And if we need more proof of that, just read this extensive article from the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) last week about the still-growing impact of Osama on the United States and on our world:

From Part 1: " The anxieties of the Europeans over Bush hae been awakened... because they are afraid that the man who once said that Jesus Christ was the political philosopher who had had the most influence on him is himself simple enough to believe his own words. If Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" speech in 1983 was meant to frighten the Soviet Union with our actor-president's irresponsibility, Bush's "axis of evil" might have been designed to reassure our allies that nothing has changed, now that we have a Texas cowboy in the White House. They are still needed to keep us from behaving recklessly. Richard Nixon, who always preferred to do these things through "back channels", once instructed Henry Kissinger to impress upon the leaders in the Kremlin that he, Nixon, was dangerously unstable, if not mad, and would be capable of doing anything if provoked."

From Part 2: "Americans are so scared and so outraged, that they will do virtually anything to help stamp out the threat to the American way. That includes brushing aside most considerations of due process, world opinion, fiscal practicality and any questioning of the goals of this war... The truth is...that the actual military effort required is not that great, at the moment at least. The successful campaign in Afghanistan was largely an Afghan civil war in which one set of unpopular Afghans were routed by slightly less unpopular Afghans, who happened to receive a large amount of American aerial support and a significant amount of special forces assistance and guidance as well. The war is evoked to justify large sacrifices from American society. The budget cuts, however, fall disproportionately on those areas of government which benefit and protect America's poor and the environment. The immense increases in the defence budget,...obviously benefit the military establishment, a largely Republican constituency. These vast sums are also a great boost for defence contractors, who are also generally in the Republican camp. Meanwhile, the sacrifice demanded from the rich is that they accept billions of dollars' worth of yet more tax cuts. Fiscal conservatives should be aghast at this budget, but social conservatives such as Bush are not, for it makes it almost impossible for the federal government to do anything further in the form of social programmes. By raiding the Social Security and Medicare kitties, it makes securing America's social safety net - what there is of it - much more difficult, and a privatization of the system that much more likely. "

[The Times Literary Supplement (U.K.) - 15 March 2002 - Part 1]: When George W. Bush started talking in his State of the Union Speech about extending the "war on terrorism" to the three countries - Iraq, Iran and North Korea - that comprise, in his memorable phrase, an "axis of evil", many governments around the world, including most of America's allies, were alarmed, and rightly. Subsequently, the phrase has been qualified and rationalized by those governments and most foreign commentators, as well as many of the more centrist and liberal American commentators, so that it is seen as a combination of a reach for rhetorical grandeur, a bit of sabre rattling, and a large amount of brinkmanship. The spokesmen of the Right in America, however, such as William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Michael Kelly, have taken Bush at his word, and given him their full support for this campaign (one is no longer allowed to use the word "crusade", for obvious reasons) against "tyranny". And it looks as though Bush does in fact mean it, in some form or another.

It is understandable why, from abroad, this dramatic heightening of the stakes in the response to September 11 is so hard to take at face value. It seems completely unrealistic, because so impractical and so utterly destabilizing of the world system as we know it. From within America, though, in the present climate, to dismiss Bush's repeated ultimata to the "axis of evil" as mere injudicious rhetoric is a big mistake. The truth is that the war against terrorism, and the continuation and expansion of the war to encompass any conceivable threat to America's security, have a domestic political logic going for them that is nigh on irresistible for a conservative Republican like Bush.

The war on terrorism is the perfect war for American conservatives. For a start, there is little doubt this time that Americans do face a threat. Not since Pearl Harbor has there been a direct attack on such a scale on American territory, and not since the British burnt the White House has there been an attack on this scale on the American core territory. Americans are not used to being directly attacked and have no real collective memory of being the victims of war. Immigrants might have come from war-torn regions, but they came to America precisely to escape that fate. Americans are used to relatively high levels of violence. They are also used to American military force being used against others abroad; but they are not used to being attacked by foreign powers on their home soil. American complacency about the reality of war has now been replaced by a shocked recognition of American vulnerability.

The fact that most of the thousands of victims of the attacks were civilians simply going about their daily tasks has also added to the moral outrage that feeds the urge for retribution, and opens the way to a moral rhetoric about the need to smash the "evil" networks of terrorism. This moral aspect to the "war on terrorism" has provided just that simple, all-embracing ideological clarity that American conservative foreign policy seems to need in order to function properly. After the war on "the evil empire" of the Soviet Union, the war on the "axis of evil". After 1989, we may not have known what we were for, but after September 11, we now know what we are against.

