Iraq dossier: What universal threat?

Peter Preston Guardian News Service London

One thing -- subconsciously, as we now say in polite society -- goes with another. Just like the CIA and George Bush. Finally on the back foot about duff Iraqi dossiers? Can't understand how all those pesky WMD got lost? Then here comes another babble of awful warnings, rubbishing British Airways (BA) and Air France schedules (with Continental as an afterthought) but leaving United, American and the rest magically untouched. Does Osama have a frequent-flyer deal with BA? Why can't Halliburton run airlines too?

It is all pretty desperate stuff -- even by the standards of this White House and the chattering chorus of mystic messages they rely on whenever the political heat turns sweaty. Sure, Baghdad is a bit of a bust. But look what we got on those al- Qaeda guys!

And there, more clearly than ever before, you have it: A vault for safety that just ends up in the pits. For why should old, frail intelligence about Iraq be so dopily dodgy -- while new, wonder, improved intelligence can put airports on red alert in a trice?

Here, fresh on British and U.S. bookstalls this week, is a different assessment of bin Laden and friends from an analyst who long ago reached parts that MI6 and the CIA never came near. Emmanuel Todd forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in clearest terms. Read La Chute Finale (1976); and now read what he says about this "war on terror" (After the Empire by Emmanuel Todd (Columbia University Press).

Al-Qaeda, Todd concludes, "is a band of mentally disturbed but ingenious terrorists". No more; no less. "It emerged from within a relatively small and circumscribed part of the planet, Saudi Arabia, even if bin Laden recruited a few Egyptian turncoats and a handful of lost souls from the poor suburbs of western Europe.

"However, America is trying to portray al-Qaeda as an omnipresent terrorist threat, as evil as it is widespread -- from Bosnia to the Philippines, from Chechnya to Pakistan, from Libya to Yemen -- thus legitimizing any punitive action it might take anywhere at any time. This elevation of terrorism into a universal force institutionalizes a permanent state of war across the globe."

Now, there's no need to buy the whole Todd thesis about the decline and fall of imperial Washington as outlined in his latest book*, translated into English after topping French and German bestseller charts. He's a distinguished Parisian demographer and historian, not an economist or political scientist, and much more persuasive on home academic ground. But here he scores runs all round the wicket.

Todd's basic case -- the case which told him that Soviet communism was in terminal trouble -- puts history and demography together. It holds that rising literacy and then falling birthrates are key, the vital shifts within society which precipitate change and democracy, and destroy dictatorships and choking peasant autocracies. There is turbulence in the change, to be sure. Bin Laden is turbulence. But it passes. And there's a true (political and media) craziness in confecting an "image of the world organized by hatred and ravaged by violence".

Between 1980 and 2000, he says, the percentage of people over 15 who can read has soared: From 33 percent to 64 percent in Nigeria, 28 percent to 56 percent in India, and 51 percent to 77 percent in Iran. The tide is general, worldwide. Even Mali has gone from 14 percent to 40 percent in two decades.

That makes a huge difference to fertility rates. India from 5.3 children per woman in 1981 to 3.2 in 2001; Brazil from 4.4 to 2.4; Vietnam from 5.8 to 2.3. And the trend in most Muslim countries is similar: Tunisia from 5 to 2.3, Iran from 5.3 to 2.6, Indonesia from 4.1 to 2.7. Demographic transformations are well under way. Good, good news for us all -- but nothing to make a headline out of, nothing to ripple across George W's blank screen.

We may reasonably worry about places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where such change has barely started. "But one can in no way deduce the existence of universal terrorism from the anti- American feelings of the populations of two Muslim countries, both intimately linked to America's power structure. A large part of the Muslim world is already in the process of finding a new peaceful equilibrium." Too much mindless talk about jihad is nonsense.

Well, of course, you can hear the Rumsfelds and Cheneys sniffing here, the Tenets tuning in for more chat. Poor old Flight 223 goes on hold. And you know that Tony and his joint intelligence committee will be sub-editing out the "maybes and perhaps" as usual. But the debacle of Iraq -- the utter absence of WMD, the transparent shabbiness of the intelligence effort and political urging involved -- makes the next, best question inevitable.

Where, please, is the evidence of universal threat that underpins this all-justifying "war on terror"? We may -- in any halfway decent investigation -- trace some of the Baghdad blatherers: Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress exile gang, for instance, telling the White House what it rejoiced to hear, laying a magic carpet of assumption for Downing Street's finest.

But Chalabi -- only a few brief months ago -- was still asserting that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were hand in glove. He was still stuck playing usually unreliable source. He was still serving the same slop to our "intelligence community".

It isn't good enough any longer. It doesn't -- and cannot -- stop with Iraq. If Bush is genuinely anxious about "what went wrong", there is more to worry about than a few 45-minute missiles gone astray. He, and Tony Blair, are really talking -- not in its urgency or seriousness, but in its deluding portent.