When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and we knew exactly who the they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.
Speech by GEORGE W. BUSH in Council Bluffs, Iowa,
21 January 2000
‘You have to worry: has the world slipped off its hinges?’ the New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote in 1989. ‘Where can we look for assurance that it’s still the same reliably inevitable old world we loved to hate?’ Baker, one of America’s wisest political satirists, may have been kidding; but he was kidding on the level, reflecting what Newsweek, later that summer, called ‘the general unease’ at the disappearance of Cold War attitudes. Academic experts from the modish new discipline of ‘political psychology’ were much in demand over the next couple of years to explain the lack of rejoicing. ‘There is no “us” without there being a corresponding “them” to oppose,’ said Professor Howard Stein, editor of the Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology. ‘We need the bad guys, the people who embody all that stuff we want to get rid of – our greed, anger, avarice.’ Vamik Volkan, a sometime president of the International Society of Political Psychology, published a book called The Need to Have Enemies and Allies. At a seminar on the New World Order hosted by the American Psychiatric Association, Stein argued that with the crumbling of Communism ‘we’ve had a hard time finding an enemy to glom onto’. He believed that politically, as well as personally, ‘you hate somebody who embodies what you most envy’ (though how this applied to the decades of Soviet-hating was not divulged), and therefore ‘the next evil empire is going to be our economic competitor, Japan’.
The idea seemed plausible enough. A Gallup poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in 1990 found that 60 per cent of respondents regarded Japanese economic power as the ‘critical threat’ to American interests over the next decade – almost twice the 33 per cent who cited the Russian military menace. The scare was fanned by The Coming War with Japan, a bestseller in both Washington and Tokyo, in which the right-wing academics George Friedman and Meredith Lombard argued that competition for Pacific markets would almost certainly end in military combat. A CIA-sponsored report, leaked in June 1991, described the Japanese in terms pillaged from the anti-semitic lexicon –‘creatures of an ageless, amoral, manipulative and controlling culture’ who had ‘a shared national vision for world economic domination’. Although some members of congress suspected that the CIA was trying to replace the Red Peril with the Yellow Peril merely to avoid budget cuts, many officials in Washington privately agreed with the agency’s assessment that Japan was now the great menace to American national security. The hysteria crossed the Atlantic later that month, when the French prime minister Edith Cresson characterised the Japanese as ‘yellow dwarfs who sit up all night thinking of ways to screw the Americans and the Europeans’. (Cresson, it should be said, had quite a talent for giving offence: she also described her Cabinet colleagues as ‘creeps’ and announced that one Englishman in four was homosexual, a statistic inferred from the fact that no one wolf-whistled her in the streets of London. ‘You cannot imagine it in the history of France,’ she wailed. ‘Frenchmen are much more interested in women; Anglo-Saxon men are not, and this is a problem that needs analysis.’)
By the end of 1991, with election primaries looming in the United States, American politicians of all parties were blaming unfair Japanese competition for the recession at home: Virginia governor Douglas Wilder adopted the campaign slogan ‘Put America First’; Senator Tom Harkin delighted an audience of labour activists in Maine by boasting that ‘I’m proud of being accused of being a protectionist!’ Never mind that Japan’s average tariff on industrial products – 2.6 per cent – was actually lower than the US average, of 3 per cent; nor that World Bank figures showed Japanese and American non-tariff barriers to be roughly equal. Why let facts intrude on the hustings? Soon after announcing his intention of challenging President Bush for the Republican presidential nomination, the hoarse right-wing demagogue Pat Buchanan was asked about his attitude to Japan by a reporter from a Tokyo newspaper. ‘You and I may be friends,’ Buchanan replied, ‘but we’re not going to tolerate dumping of computer chips, which take out a couple of American industries, and then sudden shortages … This is the kind of stuff that is not going to go on. We’re going to play hardball with you. If we think that you folks are going for economic hegemony in the twenty-first century … we Americans have not yet begun to fight.’ Another of Bush’s Republican rivals, the former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, was even blunter: ‘I’m from Louisiana. We produce rice. We must go to the Japanese and say, “You no buy our rice, we no buy your cars.”’ (‘Duke later denied his remarks were a slur on the Japanese,’ a deadpan report in the Chicago Tribune added.)