Americans are so scared and so outraged, that they will do virtually anything to help stamp out the threat to the American way. That includes brushing aside most considerations of due process, world opinion, fiscal practicality and any questioning of the goals of this war. When otherwise reasonable, liberal columnists such as Richard Cohen write in praise of anger as a way to greater clarity and insight, you know that the right wing is on to a winner. American society was already one in which violence and immediate gratification were more prevalent than in most other developed societies. Now, the emphasis on aggression as a virtue has reached new heights, so that previously moderate foreign policy analysts will say in conversation that any al-Qaeda terrorists should be killed rather than captured, because they are evil and because of the threat of future attacks.There is a lack of scruple and of balance in American public opinion that is unnerving, even when this is married to an urge for patriotic self-sacrifice and a sense of national cohesion that would otherwise be admirable.

The truth is (and this is yet another great advantage of the perfect war) that the actual military effort required is not that great, at the moment at least. The successful campaign in Afghanistan was largely an Afghan civil war in which one set of unpopular Afghans were routed by slightly less unpopular Afghans, who happened to receive a large amount of American aerial support and a significant amount of special forces assistance and guidance as well. For Americans this is War-Lite, and even if the total of Afghan civilian casualties was possibly higher than the total victims of September 11, Afghans were used to war, and seemed quite happy to have the Taleban off their backs.

The Afghan campaign is far from resolved, as the recent battle in the mountains near Gardez shows, and, in any case, this is only the first stage of the "war on terrorism", which is projected by Bush himself to go on for years. After all the belly-aching by Republicans in the Clinton years about the lack of any exit strategy for the various modest foreign interventions of that administration, one might have thought this was a drawback, but, in fact, given the rallying around the flag there has been, this is only good for Bush and his allies. The war, due to its amorphous nature (how do you define "terrorism"?; how will anyone know when it has been "beaten"?), could be endless, or it could be over tomorrow. I suspect it will go on as long as the Republicans think they can persuade the American electorate that the terrorist threat is real enough to justify neglect of domestic reform - and, more than that, a powerful tool for enabling President Bush's conservative political and social agenda. Annoying civil rights for foreigners and citizens, bothersome freedom of information rights for journalists, and possibly for congressmen, can all be swept aside in the name of "homeland security". Now that the Government is in the hands of conservatives for the foreseeable future, Government is once again good - libertarians can go cry in a corner somewhere.

The threat of war allows the Bush administration to blame the disappearance of the budget surplus on the effects of September 11, rather than their irresponsible tax cuts; it further allows them, as the recent budget proposal makes clear, to press home a radical reordering, indeed distortion, of the federal government's priorities.

The war is evoked to justify large sacrifices from American society. The budget cuts, however, fall is proportionately on those areas of government which benefit and protect America's poor and the environment. The immense increases in the defence budget, which would make total American defence expenditure almost as great as the rest of the world's put together, when the American military is already too advanced for its NATO allies effectively to collaborate with it, obviously benefit the military establishment, a largely Republican constituency. These vast sums are also a great boost for defence contractors, who are also generally in the Republican camp. Meanwhile, the sacrifice demanded from the rich is that they accept billions of dollars' worth of yet more tax cuts.

Fiscal conservatives should be aghast at this budget, but social conservatives such as Bush are not, for it makes it almost impossible for the federal government to do anything further in the form of social programmes. By raiding the Social Security and Medicare kitties, it makes securing America's social safety net - what there is of it - much more difficult, and a privatization of the system that much more likely.

It should surprise no one that there is hardly any money in the budget to address the causes of terrorism. There is a paltry increase in the State Department's budget, but I have yet to see any substantial increase in the foreign aid budget. Indeed, the administration has managed to scuttle British attempts to get large increases in foreign aid spending by the developed countries, despite the well-made argument that improving the lot of the poorest in the world is one of the best ways of "draining the swamp", preventing the hopelessness and distress that are the breeding ground of terrorism. With support for Bush at 85 per cent, the Democrats running scared (Tom Daschle notwithstanding) and domestic opponents wary of being too critical for fear of being seen to be unpatriotic, why should the Bush administration do anything that the global community wants, just because it would diminish the threat of terrorism that sustains their domestic hegemony?

