The War on Terror is a war of religion

Compare the world 20 years after the 9/11 attacks to the world two decades after Pearl Harbour. World War Two was a vivid presence in popular culture and national memory in 1961, but America in the first year of John F. Kennedy’s administration was in no sense living in the shadow of Japan’s attack. That war had ended 15 years ago; Japan was now our ally in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Twenty years after 9/11, the US has only just ended its war in Afghanistan, and the result of that conflict, which lasted five times longer than the one with Imperial Japan (and Hitler’s Germany), was the immediate return to power of the regime we set out to depose at the start.

After Afghanistan, the US is still fighting a War on Terror against al-Qaeda and similar groups. The foreign-policy community continues to dream of bringing regime change to the Islamic world, while weapons of mass destruction at the disposal of the ‘Axis of Evil’ remains a preoccupation of our diplomats and think-tankers, or tank-thinkers.