Meanwhile, in California, a prominent local official fired a rhetorical fusillade at a ceremony to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. ‘I’m getting sick and tired of these Japs trying to take this country over,’ yelled James Bucher, chairman of the Imperial County board of supervisors. ‘They’ll do it one way or the other … through their sneak attacks or through their dollars. It’s about time this country wakes up and puts this country back on its feet. If we rely totally on these Japs we’re going to pay the price. We’ve already paid the price and I’m not willing to pay it a second time.’ When the Japanese-American Citizens’ League demanded an apology Bucher tried to clarify his remarks by saying that the insults were directed not at Americans of Japanese descent but at ‘the damn Japs as a nation’. Delta Press Ltd, an Arkansas company, commemorated the Pearl Harbor anniversary by placing advertisements in USA Today for a ‘revenge t-shirt’ in red, white and blue, which carried a picture of a mushroom cloud with the words: ‘Made in America, Tested in Japan’. The owner of Delta Press, Billy Blann, seemed surprised by all the fuss. ‘It really is a joke, OK?’ he told the Los Angeles Times. ‘All I did was put something in print that’s behind every door in America.’
As soon became obvious, however, the damn Japs were unable to live up to their billing as bogeymen. While Americans prospered in the 1990s, Japan’s economy was floored by its sumo-sized debts: by the end of the decade, shares on the Tokyo stock exchange had lost three-quarters of their value, thousands of companies were bankrupt and the Los Angeles Times was duly recording ‘a national epidemic of indifference toward our closest Asian ally … American interest in Japan is the lowest it has been in two decades.’ In the absence of the Yellow Peril, American politicians were obliged to exhume older and more dependable ogres such as Saddam Hussein, or even occasionally that barmy old crowd-pleaser Colonel Gadafy. ‘It is human to hate,’ Samuel Huntington explained, with apparent relish. ‘For self-affirmation and motivation people need enemies: competitors in business, rivals in achievement, opponents in politics … The resolution of one conflict and the disappearance of one enemy generate personal, social and political forces that give rise to new ones.’
A visiting Martian – or indeed any intelligent child – might reasonably wonder why the leaders of the most powerful nation ever to bestride the globe should be so jumpy and insecure, especially since the only serious threat to its hegemony had disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘It’s a cycle that has repeated itself in American politics for centuries, and it’s in direct relation to how badly off people are economically,’ Robert Beckel, a Democratic Party consultant, suggested in November 1991. ‘Right now, the American voter is being driven by nothing but fear.’ True enough, up to a point: financial anxiety would account for the foamy tide of protectionism on which many candidates surfed during the 1992 presidential campaign. But it does not begin to explain why some of the most economically insignificant republics on the planet were periodically promoted to head the list of America’s Most Wanted.
Despite the vapourings of political psychologists, there is no reason to suppose that people cannot enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without having an enemy ‘to glom onto’. However, there are powerful interests in the United States which do require a constant supply of threats and villains – sometimes real, to be sure, but often exaggerated or simply invented. (Hence the resonance of the film Wag the Dog.) These interests are usually known as ‘the military-industrial complex’. One might imagine that this shorthand was invented by peaceniks or left-wing malcontents: that was also the assumption of Ronald Reagan, who in his 1985 State of the Union speech asked congress to sanction a huge budget for his two pet projects, the MX missile and the ‘Star Wars’ Strategic Defence Initiative. ‘We must not relax our efforts to restore military strength,’ he said. ‘You know, we only have a military-industrial complex until a time of danger; and then it becomes the arsenal of democracy. Spending for defence is investing in things that are priceless: peace and freedom.’ Yet the man who first used the phrase was President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a four-star general and war hero. ‘This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,’ he warned in a farewell speech on 17 January 1961, four days before handing over the White House to John F. Kennedy. ‘The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every statehouse … In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.’ Scarcely anyone heeded him; least of all President Kennedy, who had repeatedly attacked the Republicans for allowing a ‘missile gap’ to develop between the Soviet Union and the USA. (There was indeed a gap – but it was overwhelmingly in America’s favour.)