Had there been a domestic need for more circumspection, one might have expected a return to a more low-key approach after Afghanistan that emphasized intelligence countermeasures and international, multilateral police collaboration. One might have hoped for a realization of some of the rhetoric of "compassionate conservatism" on an international scale, increasing foreign aid and opening domestic markets, not only for the effect on mitigating the temptation of terrorism, but also for the positive effect on America's image in the world. Given the largely sympathetic international reaction after September 11, one might have hoped for some new appreciation of the merits of multilateral co-operation. Instead, foreign aid is derided, and swingeing tariffs are imposed on steel imports. Instead of trying to employ the immense economic and ideological power of the United States to prevent deadly conflict, the administration seems more intent on using its military power to pre-empt the threat of "weapons of mass destruction" (or at least those possessed by regimes it does not like) by threatening deadly conflicts of its own with the "axis of evil". But then, why go against your aggressive and unilateralist instincts when there is nothing back home to stop you?

Do not expect much in the way of cooperation by the US, by any but military means, towards calming today's turbulent world; the Bush administration is doing just fine with the state of war as it is. Now, if only Enron would go away . . . .

The Times Literary Supplement (U.K.) - 15 March 2002 - Part 2: When last week the Sunday Times gave to a story from Washington, by Tony Allen-Mills, the headline "Pentagon has nuclear hit list of seven nations", I wonder how many nervous Britons bought the paper to find out if, perhaps, they were on the list. As it turned out, the seven were China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria, and, in spite of the provocative designation of these countries as a "hit list", few attentive readers can have been surprised to learn that there were such contingency plans with respect to any of them, since all are past or potential enemies who either have nuclear weapons themselves or are believed by American strategic planners to be in the process of trying to acquire them. The real scandal would have been if, possessing all that megatonnage of destructive power, the Pentagon had no idea against whom it might be used.

Yet so far, it appears that the leak of the Pentagon's list of nuclear targets has terrified those who aren't on it much more than those who are. Nor are such fears much less among American commentators than among European ones. It was, after all, the New York Times reporter John H.Cushman Jr, and not Mr Allen-Mills, who helpfully informed his readers that "Critics are bound to argue that Mr Bush is making a radical and dangerous shift to a first-strike policy". And have we not the assurances of European eminences such as Chris Patten, Joschka Fischer and Hubert Vedrine of how dangerous and "simplistic" it is to talk about an "axis of evil"? Have not more than sixty Labour MPs proclaimed their unwillingness to follow such a simpleton to Baghdad? Has not Jimmy Carter spoken of his successor's understanding of the strategic situation as being "simplistic and counterproductive" and claimed that the diplomatic damage would take years to repair?

It seems to me very odd that the complaint of all these critics of President Bush is not, on the whole, that the leaders of Iraq, Iran and North Korea are not evil, or even that they are not an axis, though some have made this point too. That all democracies, and especially the American democracy, on their entry into war, customarily demonize their enemies in some such fashion was perhaps an unspoken assumption. Bill Clinton did it to Slobodan Milosevic, Bush's father to Saddam Hussein, and every President from Truman to Reagan did it to the empire that the latter called "evil". Most sophisticates understand that the simplisme (to use M. Vedrine's word) of such language is useful in enlisting the support of simple people (unfortunately, a majority) for war, which is often unpleasant and might be especially so against an enemy armed with those "weapons of mass destruction".

In fact, at least since the atrocity stories that accompanied the outbreak of the First World War, no democratic nation has attempted to fight a sustained war of the kind proposed against terrorist organizations by President Bush without some resort to the language of evil. (Sometimes the language is even true. Recently, John Horne and Alan Kramer have argued that it was true, at least with respect to the atrocity stories in the First World War, in their German Atrocities, 1914, reviewed in the TLS, December 21, 2001.) The language of national honour having been rendered obsolete in the twentieth century, how could it be otherwise? Yet it is a war of national honour that Bush, in effect, proposes to fight. And must fight. For so grievous a blow as that struck against the United States on September 11, if unanswered by force - and such force as to make American military superiority overwhelmingly apparent - could only invite actual as well as potential enemies to strike again, and harder. How otherwise than as "evil" can he characterize such a likelihood, if he is to summon up the necessary determination of the American people to forestall it?

