The making of a master criminal “An anguished John le Carré says we wasted our cold war victory and are now assisting our enemy.” I’ve been following le Carré for twenty years, reading everything of his I could get my hands on, ever since one of my psychiatric mentors, Leston Havens, mentioned that le Carré had the best characterizations he had ever read in fiction. Here’s how he nails bin Laden:

The stylised television footage and photographs of Bin Laden suggest a man of homoerotic narcissism, and maybe we can draw a grain of hope from that. Posing with a Kalashnikov, attending a wedding or consulting a sacred text, he radiates with every self-adoring gesture an actor’s awareness of the lens. He has height, beauty, grace, intelligence and magnetism, all great attributes unless you’re the world’s hottest fugitive and on the run, in which case they’re liabilities hard to disguise. But greater than all of them, to my jaded eye, is his barely containable male vanity, his appetite for self-drama and his closet passion for the limelight. And just possibly this trait will be his downfall, seducing him into a final dramatic act of self-destruction, produced, directed, scripted and acted to death by Osama Bin Laden himself.

Read the entire essay, both for his tortured message and his eloquence. He concludes:

…please, Mr Bush – on my knees, Mr Blair – keep God out of this. To imagine God fights wars is to credit Him with the worst follies of mankind. God, if we know anything about Him, which I don’t profess to, prefers effective food drops, dedicated medical teams, comfort and good tents for the homeless and bereaved, and, without strings, a decent acceptance of our past sins and a readiness to put them right. He prefers us less greedy, less arrogant, less evangelical, and less dismissive of life’s losers.

It’s not a new world order, not yet, and it’s not God’s war. It’s a horrible, necessary, humiliating police action to redress the failure of our intelligence services and our blind political stupidity in arming and exploiting Islamic fanatics to fight the Soviet invader, then abandoning them to a devastated, leaderless country. As a result, it’s our miserable duty to seek out and punish a bunch of modern-medieval religious zealots who will gain mythic stature from the very death we propose to dish out to them.

And when it’s over, it won’t be over. The shadowy armies of Bin Laden, in the emotional aftermath of his destruction, will gather numbers rather than wither away. So will the hinterland of silent sympathisers who provide them with logistical support. Cautiously, between the lines, we are being invited to believe that the conscience of the West has been reawakened to the dilemma of the poor and homeless of the earth. And possibly, out of fear, necessity and rhetoric, a new sort of political morality has indeed been born.

But when the shooting dies and a seeming peace is achieved, will the United States and its allies stay at their posts or, as happened at the end of the cold war, hang up their boots and go home to their own back yards? Even if those back yards will never again be the safe havens they once were. Sunday Times of London