Current Affairs: On my way through Shannon Airport I saw a woman hold a handwritten note against the double-glazed window of the transit lounge which read, "God bless you. God bless America".
The young black soldier, who looked about 14, passed by without noticing. It was unquestionably his first time outside his home county and he looked scared stiff. He could well be one of the faces which appear one day on PBS in silent homage to those killed in Iraq.
Iraq is everywhere in the US: on the television, from the mannequin-like "anchor" broadcasters who swap soundbites to brawling Fox News to heavyweight media sessions at which administration press officers, like senior school prefects, do the president's bidding, to the latest revelation of wrongdoing. And yet, notwithstanding this avalanche of coverage, little real light is shed by the interminable number of "experts" (on terrorism, on the Middle East) who are promoting their books, think-tanks or institutes. It really is a tower of Babel, but if you have God on your side, well, the likes of this kind of malarkey fits all sizes:
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."
This "Bush-speak", from an aide quoted by Ron Suskind in October 2004, is part of the dream world unpicked by Seattle-based British novelist, critic and travel writer Jonathan Raban in this excellent series of dispatches from the American home front. Two years on, the bravado has shrunk to one of those brittle smiles on NBC's Meet the Press, but My Holy War is not an "I told you so", self-regarding book. Far from it. It is full of Raban's knowledgeable fascination for the US, its mighty, embracing culture, its literature and its people. (Raban was one of those who introduced the great American poet Robert Lowell this side of the Atlantic). But the curiosity about Bush and his (disappearing) troupe of ideologues is infectious:
"It's as if America, since September 11, has been reconstituted as a colonial New England village: walled in behind a stockade to keep out Indians (who were seen as in thrall to the devil); centred on its meeting house in whose elevated pulpit stands Bush, the plain-spun preacher, a figure of nearly totalitarian authority in the community of saints. The brave young men of the village are out in the wilderness, doing the Lord's work, fighting wicked spirits who would otherwise be inside the stockade burning down Main Street and the meeting house. That, at least, is how the presidential handlers have tried to paint things."
Raban is also good on the causes of all the paranoia and fear. He tracks the ideology of fundamentalism in the September 11th hijackers, and those who have fallen in their footsteps, with almost chilly clarity, quoting from sources such as Sayyid Qutb's Milestones (1964), "the primary inspirational book of the jihad movement". When it comes to recognising the context out of which the bombers emerged in Europe and Britain, Raban's description is worth quoting in full. The September 11th hijackers, he writes,
"learned their brand of murderous revolutionism not in the Middle East, where they grew up, but in the west, where they were students. In particular, they congregated in the polyglot suburb of Harburg, south of the river Hamburg; a place that in its social and economic make-up looks a lot like the shabbier bits of Leeds, Yorkshire, or the London suburbs of Stockwell, Tulse Hill, and Streatham Hill, where the London bombers found their lodgings - that unpicturesque terrain of flats, terraced housing, betting shops, malodorous hairdressers, ethnic groceries and restaurants, stalled traffic, broken pavements, boarded-up shop fronts, the amiable muddle of gimcrack domestic and commercial architecture dating from the 1880s to the near present. Nowhere could be more 'western' in its style of down-at-heel free enterprise. This is the landscape of lax secular capitalism, out of which people - many of them recent immigrants - have quarried their own small communities, where indigent loners can easily find a room to let, the natural habitat of the eccentric sect or coterie. Anything goes."
Jonathan Raban knows what he is talking about here; he also knows a thing or two about the Middle East. If you want a book that tries to understand the bloody mess we're in, this is the one.
• Gerald Dawe's most recent poetry collections include The Morning Train and Lake Geneva. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin
My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front By Jonathan Raban Picador, 193pp. £9.99