The anxieties of the Europeans over Bush hae been awakened, one surmises, because they are afraid that the man who once said that Jesus Christ was the political philosopher who had had the most influence on him is himself simple enough to believe his own words. Some among the American elite may have the same fear, but mostly they are upset because the Europeans are upset. The language of axes and evil seemed an infallible sign that President Bush intends to "go it alone", as he was thought to have done in the first eight months of his term over the Kyoto treaty and missile defence. Then, too, the merits neither of the treaty nor of missile defence experiments were of much interest compared to the shock of this "going it alone".

In fact, Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a former Clinton administration official, has just published The Paradox of American Power: Why the world's only superpower can't go it alone (222pp. Oxford University Press. $26. 0 19 515088 0), largely written before Bush's brief foray into multilateralism. Nye recommends to the new administration the example of Britain, which he says was able to extend its influence well beyond the reach of its declining imperial power with the aid of international institutions that it helped to set up, such as the UN and the World Bank. Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their famous Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight, because, said the Washington Post, of "growing concern about the security of stockpiled nuclear weapons around the country, the rising disparity between rich and poor and the increasing willingness of the United States under President Bush to go it alone".

Such fear of American power among the American intellectual elites who feel themselves excluded from it may owe something to the habits of mind of those, now in their fifties, who were students and potential draftees during the Vietnam War. Then, too, the Communist enemy had been "demonized" and - lo! - proved not to be demons but nationalists and patriots. Yet, as David E. Sanger remarked in the New York Times, "President Bush and his top aides now seem to welcome, even to egg on, the sharp differences prompted by Mr Bush's determination to expand his battle against what he calls 'evil'regimes." On several occasions, Sanger wrote, and "in appearances across the country, he has built on the 'axis of evil' phraseology . . . knowing full well that each repetition irritates and divides the countries he once hailed as his great coalition partners." And, as if that weren't enough, reports emerged of a new Office of Strategic Influence at the Pentagon which would have functioned as a kind of ministry of propaganda - or lying to foreigners.

All the same, I wonder if the administration's new arrogance towards Europe may not be something other than a product of mere ignorance, philistinism and trust in Jesus. Though Jack Straw said that the "axis of evil" remark was "best understood in the context of the midterm elections in November", it is possible that the elections the President had in mind were the French and German ones in May and September. Gerhard Schroder, in particular, has gone out on a limb and endangered his government's coalition with the Greens by his support for America.

Could it be possible that Bush's willingness to assume the oafish and "absolutist" role traditionally allotted to America in European thinking was intended as a gift to Herr Fischer's party? For by providing him with an opportunity to denounce the Americans (without any practical consequences for either the alliance or the war), he had given him a chance to shore up the governing coalition.

To a greater or lesser extent, all the alliance members have paid, and will always have to pay, a political price for being seen as the lapdogs of the Americans. Even in Britain, where the electoral price for Tony Blair of not being close to America might be greater, Blair cannot be unhappy about the signal that Straw's scepticism will have sent to readers of the Guardian or the London Review of Books - to say nothing of his own back benches. If Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" speech in 1983 was meant to frighten the Soviet Union with our actor-president's irresponsibility, Bush's "axis of evil" might have been designed to reassure our allies that nothing has changed, now that we have a Texas cowboy in the White House. They are still needed to keep us from behaving recklessly. Richard Nixon, who always preferred to do these things through "back channels", once instructed Henry Kissinger to impress upon the leaders in the Kremlin that he, Nixon, was dangerously unstable, if not mad, and would be capable of doing anything if provoked.

It ought to be reassuring then that Bush, like these predecessors, understands so well what use is to be made of America's type-casting as the lumbering colossus, stumbling across the world-stage and much in need of the wiser heads and hands of Europe to keep a grip on its tether. President Kennedy, too, must have found it useful when Harold Macmillan professed to have discovered a role for Britain as the Greece to America's Rome. It is so much better for the allies, who must come along on (or at least stand aside from) even such adventures as Vietnam, when they can see themselves as not mere parasites and hangers-on but usefully employed, as the pilot fish was once supposed to be by the shark. Perhaps this little exercise in letting them think they are so employed is the first great success of the Office of Strategic Influence, now allegedly dismantled.