis on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction: the intelligence agencies of every country on earth, Iraq included, believed that he had them. The fatal turn was the American President’s all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (“Mission Accomplished”)—every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.

  We should parenthetically add that Tony Blair succumbed to it too—with a difference. In “old” Europe, as Rumsfeld haughtily called it, the idea of a political class was predicated on the inculcation of checks and balances, of psychic surge-breakers, to limit the corruption that personal paramountcy always entrains. It was not a matter of mental hygiene; everyone understood that a rotting mind will make rotten decisions. Blair knew this. He also knew that his trump was not a high one: the need of the American people to hear approval for the war in an English accent. Yet there he was, helplessly caught up in the slipstream turbulence of George Bush. Rumsfeld, too, visibly succumbed to it. On television, at this time, he looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. “Stuff happens,” he said, when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad—the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarized by power. As well as the body language, at this time, there was also the language, the power language, all the way from Bush’s “I want to kick ass” to his “Bring it on”—a rather blithe incitement, some may now feel, to the armed insurgency.

  Contemplating this, one’s aversion was very far from being confined to the esthetic. Much followed from it. And we now know that an atmosphere of boosterist unanimity, of pre-war triumphalism, had gathered around the President, an atmosphere in which any counter-argument, any hint of circumspection, was seen as a whimper of weakness or disloyalty. If she were alive, Barbara Tuchman would be chafing to write a long addendum to The March of Folly; but not even she could have foreseen a president who, “going into this period,” “was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will.” A power rush blessed by God—no, not a good ambience for precautions and doubts. In 2003, the invasion of Iraq was presented as a “self-financing” preventive war to enforce disarmament and regime-change. Three and a half years later, it is a misadventure in search of an exit strategy.

  The Iraq project was foredoomed by two intrinsic realities. First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule—for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it. Did no one whisper the words, in the Situation Room—did no one say what the scholars have been saying for years? The “electoral policy” of the fundamentalists, writes Lewis, “has been classically summarized as ‘One man (men only), one vote, once.’” Or, in Harris’s trope, democracy will be “little more than a gangplank to theocracy” and that theocracy will be Islamist. Now the polls have closed, and the results are coming in, region-wide. In Lebanon, gains for Hezbollah; in Egypt, gains for Sayyid Qutb’s fraternity, the Muslim Brotherhood; in Palestine, victory for Hamas; in Iran, victory for the soapbox rabble-rouser and primitive anti-Semite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And in Iraq, a Shia religious coalition. Bush and Blair, pathetically, had both “hoped” for Allawi, whose return was 14 percent.

  Second, Iraq is not a real country. Cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early 1920s, it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces: Sunni, Shia, Kurd—a disposition which looks set to resume. Among the words not listened to by the U.S. Administration, we can include those of Saddam Hussein. Even with an apparatus of terror as savage as any in history, even with chemical weapons, helicopter gunships, and mass killings, even with a proven readiness to cleanse, to displace, and to destroy whole ecosystems, Hussein modestly conceded that he found Iraq a difficult country to keep together. As a Sunni military man put it, Iraqis “hate” Iraq—or “Iraq,” a concept that has brought them nothing but suffering. There is no nationalist instinct; the instinct is for atomization.

  A third historical reality might also have given us pause. Only the sack of Mecca and Medina, and perhaps Jerusalem, would have caused more pain to the Islamic heart than the taking, and befouling, of the Iraqi capital, the seat of the Caliphate. We have not heard any discussion, at home, about the creedal significance of Baghdad. But we have had some intimations from the jihadi front line. In pronouncements that vibrate with historic afflatus, they speak of their joyful embrace of the chance to meet the infidel in the Land Between the Rivers. It may be that the Coalition has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation—or for longer, forever, in the dependent mind, which is a mind indifferent to time.

  There are vast pluralities all over the West that are thirsting for American failure in Iraq, thirsting for regional conflagration, for a Fertile Crescent bridle-deep in gore—because they hate George Bush. Perhaps they don’t realize that they are co-synchronously thirsting for an Islamist victory that will dramatically worsen the lives of their children. And this may come to pass. Let us look at the war, not through bin Laden’s eyes, but through the eyes of the cunning of history. From that vantage, September 11 was a provocation. The “slam dunk,” the “cakewalk” into Iraq, amounted to a feint, and a trap. And we now know (from five-hundred-page best sellers like Cobra II and Fiasco) that the invasion of Iraq was quite unbelievably blithe. There was a near-infinity of exploratory research for the occupation, at the level of the subcommittee and the think tank; but when the occupation became a reality, there was no plan.

