Finding out what they want

Let's admit it, we are scared. America seems to be run by a cabal of characters who think that Dr Strangelove was a documentary and Peter Sellers offered a paradigm of modern leadership. This bizarre group - Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Richard Perle - believe we are locked in a final battle between civilisations.

The "War on Terror" is a conflict between good and evil, between the darkness and the light. The only people who agree with this clumsy doomsday analysis are Osama bin Laden and his cronies in al Qaeda.

The rest of us are left watching baffled as the Twin Towers collapse, Afghanistan is bombed, Iraq invaded, Israel and Palestine swamped in blood.

We are not quite convinced by the reductionist arguments of the American neo-conservatives, nor by the millennarian lunacy of Bin Laden.

These views are no more convincing than the bare-faced lies Tony Blair told Parliament in the preposterous "intelligence dossier" he presented to justify the war against Saddam Hussein. The CIA came up with another "stupid file" - this one pretending that Niger was selling uranium to Saddam. This included a faked letter signed by a "foreign minister" who had been out of office for years.

No wonder we're scared. We have little faith in our "protectors" - but we know that out there and among us there are men and women who want to kill our children, tear down our homes and send us all back to the sixth century. Who are they? Why do they want to do this? Can they be stopped?

Jason Burke's book offers cold comfort. But it should be compulsory reading for Rumsfeld and his clique.

As he watched B-52 bombers rain explosives on Tora Bora, Bin Laden's last hideout in the Spin Gar mountains of eastern Afghanistan, Burke was struck by the futility of the exercise. Unlike the Americans and Dubya's poodle Blair, Burke asked those basic questions - and then set out to answer them.

His conclusions are chilling. First, al Qaeda, strictly, does not exist. It's more an idea, a motivation, than an organisation. It will, therefore, be very difficult to destroy. Al Qaeda isn't hydra-headed, it is barely even a loose alliance of likeminded groups of Islamic radicals spread across the globe from Manila to Manchester.

Bin Laden, Burke convincingly argues, had not been much of a player in Islamic terror until recently. He was not behind the 1993 attack on the Twin Towers, nor the 3 October 1993 killing of 18 US soldiers in Mogadishu. These days he's a figurehead for terrorist groups, a symbol of the struggle against Western capitalism and secular thought world-wide, but he's not the leader. The Saudi billionaire is more Sugar Daddy than criminal mastermind.