In the draft of his valedictory speech Eisenhower referred to the ‘military-industrial-congressional complex’, but he removed the third adjective because it was ‘not fitting … for a President to criticise Congress’. Admirably courteous of him, no doubt, yet the unexpurgated phrase makes far more sense. Defence contractors’ success in forcing up the military budget depends on politicians who have debts to pay and constituents to placate. During the 2000 election cycle, the four biggest arms manufacturers invested more than $11 million in campaign contributions; far more important, however, is the leverage they exert when deciding where to spend the taxpayers’ bounty which congress has so generously bestowed upon them. Republicans and right-wing Democrats who are instinctively mistrustful of publicly financed welfare programmes will do almost anything to protect and nurture this particular welfare scam from the laws of the market. Between 1978 and 1998, for instance, the US Air Force requested five Lockheed Martin C-130 transport aircraft; but members of congress, several of whom had been employed by Lockheed Martin as consultants, approved funding for the purchase of no fewer than 256 C-130S. At this rate, as Senator John McCain pointed out, there would eventually be enough of these surplus planes to park one in every schoolyard in America.
US procurement policy is so flabbergastingly corrupt, and so wholly divorced from questions of military requirement or operational efficiency, that only a satirist could really do justice to it. Even the men clinging to the pork-barrel regard it as a joke. When the Senate Republican leader Trent Lott visited Georgia in 1999 to campaign for his friend Mack Mattingly, a former senator attempting to regain his seat, he told voters that if they chose ‘good old Mack’ he would personally ensure that production of the F-22 fighter (a notorious cashguzzler, with a price-tag of $200 million per plane) remained at Lockheed’s local plant; if they elected a Democrat, production might be transferred to Lott’s own state of Mississippi. As the defence analyst William Hartung noted: ‘Given Lott’s proclivity for shovelling defence dollars to his own state for everything from a $1.5 billion Marine helicopter carrier to a space-based laser project, it took a moment for Georgians to realise that this was a joke. The irony of Lott’s remark was heightened by the fact that Mattingly had just completed a stint as paid lobbyist for Lockheed Martin.’
Just occasionally, someone with the courage of his laissez-faire convictions tries to halt the boondoggle. As long ago as 1989, George H. W. Bush’s defence secretary Dick Cheney horrified the military-industrial complex by scrapping Boeing’s V-22 Osprey, an accident-prone flying machine – half-aeroplane, half-helicopter – which Boeing had been striving to perfect for several years with no visible success. Since Boeing had cunningly spread work on Osprey around twenty states, however, almost half the legislators on Capitol Hill had a direct local interest in saving the project. By the time the defence budget emerged from congress, Osprey had been reinstated.
Cheney learned his lesson: thirteen years later, as vice-president to George Bush Junior, he supported a defence budget that included a further $2 billion for the Osprey – which was still in its ‘experimental stage’ and had been described in a Pentagon report as ‘not operationally sustainable’. (Over the previous decade four more prototypes had crashed in trials, killing thirty marines.) The same procurement estimates included an extra billion dollars for the army’s Comanche helicopter, which was ‘initiated’ in 1983 but had not yet gone into production by 2002 despite an investment of $48.1 billion. One senior Pentagon analyst was prompted to wonder if ‘this money can be followed and frozen by law enforcement as part of the war on terrorism, as the programme is clearly as much a threat to the US military as any marauding armed force in the world’.
President George W. Bush appeared at the Elgin air force base in Florida on 4 February 2002, clad in a leather bomber jacket, to announce his plan for a huge hike in military spending over the next five years. The proposed increase for 2003 alone – $48 billion – was itself higher than the entire defence budget of the United Kingdom, and the overall annual figure of $396 billion would be more than the combined total of the next fifteen highest-spending countries, including Russia and China. As retired Admiral Eugene Carroll commented: ‘For 45 years of the Cold War, we were in an arms race with the Soviet Union. Now it appears we’re in an arms race with ourselves.’
