John Edwards can't get the high-beam smile off his face.

Picked this week as putative Democratic candidate John Kerry's running mate, his joy at the notion of becoming U.S. vice-president fairly leaps off the TV screen.

But has the junior senator from North Carolina thought it through?

He's important now. Some say his open-faced affability is, in fact, crucial if Kerry's so-far plodding campaign is ever to catch fire. But if the Democrats win Nov. 2, what then?

Will Edwards step in to the second most important job in the land, a heartbeat away from the presidency? Or, having served his purpose, will he be at a political dead end?

The first American vice-president, John Adams, called the job"the most insignificant office ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." Rather more succinct was one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's three vice-presidents, John Nance Garner, who bitterly remarked that it"isn't worth a pitcher of warm spit."

That's been the case more often than not.

It's widely acknowledged that a vice-president has a far more significant role before the election, not after, hence the term, running mate.

He's expected to broaden the appeal of the main contender, not overshadow it because it's the top of the ticket that people vote for, analysts say, not the bottom. And Kerry's choice of a running mate is textbook. Edwards' blue-collar southern roots and trial-lawyer speechifying will counterpoint the Massachusetts senator's own blue-blood East Coast dispassion.

U.S. President George W. Bush also needed a counterpoint when he chose Dick Cheney in 2000, and almost certainly will do so again next month. Cheney, secretary of defence in George H.W. Bush's administration and ultimate Washington insider, added ballast to Bush's inexperience at the federal level.

Presidential historian Allan Lichtman notes it's a myth that running mates are picked to balance the ticket geographically or to deliver a key state or region. It rarely happens because it rarely works."Only Lyndon Johnson did that, back in 1960, when he was credited with winning Texas for John F. Kennedy."

Traditionally, once past the inauguration, vice-presidents are more or less sidelined, limited to attending the funerals of foreign dignitaries, playing host to less important White House visitors and chairing the occasional commission. Indeed, the role has only two officially mandated duties. The first is to serve as president of the Senate, though the V-P may vote only when there is a tie. Someone else actually runs it on a day-to-day basis.

The second is to succeed if the president dies or resigns, as in 1974 when Gerald Ford took over from the disgraced Richard Nixon. Nine of the 46 U.S. vice-presidents have replaced their boss before the end of his term, a fact that apparently enticed Johnson to sign on with Kennedy.

"Lots of presidents die in office," he noted in graceless foreshadowing,"so why not?"

The vice-president does attend cabinet meetings and sits on the National Security Council, the president's chief advisory panel on foreign relations and national defence policies.

That's only because of Harry Truman; as Roosevelt's third V-P, he was kept so far out of the loop that he knew nothing about testing of the atomic bomb. When he took office on FDR's death in 1945, with war in the Pacific still raging, Truman vowed no vice-president would ever be so ill-prepared again....

Senator John Kerry's political advisers plan to dispatch his new running mate, Senator John Edwards, to rural areas in critical states across the Midwest and the West, in the belief that Mr. Edwards could be an unusually powerful advocate for the ticket in regions viewed as President Bush's stronghold.

For all the attention to Mr. Edwards's Southern roots, Mr. Kerry's aides said that his strongest appeal was likely to be among rural and independent voters, two of the most vital segments of the electorate this year, because of his upbringing in a small North Carolina town and his political identity as a Southern Democrat. Mr. Kerry's aides and some outside analysts said he could be a strong presence in a dozen battleground states outside the South, from Ohio to Oregon.

''From looking at how he performed in the primaries, it is clear he did well with the rural vote," Steve Elmendorf, Mr. Kerry's deputy campaign manager, said."We're going to send Edwards into rural states and Southern states because we think he can help us close the gap there."

The Democrats' emerging plan for Mr. Edwards comes at a time when Democratic and even some Republican officials suggest that Mr. Kerry's vice-presidential selection has the potential of being the most politically significant choice since another Massachusetts Democrat, John F. Kennedy, turned to another Southerner, Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1960. Many experts say the choice of Johnson pushed Texas into the Democrats' column and ensured Kennedy's victory.

Although Mr. Edwards is likely to sway a relatively small number of votes, Democrats and Republicans noted that the contest was likely to be determined by a sliver of voters in a handful of states, and said that Mr. Edwards appeared particularly strong among those voters the White House and Mr. Kerry's campaign had seen as pivotal to the outcome in November.

"I think it's going to help him," Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, said of Mr. Kerry's choice of Mr. Edwards."The picture of him and all the kids and the rest of it.

