The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East

But it was more complicated than this. Farmers who had never grown poppies began to plant them so they could get free maize seed in return for destroying the fields they had just planted.’

The Saudi royal family had promised sharia laws while at the same time allowing the United States ‘to Westernise Saudi Arabia and drain the economy’. He blamed the Saudi regime for spending $25 billion in support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran – Iraq war and a further $60 billion in support of the Western armies in the 1991 war against Iraq, ‘buying

President Clinton’s ‘anti-terrorism’ conference at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh was regarded by Arabs as a humiliation.

massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist militia allies in 1982 and the slaughter by Israeli artillerymen of 106

Howard K. Smith, who fled Nazi Germany on the last train from Berlin before Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941; James Cameron, whose iconic 1946 report from the Bikini atom tests was perhaps the most literary and philosophical article ever published in a newspaper.

I smiled back the rictus of false friendship.

were less an attempt at religious revival than a continuation of life in the vast dirt camps in which so many millions of Afghans had gathered on the borders of their country when the Soviets invaded sixteen years before.

1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

What kind of Islamic state would bin Laden wish to see? Would thieves and murderers still have their hands or heads cut off in his Islamic sharia state, just as they do in Saudi Arabia today? There came an unsatisfactory reply. ‘Islam is a complete religion for every detail of life. If a man is a real Muslim and commits a crime, he can only be happ