Concentration on pick'n'mix government does, however, distract from bigger issues. As bin Laden knows, war has its own momentum. Malaysia and Indonesia stir. Pakistan looks increasingly fissile. The relief that Bush has, for now, backed off Iraq ignores the fact that Saddam Hussein also plays battle chess. Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford University, believes that he will, within three to four weeks, begin air movements around Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and may move ground troops towards Kuwait. Would Bush's alliance dare do nothing in the face of such provocation?

In July 1995, the US Naval War College played out a game designed to explore the development of a major crisis in the Persian Gulf. A resurgent Iraq killed so many in the region with biological weapons that the only endgame for America's better military brains was a nuclear attack on Baghdad. It is three years since the UNSCOM inspectors left. Everyone believes Saddam's biological stockpile will now be fearsome. For the West to believe itself the sole driver of events is madness.

Saudi Arabia, the core of Bush's war, grows more febrile. There is no afternoon tea for Blair, nor any gesture that might inflame bin Laden's desire to depose a corrupt royal family and remove 5,000 US troops sullying the land of Mecca and Medina. He longs to collapse the degeneracy of its thousands of princes, with their leather-upholstered Mercedes and dinky mobile phones, into an underlying culture in which Valentine and Pok�mon cards are banned, and 100 public beheadings take place every year.

Beneath the veneer of lush globalization, Saudi is dying. Per capita income has halved to $7,000 over 20 years, unemployment is vast, and 10,000 half-educated graduates of Wahib apostasy have emerged from its religious schools. These are bin Laden's acolytes, bred to die and weaned on hatred; 12 of the 19 US hijackers were Saudi-born.

Until Iran and Iraq are brought back into the US fold (or the West learns to use less oil), America relies on Saudi for its survival. Should bin Laden win control of the country, Western economies would be crippled. If America has begun to work out how to deal with a nation that is now both its scourge and salvation, there is little evidence.

Instead, we get such clodhopping DIY lessons in Islam that it is not difficult to see how the mildest of mullahs despair. For Islamic scholars to be treated to the Robin Cook version of the Koran must be tiresome. For people who have never given a thought to the Taliban's take on glitter nail varnish to proclaim this a feminist war must be baffling. The treatment of Taliban women is a disgrace. But if right-wing female British commentators have a long-held desire to get Muslim women out of burkas and into Stella McCartney T-shirts with 'Bristols' emblazoned on the front, they should have said so earlier.

This war is fought for phony reasons, by protagonists who, Blair apart, rarely exude charisma or even competence. Perhaps our politicians do not have the knowledge or the insight or the moral authority to lead us through this morass. Why should they? Since Nasser's day, the Arab world has inched from socialism to secularism to nationalism to religious fundamentalism. A government that struggles to run a health service or a railway cannot be instantly expert on Islam's tussle between the modern and the arcane.

When politicians falter, it is incumbent on ordinary citizens to be wise and critical. That makes it all the more pernicious that dissent is barely possible in liberal Britain, where opponents of this war - far more than the opinion polls reflect - were derided as woolly peaceniks or callous anti-Americans, as fools, heretics or cynics. And so we get signed up to a war devoid of limit and so thin on enemies, beyond the spectral bin Laden that we are forced to invent some back-up villains. Yvonne Ridley, Kate Adie and Jo Moore are this week's baddies. Next week will produce another crop unless bin Laden strikes again, as the FBI warns he may.

Perhaps, or maybe the terrorist masterminds are too shrewd for that. Anthrax notwithstanding, the suspicion is that bin Laden waits as we, squandering the righteousness of our cause, blunder into an ugly war whose worst impact is on people who have done us no harm. Not a single Afghan citizen took part in the World Trade Center bombings.

But we had to do something, everyone says. We were entitled to strike back. Of course, but the issue is not the mandate but the method. Building on cross-cultural sympathies, dealing with the root causes of terrorism and seeking to try bin Laden in a newly-created UN court, devised with American co-operation, was the proper route. But right-wing America clamored for a war now skewered on its own crossed wires.