"He appeals to the Southern moderates, who in the past may have voted for the Republicans," Mr. Fabrizio added."He's got a populist message, so it can go to union members; a sizable number of union members might have voted for George Bush. I think Edwards is appealing to female voters."

Mr. Bush's aides said they did not believe Mr. Edwards would make a significant difference, arguing that voters end up making their decisions in presidential elections based on the top of the ticket....

Some years ago the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer declared that"we are all multiculturalists now." One's initial response to such an unwanted announcement is to say:"What do you mean, 'we'?" Yet, even if"we" do not subscribe to that sentiment, it cannot be denied that over the last twenty years multiculturalism has become the ruling idea of America, incarnated in every area of society ranging from educational curricula to the quasi-official establishment of foreign languages, to mandated racial proportionality schemes in private employment and university admissions, to the constant invocations by our political, business, and intellectual elites of"diversity" as the highest American value. How, so quickly and effortlessly, did this alien belief system take over our country? In this article, I look at multiculturalism as an ideology that has advanced itself by means of a set of propositions. My intent is to examine the false arguments of the multiculturalists themselves, and to see how they have used these arguments to fool an all-too-willing American majority to go along with them.

The Fraud of Inclusion

The first principle of multiculturalism is the equality of all cultures. According to its proponents, America is an assemblage of racially or ethnically defined subcultures, all of which have equal value and none of which can claim a privileged position.

It follows from this that the main goal of multiculturalism is inclusion. Multiculturalists argue that minority and non-Western cultures have been unjustly excluded in the past from full participation in our culture, and that in order to correct this historic wrong we must now include them on an equal basis. In other words, these minority cultures must be regarded as having the same public importance as America's historic majority culture. Moreover, we are told, this equal and public inclusion of different cultures does not threaten our culture, but"enriches" it. By this reasoning, if we became (say) an officially bilingual society, with Spanish appearing alongside English on every cereal box and street sign in the land (as is done with the two languages of Canada), our culture would not be harmed in the slightest. We would only be including something we once excluded. We would have become something more, not less. What could be more positive? How could any decent person object?

To begin to answer that question, let us imagine a scenario in which a Western cultural group—say a large population of Italian Catholics—moved en masse into a Moslem country and demanded that the host society drop all public observance of its majority religion and redefine itself as a multicultural state. When the Moslems react in fear and outrage, the Catholics answer:"What are you so uptight about, brothers? In challenging Islam's past exclusionary practices, we're not threatening your religion and way of life, we're enriching them." Of course, as even the multiculturalists would admit, such"enrichment" would change Islam into something totally unacceptable to the Moslem majority. By the same logic, if the U.S. Congress were required to conduct all its proceedings in Chinese or Spanish alongside English, that would obviously not"enrich" America's political tradition, but radically disrupt and change it. To say that a majority culture must"include" alien traditions on an equal basis in order to prove its own moral legitimacy is to say that the majority culture, as a majority culture, is not legitimate and has no right to exist.

Since multiculturalism claims to stand for the sanctity and worth of each culture, the discovery that its real tendency is to dismantle the existing European-based culture of the United States should have instantly discredited it. Yet it has not—not even among conservatives. A leading reason for this failure is that modern conservatives are themselves ethnicity-blind, democratic universalists. Their conservatism consists in seeing multiculturalism as an attack on their universalist tenets. They fail to understand multiculturalism as an attack on a particular culture and people, namely their own, because as universalists they either have no allegiance to that particular culture and people or their allegiance is defensive and weak. Thus the typical conservative today will say that multiculturalism is bad because"it divides us into different groups"—which is of course true. But he rarely says that multiculturalism is bad because"it is destroying our culture"—America's historic culture and civilization—since that would imply that he was defending a particular culture rather than a universalist idea. Because conservatives are unwilling to defend the very thing that multiculturalism is seeking to destroy, they are unable to identify the nature of multiculturalism and to oppose it effectively.

Several caveats are in order before proceeding with a discussion, which will inevitably incite the multicultural left and invite its characteristically unscrupulous attacks. When I speak of America's"dominant Western culture," or of its"majority culture and people," these are not intended as code words for whites. Individuals of non-European ancestry are and can be full members of America's majority Western culture. At the same time, it is a historical fact that America’s defining political culture is Anglo-Saxon and Protestant in origin and character. A Japanese-American can become an American by embracing this culture—this culture shaped by Anglo-Saxon and Protestant traditions—as his own. (And I write this as a non-Anglo-Saxon Jew.) The same is true for individuals of any ethnic or racial group.

