Osama the Dread

"A rational response" to 9/11 and bin Ladenism, Amis writes, "would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust." But it's when he varies his siren that the book snaps and snarls. During a coiled, approving review of the movie "United 93," Paul Greengrass's almost unwatchably intense recreation of the flight whose abandoned, assaulted passengers did far more than NORAD to defend the country, a furious Amis imagines having to explain the hijacking to a child on board: "Well, you see, my child, the men with the bloodstained knives think that if they kill themselves, and all of us, we will stop trying to destroy Islam and they will go at once to a paradise of women and wine." Or there's his commendable disdain for Western conspiracy cranks, who indecently mewl that the U.S. government planned the attacks and desperately "want you to sit still and listen to an epic of futile pedantry." Or his skewering of President Bush over his Iraq policy (which Amis regards as imbecilic) and propensity to cast the post-9/11 world in theological terms: "It makes him feel easier about being intellectually null. He wants geopolitics to be less about the intellect, and more about gut instincts and beliefs -- because he knows he's got them."

The last word should go, perhaps, to Tony Blair, whom Amis shadows for several days and finds far from intellectually null. At one point, the devoutly Christian prime minister remembers being lectured by Alastair Campbell, his closest aide. "Look. This isn't America. Religion and politics don't mix," Blair recalls Campbell saying.

"And when religion and politics mix?" Amis asks.

"You start saying things," Blair replies, "like 'God made me do it.' "

That is the great geopolitical danger; Amis, for one, told us so. ·

Warren Bass, a former member of the 9/11 Commission's staff, is deputy editor of The Post's Outlook section.