Boomerang Times

Last night Channel 4 aired ex-CIA man Robert Baer's documentary, The Cult of the Suicide Bomber, part of the station's New World War strand. (From experience back home, V reckons there's no such thing as an 'ex' CIA man - that it's rather like describing someone as a former terrorist or murderer.)

In person Colorado-native Baer is far less charismatic than George Clooney, who is to play him in Syriana. After 22 years in the Agency he resigned in disgust after the failed attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1995. In some ways he is Langley's Heseltine - in spite of his contrarian views there are strong hints of a conservative agenda in his organisation of the facts.

Unlike Robert Pape who deliberately extends his search beyond Islam, Baer locates the origins of the martyrdom cult in the Iranian Revolution. He also has a clearer notion that it cannot be understood purely in terms of its history, because it continues to expand and mutate. The programme showed Baer attending Friday morning prayers in Tehran, a scene scarily reminiscent of the two minute hate in Nineteen Eighty Four.

Whilst many look to events in Israel or Afghanistan to explain the current pandemic of Islamic extremism, Baer may be right to suggest that the resurgence of the theocratic tendency within Islam owes a great deal to the events of 1979 in Iran.

Perhaps the most frightening part of theocratic communities is the seemlessness with which church and state, individual and collective appear to be blended. Freedom's former enemy, Communism, had many more points of disconnect. The term Iron Curtain itself carried the implication that ordinary human aspirations to free expression and movement were being artificially enclosed by the Soviets. Take away the mechanics of state oppression and the people would quickly become just like the rest of us - and indeed this is what has more or less happened in the formerly en-curtained nations. It's rather less easy to be similarly optimistic about the revert-ability of those that currently submit to the will of the Ayatollahs.

Blair can keeping trying to convince us that Jihadist tendencies are a "perverted" form of Muslim devotion until the cows go mad, but the original manifestation of ascendent Islam was a theo-political one, the Caliphate. Socialism could also be pursued purely as a private faith but who can doubt the 'community' currents within it?

Residents of Londonistan should be reminded of the words of Jean Paul Sartre who, on witnessing the Algerian rejection of French tutelage, observed that "it is the time of the boomerang". Well, now it most definitely is. The coalition of the willing wants us to keep trying to throw it back at them, but we know what that will achieve. Time I think for some more holistic remedies.