In this article I refer occasionally to whites as well as to generic conservatives, mainly because whites, as the American majority population and the historic ethnic core of the dominant culture, are the particular targets of multicultural propaganda. Whites as a group are never spoken of today except in negative terms. This is the case even as liberal white elites worship at the altar of blacks as a group, of Moslems as a group, of Mexicans as a group, and so on. Many whites have so absorbed today's anti-white attitudes that they consider it"racist" even to think of themselves as whites or to speak of whites as a category at all. Not only does this represent a malignant double standard, in which nonwhites are empowered in their anti-white racism while their white targets are silenced, it doesn't even make sense. How can we speak intelligently about the fateful issues of multiculturalism and national identity if we are not even allowed to mention one of the main parties (though most of its members decline to think of themselves as a party) to those controversies?

My occasional use of the present tense to portray the respective sides of the diversity debate should not be taken to suggest that any meaningful debate on that topic is still going on, at least in mainstream venues. As has been increasingly evident since the mid-1990s, the multiculturalists have pretty well won their war against America's former dominant culture, in the sense of supplanting it as the prevailing national idea. Multiculturalist agendas and the rhetoric of diversity inform the key institutions and official expressions of American society. It is now an unquestioned credo both in the schools and among the elites that the central purpose of our society is the inclusion of other peoples and cultures, rather than the preservation, flourishing, and enhancement of our own people and culture. Multiculturalism is embraced in the highest precincts of the establishment right as well as the left. Thus George W. Bush, casting aside Ronald Reagan's belief in immigration with assimilation, has celebrated the growth of unassimilated foreign languages and cultures in this country, while his closest aide, Condoleezza Rice, who ten years ago told radio host Bob Grant that she was a Republican because Republicans treated her as an individual instead of as a black, now supports minority racial preferences in college admissions and throws around diversity rhetoric with the best of them....

Back in 2002 I went over to see John and Elizabeth Edwards at their house in Washington. We had lunch, salads for us all, the pundit sizing up the prodigy with the usual Beltway questions about this or that, when suddenly Edwards set the agenda. He talked passionately about racial injustice.

I won't go into the particulars of that conversation -- it doesn't matter anyway -- but suffice it to say that I found it an unexpected turn of events. Edwards was even then known for rhetoric that was to become his stock campaign speech about"two Americas":"We're going to build an America where we say no to kids going to bed hungry, no to kids who don't have the clothes to keep them warm, and no forever to any American working full time and living in poverty." This is the rhetoric that has earned him the label"populist."

It is also the rhetoric that comes right out of his background as the son of a textile worker -- working class, blue-collar, always an accident away from financial disaster. Edwards's story is by now well known: the first in his family to go to college, the trial lawyer who sued the pants off rich corporations and lousy doctors, making them pay for maiming people in the grand cause of profit.

But over lunch in his house, little of that came out. Instead, it was civil rights, race and the ideology of some of George Bush's judicial appointments. Edwards spoke with a passion you don't often hear in Washington anymore, referring to his boyhood in the South and the degradation and humiliation of African Americans that he had witnessed -- a Southerner out to make amends. Either he felt it keenly or he was putting on one hell of an act.

Edwards is often likened to Bill Clinton, and the comparison is in some ways apt. They are both political wunderkinds who felt no obligation to punch the conventional ticket -- city council, state legislature, etc. -- and instead decided to start where other men are glad to finish. They both have tongues that are hard-wired to their brains, punctuating their thoughts with verbal commas and periods and not with the grunts and hmmms of most politicians. Both Edwards and Clinton studied their betters -- and bested them.

There is yet another way in which Edwards is like Clinton -- the quality, if that's the right word, of his wife. I will never forget sitting at a lunch counter in New Hampshire with Bill and Hillary Clinton as they answered questions from a waitress about various programs for single mothers. If Bill Clinton paused while putting some food in his mouth, Hillary Clinton took over. It may not be true that she knew as much as Bill. She probably knew more.

It was something similar at lunch with John and Elizabeth Edwards. That day, it was clear that if John Edwards needed to pause in the middle of a sentence, his wife could finish it, maybe adding a detail or two that he forgot. She, too, is a lawyer. Together, they are a firm.

The Edwards firm is now in competition with the Clinton one. If, as every Democrat in New York believes, Bill and Hillary have their eyes on a Clinton Restoration (Hillary as president in 2008 or 2012, depending) they now have to contend with the Edwardses. The brand new vice presidential nominee is just 51. Nothing is certain in politics, but an Edwards-Clinton showdown seems destined....