Many beneficiaries of the spending spree had no discernible connection with the war against terrorism. Almost $500 million was allocated to the Crusader self-propelled artillery system (cost so far: $9 billion), an ungainly 42-ton monster which was designed for fighting land battles against the Soviet Union and is so big that not even the most capacious cargo plane in the military fleet can actually carry it. Yet Bush’s speech, delivered against a backdrop of F-15 and F-16 fighter planes, was salted and peppered with topical references to ‘a new security environment’. For the American defence industry, which had spent the past decade fretfully calculating the consequences of a ‘peace dividend’, the identification of Islamic terrorism as the latest globe-threatening force was very good news indeed.
Our visiting Martian might note, with some puzzlement, a certain capriciousness in the official demonology. After the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, in November 1979, Iran was public enemy number one; only a few years later, emissaries from Washington were selling arms to the Iranian mullahs and using the proceeds to finance a guerrilla war against the new adversary-in-chief, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua – even while both Britain and the United States were helping Saddam Hussein prosecute his own battles against the Iranians. Washington applauded Saddam’s invasion of Iran in September 1980, which precipitated a decade of war, yet when he tried the same trick in Kuwait ten years later the full might of Nato was mobilised against ‘the Hitler of the Gulf.’
Thus is the great game of Realpolitik played. Perhaps the most eloquent summary of its rules can be found in the report of the Pike Commission, which investigated covert intervention by the US in Iran and Iraq during the 1970s. The committee members found that in 1972 Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon had told the Shah of Iran that Iraq was upsetting the ‘balance of power’ in the Gulf, and that this could best be remedied by exhorting the Kurds in northern Iraq to revolt against the Baathist regime. As the Pike report revealed: ‘Documents in the committee’s possession clearly show that the President, Dr Kissinger and the foreign head of state [the Shah] hoped that our clients [the Kurds] would not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally’s neighbouring country [Iraq]. This policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting.’ But it was imparted to Saddam Hussein, then the deputy leader in Baghdad, who eventually took the hint. He and the Shah signed a treaty in 1975 ending their border dispute and restoring the region’s ‘balance’: on the very same day Washington abruptly cut off aid to the Kurds, and Saddam began his long Blitzkrieg against Kurdistan.
Henry Kissinger and other modern heirs to the tradition of Palmerston and Metternich like to repeat the old nineteenth-century dictum that great states have no permanent friends or principles, merely permanent interests. They maintain that this deadly cynicism – which they prefer to regard as worldly-wise realism – can be justified both practically and morally. It is idealism that destroys, as in the Gulag or Pol Pot’s killing fields; the practitioners of Realpolitik or raison d’état, with their constant ‘tilts’ and ‘shifts’, may seem devious or even downright wicked to the untutored eye, yet by preserving a geostrategic equilibrium they are the true (if unacknowledged) peacemakers. The British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd proffered a fine example of this self-congratulatory style in April 1993, when explaining why the arms embargo against Bosnia should not be lifted: although ‘at first sight it seems an act of justice’, he said, in practice it would create a ‘level killing field’.
To which one can only reply with Tacitus’ resonant line: where they make a desert, they call it peace. The inference to be drawn from Hurd’s logic was that he preferred an uneven killing field, on which Slobodan Milošević provided the Bosnian Serbs with troops and weapons while the Bosnian government had to make do with whatever equipment it could buy on the black market or grab from captured enemy soldiers. Confirming this interpretation, Hurd said that allowing the Bosnians to defend themselves would ‘only prolong the fighting’. Yet the idea that lives are saved by such lofty pragmatism is not borne out by the record. The Iraqi Kurds, who endured massacres galore after being abandoned by the Americans in 1991, might not agree that Washington’s wily manoeuvring was essentially benign; nor, one guesses, would the dependants of the half-million corpses created by the Iran-Iraq War. The fruit of American Realpolitik in the region over recent decades has been war, and the seeds of future war – and further setbacks for the cause of secularism and democracy.