  All the same, we should not delude ourselves that the underlying motives were wholly dishonorable. This is a more complicated, and more familiar, kind of tragedy. The Iraq War represents a gigantic contract, not just for Halliburton, but also for the paving company called Good Intentions. A dramatic (and largely benign) expansion of American power seems to have been the general goal; a dramatic reduction of American power seems to be the general outcome. Iraq was a divagation in what is ominously being called the Long War. To our largely futile losses in blood, treasure, and moral prestige, we can add the loss in time; and time, too, is blood.

  An idea presents itself about a better direction to take; and funnily enough its current champion is the daughter of the dark genius behind the current disaster—she is called Liz Cheney. Before we come to that, though, we must briefly return to Ayed, and his belt, and to some quiet thoughts about the art of fiction.

  The “belt” ending of “The Unknown Known” came to me fairly late. But the belt was already there, and prominently. All writers will know exactly what this means. It means that the subconscious had made a polite suggestion, a suggestion that the conscious mind had taken a while to see. Ayed’s belt, purchased by mail order in Greeley, Colorado, is called a “RodeoMaMa,” and consists of a “weight strap” and the pommel of a saddle. Ayed is of that breed of men which holds that a husband should have sex with his wives every night. And his invariable use of the “RodeoMaMa” is one of the reasons for the rumble of mutiny in his marriages.

  Looking in at the sector of “the ‘Prism’” called Known Knowns, Ayed retools his “RodeoMaMa.” He goes back to the house and summons his wives—for the last time. Thus Ayed gets his conceptual breakthrough, his unknown unknown: he is the first to bring martyrdom operations into the setting of his own home.

  I could write a piece almost as long as this one about why I abandoned “The Unknown Known.” The confirmatory moment came a few weeks ago: the freshly fortified suspicion that there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide–mass murder. For quite a time I have felt that Islamism was trying to poison the world; and here was a sign that the poison might take—might mutate, like bird flu. Islam, as I said, is a total system, and like all such systems it is eerily amenable to satire. But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.

  In Twentieth Century the late historian J. M. Roberts took an unsentimental line on the Chinese Revolution:

  More than two thousand years of remarkable historical continuities lie behind that…upheaval which, for all its cost and cruelty, was a heroic endeavor, matched in scale only by such gigantic upheavals as the spread of Islam, or Europe’s assault on the world in early modern times.

  The cost and cruelty, according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story, amounted, perhaps, to seventy million lives. Yet this has to be balanced against “the weight of the past”—nowhere heavier than in China:

  Deliberate attacks on family authority…were not merely attempts by a suspicious regime to encourage informers and delation, but attacks on the most conservative of all Chinese institutions. Similarly, the advancement of women and propaganda to discourage early marriage had dimensions going beyond “progressive” feminist ideas or population control; they were an assault on the past such as no other revolution had ever made, for in China the past meant a role for women far inferior to those of pre-revolutionary America, France or even Russia.

  There is no momentum, in Islam, for a reformation. And there is no time, now, for a leisurely, slow-lob enlightenment. The necessary upheaval is a revolution—the liberation of women. This will not be the work of a decade or even a generation. Islam is a millennium younger than China. But we should remind ourselves that the Chinese Revolution took half a century to roll through all its villages.

  In 2002 the aggregate GDP of the Arab countries was less than the GDP of Spain; and the Islamic states lag behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality. (A recondite example: in terms of the ownership of telephone lines, the leading Islamic nation is the U.A.E., listed in thirty-third place, between Réunion and Macau.) Then, too, there are the matters of tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society. We may wonder how the Islamists feel when they compare India to Pakistan, one a burgeoning democratic superpower, the other barely distinguishable from a failed state. “What Went Wrong?” asked Bernard Lewis, at book length. Institutionalized irrationalism is the broad answer; and the particular focus, perhaps, is the obscure logic that denies the Islamic world the talent and energy of half its population. No doubt the impulse toward rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male. But we can dwell on the memory of those images from Afghanistan: the great waves of women hurrying off to school.

  The connection between manifest failure and the suppression of women is unignorable. And you sometimes feel that the current crux, with its welter of insecurities and nostalgias, is little more than a pre-emptive rage—to ward off the evacuation of the last sanctum of male power. What would happen if we spent some of the next three hundred billion dollars (this is Liz Cheney’s thrust) on the raising of consciousness in the Islamic world? The effect would be inherently explosive, because the dominion of the male is Koranic—the unfalsifiable word of God, as dictated to the Prophet: