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Many of the indicted (and later pardoned) US officials involved, however, would remain influential in US policy circles and resume office under George W. Bush. Notable here were then assistant secretary of state Eliot Abrams and former NSC consultant Michael Ledeen. Abrams, named deputy national security adviser in February 2005 and later appointed Baghdad ambassador, had line responsibility for ‘Global Democracy and Strategy’, a concept embracing some ambiguity in the Bush administration. Whilst the personnel associated with Iran–Contra have remained in government, however, the focus in policy had shifted to regarding Iran and Shi’ism in general as the main enemy.

105 Clearly, such an outcome – whether intended or not – remains well within the bounds of possibility. But the advent of such a ‘perfect storm’ warned of in CIA assessments of the Iraq invasion106 might also be not unwelcome to some sections of the Washington policy community. 107 Ledeen’s ‘creative destruction’ advocacy had been much in vogue in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. In the next chapter we consider how this first instalment of what was to be a highly ambitious plan was at once a marketing triumph and an intelligence disaster – and how the response was sought in an equally radical transformation of public discourse into a new theatre of warfare.

As then Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, ‘Those who abet terror by spreading distortion and hate and inciting others take full advantage of the global news cycle. ’13 Unfortunately for the administration, it was the content of the global news cycle rather than its presentation that was and remains Faith and Lies  the burning issue. And here, the State Department’s own polling statistics confirmed an increasingly bleak picture. In surveys conducted in July 2004 by Zogby International, opinion in six targeted Arab countries was virtually in freefall, with those of the population ‘favourable’ to the USA overall dropping over a two-year period from a pre-Iraq figure of 38 per cent to 11 per cent in the case of Morocco, the most supportive of the group; in Jordan, a country with a modicum of regime legitimacy by Middle East standards, and underwritten by US security guarantees for decades, the drop was from 34 per cent to 15 per cent; in Egypt, the second largest recipient of US foreign aid, the decline was from 15 per cent to an alarming 2 per cent.