There is a useful American word for this –‘blowback’, a term coined by the CIA to describe the unintended and usually disastrous consequences of the agency’s activities. It was first used soon after the 1953 coup in Iran, secretly orchestrated by the CIA, which toppled Mohammed Mossadegh. (The blowback from this particular ‘covert operation’ was a quarter-century of flamboyant tyranny and increasingly brutal repression by the Shah, which in turn created the conditions for the Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumphant return – and the subsequent seizure of American hostages.) Perhaps the most sublime instance of blowback was the despatch of US troops to Panama by President George Bush in 1989, for the sole purpose of arresting President Manuel Noriega and hauling him off to a Florida courtroom on charges of racketeering and drug-running. While awaiting trial, Noriega was approached by American prosecutors with an extraordinary plea-bargain: he could use cash from his foreign bank accounts (which had been frozen) to hire the best lawyers that dollars could buy, if in return he agreed not to mention that he had been on the payroll of the CIA since the 1970s. As they explained, rather unnecessarily, such an admission could be embarrassing, not least because the director of the CIA at the time of Noriega’s recruitment, in the days of the Ford administration, had been a certain George Bush – who, as president, was now pursuing a ‘war on drugs’. As R. M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez Bourbon write in their lively, angry book In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama 1968–89:
The very concept of a war on drugs became meaningless with Black Eagle and Supermarket, the CIA operations whereby weapons were secretly supplied to the Contras [in Nicaragua] in contravention of congressional strictures. In Black Eagle, Israeli stocks of captured PLO weapons were moved from Texas to Central America by means of Noriega’s network of hidden airstrips … Instantly grasping that drug pilots would be sitting in the cockpits of empty planes for the return flights, Noriega alertly filled the void by arranging for them to carry narcotics. The CIA, of course, was buying the gas, as well as protecting the whole operation against the impious meddling of law-enforcement organisations, which put the US government in the cocaine trade – that is, in the war against drugs but on the wrong side.
Incidentally, the American invasion of Panama in 1989 was named Operation Just Cause. No irony was intended.
Noriega’s entrepreneurial flair compels a certain admiration. Nor should one overlook the CIA’s ingenuity in devising a scheme whereby weapons would be seized from Palestinian fighters by Israel, transferred to the US and then forwarded to the Contras via the agency’s chief ‘asset’ in Panama. Something similar had been practised in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan wanted to assist the raggle-taggle army of Islamic fighters in Afghanistan while retaining ‘deniability’. Although the US spent about $5 billion funding the various mujahedin armies, until 1985 it provided them with Eastern-bloc weapons which would look as if they had been captured from Russian soldiers rather than despatched from Washington. To distance itself further from the fray, it subcontracted the day-to-day supervision of the rebels to its allies Saudia Arabia and Pakistan. The greatest beneficiary of this policy was a young construction engineer named Osama Bin Laden.
The declared purpose of President George W. Bush’s Afghan War in the autumn of 2001, beyond the obvious and immediate aim of destroying al-Qaeda and the Taliban, was to install a regime in Kabul that would respect women’s rights, promote secular education and lead the nation out of the middle ages. Yet throughout the 1980s Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had offered both financial and political support to fundamentalists – or ‘freedom fighters’, as they were styled – whose sole intent was to dislodge a government committed to just such a programme. ‘The blowback theory is dead wrong,’ a writer in the New Republic insisted. ‘American intervention in the Afghan war didn’t create Osama bin Laden. In fact, if the United States bears any blame for bin Laden’s terrorist network today, it’s because in the 1980s and 1990s we didn’t intervene aggressively enough.’ There are echoes here of the line still occasionally heard from disgruntled veterans who have seen Rambo rather more often than is good for their sanity: that the Vietnam War could also have been ‘won’ if only politicians in Washington hadn’t been so feebly pusillanimous. Inspecting the corpse-strewn landscape of Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, and Afghanistan in the 1980s, one wonders just how much more aggression or intervention was required. Successive American administrations bankrolled and trained more than 25,000 zealots from thirty Islamic countries to join the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan (without ever pausing to wonder if these militants might eventually turn the jihad against their paymasters). Even after the withdrawal of the last Russian troops in February 1989 – under the terms of the Geneva agreement signed the previous year – the US, Britain and Pakistan continued to arm the Islamic counter-revolutionaries, urging them to fight on until total victory was achieved. As Professor Fred Halliday wrote at the time, ‘it was an irony indeed that in the middle of February 1989, when the Western world was united in outrage at Islamic fundamentalists’ calls for the death of Salman Rushdie, protagonists of that very same fundamentalism should, in the guise of freedom fighters, be mustering at the gates of Kabul, incited by the whole of the Western world and brandishing missiles supplied by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Few bothered to ask what the Islamic state propounded by these mujahedin entailed.’
Though unasked, the question was answered soon enough. In 1990 the ever-helpful CIA provided the blind Muslim cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman with a visa to enter the USA. Abdel-Rahman, whose son Mohammed was to become one of Osama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenants, repaid the agency’s generosity by preaching jihad from his base in New Jersey, and in 1996 was convicted of plotting to bomb the UN building and other New York landmarks – including the World Trade Centre.
Historical irony is, of course, the essence of blowback. Thus, after 11 September 2001, Margaret Thatcher chided British Muslim leaders for not having been sufficiently robust in their condemnation of Afghan terrorism. ‘Passengers on those planes were told that they were going to die and there were children on board,’ she raged. ‘They must say that is disgraceful.’ Yet in 1986 she had invited the young Afghan resistance leader Abdul Haq to fly to London at the British taxpayers’ expense and be entertained in Downing Street. Haq was a self-confessed terrorist who in September 1984 had planted a bomb at Kabul airport, killing twenty-eight people – most of them schoolchildren who were preparing to fly to Moscow. His purpose, he explained, was ‘to warn people not to send their children to the Soviet Union’. He also defended the firing of long-range rockets at Kabul, which had killed many civilians and children. ‘We use poor rockets, we cannot control them,’ he shrugged. ‘They sometimes miss. I don’t care … if I kill 50 civilians.’ Did Thatcher – who was leading a crusade of her own at the time to deny Irish terrorists the oxygen of publicity – rebuke Haq for his ‘disgraceful’ callousness? Far from it: she exhorted him to persevere with ‘one of the most heroic resistance struggles known to history’.
The blowback theory is not ‘dead wrong’; nor is it new. Karl Marx identified the phenomenon as long ago as 1857 when reporting on the violent mutiny by Sepoys, native soldiers in the Anglo-Indian army: ‘There is something in human history like retribution, and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender. The first blow to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility; not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the Ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped by the British, but with the Sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered by them.’ Or, as Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels said, ‘those who unleash controlled forces also unleash uncontrolled forces’.
The Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew has calculated that in the 1960s there was not a single religious or cult-based terrorist group anywhere, and as recently as 1980 only two of the world’s sixty-four known terrorist groups were religious. Since then, however, Shi’a extremists alone have been responsible for more than a quarter of the deaths from terrorism. ‘We are not fighting so the enemy will offer us something,’ the former Hezbollah leader Hussein Massawi said. ‘We are fighting to wipe out the enemy.’ Whereas groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organisation or the Provisional IRA spread terror for a specific and limited political purpose, their religious successors raised mass slaughter to an end in itself. The intelligence chief of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which released nerve gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995, explained that ‘we regarded the world outside as evil, and destroying the evil as salvation’.
Bruce Hoffmann, the author of Inside Terrorism, argues that this marked a return to an old tradition that had been only briefly interrupted by modern secularism. Until the late nineteenth century all terrorism was essentially religious, bent on annihilation of infidels. The leaders of Hezbollah and al-Qaeda thus had far more in common with the Christian fanatics of early modern Europe than with their immediate predecessors such as Abu Nidal or Carlos the Jackal – as some Christians, at least, appeared to recognise. Two days after the 11 September attacks in 2001 the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, America’s best-known TV evangelists, appeared on The 700 Club, a religious chat-show. ‘What we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve,’ Falwell opined. The carnage was an expression of God’s wrath at ‘the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians … the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularise America’. To which Robertson replied: ‘I totally concur.’