Don’t let the facts interfere with a good war on terrorism

Until the collapse of communism, America’s experience as a great power had been of a world in which there was always (as she saw it) one great evil in the universe, committed to her total destruction. She stood for more than national self-interest; she stood, she believed (and often rightly believed), for the forces of good. A Manichaean universe in which America captains the Army of Light while in the surrounding dark ‘the hosts of Gideon/Prowl and prowl around’, characterises her whole memory of power.

That is not surprising. The Founding Fathers were (like fundamentalist Muslims today) in flight from what they saw as a fallen world. God, or destiny, had commanded America to start again. Being the New World was more than a matter of dates; it was a matter of innocence too.

It follows that the short period between 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, and 2001 when the World Trade Center followed it, was a novel and perhaps unsettling experience for America. The innocence of the early post-Revolution years may have been sacrificed to almost a century’s involvement in world affairs as a boss nation, but if she had bloodied her hands, she had bloodied them wielding the sword of light. Against whom should the armour of righteousness be put on next?

A psycho-political analyst might conclude that here, after 1989, was a great national collective unconscious in urgent search not of a God – He had been located on America’s side – but of a Devil in which it was possible for modern Americans to believe.

September 11 was not a post-Freudian allegory, of course. It was a reality whose perpetrators were not only wicked but powerful – or so it looked from the mayhem they created. But beyond being real the event was also perfectly placed as a national myth: an explanation, a clarifier, a catalyst permitting America’s perception of the era to re-form around a new version of the dualism she inwardly craves.