No one can accuse documentarian and bedraggled, beer-bellied gadfly Michael Moore of having a hidden agenda. He has raised a firestorm of controversy and generated a torrent of publicity not only by bludgeoning President Bush with his feature-length attack,"Fahrenheit 9/11," but also by declaring that he made the film in hopes of booting Bush from office.

In the end, he isn't likely to affect the presidential race. But"Fahrenheit 9/11" may have an altogether different effect: a change in the practice and the values of journalism. What Moore and the film have done is take dead aim on one of the most sacred of journalistic shibboleths: the idea that journalists are supposed to be fair and balanced. This isn't just a function of Moore having a point of view to push; there have always been provocateurs. Rather it is a function of the film revealing the harm that balance has done to our public discourse and the distortions it has promoted.

The words"fair and balanced" have been largely discredited in recent years because of the Fox News Channel, which uses them to mean not that Fox takes an objective, evenhanded approach to the news but that the cable channel is redressing the purported liberal bias of the mainstream news media, balancing them. But Fox aside, the idea of"fair and balanced" is still a mainstay of most journalistic practice, at least in theory. Reporters are not supposed to take sides. For every pro on one side of the scale there must be a con on the other. If the 9/11 commission declares that there is absolutely no credible evidence of any collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the press must also prominently post Vice President Dick Cheney's view that there was a relationship, whether he provides evidence or not. If the preponderance of scientific opinion says global warming threatens the environment, the press must still interview the handful of scientists who dismiss it. That's just the way it is.

And then into this staid and carefully counterpoised media culture came Moore, who chortled on"The Daily Show" recently that he was unfair and unbalanced. But he was only half right. Obviously"Fahrenheit 9/11" is not balanced in its approach to Bush. There are no Bush spokesmen giving the Bush spin. But by the same token, virtually every factual statement in the film, as distinguished from Moore's interpretation of those facts, is accurate. In short, the film isn't balanced, but it may be fair.

Even before Fox appropriated them, the words"fair and balanced" had been yoked as if they were somehow synonymous, but if by"fair" one means objective and unbiased, then more often than not"fair" and"balanced" may be mutually exclusive. To cite one glaring example of just how balance can transmogrify into unfairness, there is the story of a television host who once invited Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt on his program and then had a Holocaust denier as a counterweight, implying that the two sides were equally credible.

It should come as no surprise that conservatives have increasingly relied on this little journalistic loophole. They have come to realize that they can do all sorts of things, the more egregious the better, and the press will not call them out because balance, if not fairness, requires that the press not seem to be piling on. So the Bush administration can fashion a prescription drug program that is a shameless giveaway to the industry or continue to insist that the war in Iraq is the front line in the war on terror, knowing full well that the press will not report a giveaway as a giveaway or a trumped-up link to terror as a trumped-up link without also giving at least equal measure to the administration's own spin, even if it is demonstrably false.

At the same time, the adherence to balance that has so clearly aided conservatives has made liberals seem like the hapless fellow in a science fiction movie who keeps trying to convince everyone that the kindly new neighbors are actually aliens, only to be dismissed as a paranoid. Take Bill Clinton. However one felt about Clinton, it was perfectly obvious that the right had conspired to gang up on him just as he and Hillary said, though the press shrugged off the charge. After all, to privilege it wouldn't have been balanced....

If the American news media are lucky, 2004 will be remembered as the year of living dangerously. If not, then this election cycle may be recalled as the point at which journalism's slide back into partisanship became a kind of free fall.

Presidential elections always challenge the press: The pace of events and competitive pressure invariably war with the media's duties to provide balance and perspective. Readers, viewers and listeners inevitably become more critical news consumers as their personal preferences solidify. This year, the polls instruct us, the country is likely to approach November so exquisitely divided that serious analysts actually wonder whether Michael Moore's anti-administration agitprop may tip the electoral scales.

This situation — with all the extraordinary demands it is bound to make — comes at a time when an ever-growing share of the news media is increasingly unsure of its direction and when the public's trust in what it reads, sees and hears has fallen to levels unmatched in recent memory.

The issues can be seen most clearly in the knock-down, drag-out fight among the all-news cable television networks. What began as a normal struggle over ratings has become the contemporary media equivalent of the Spanish Civil War, a vicious battleground in which new technologies and strategies are being tested with daunting implications for the future. Actually, the war is between Fox and CNN. The third network, MSNBC, is sort of like the Catalan anarchists — slaughtered by everyone.

Its slogan notwithstanding, Fox News is the most blatantly biased major American news organization since the era of yellow journalism. But by turning itself into a 24-hour cycle of chat shows linked by just enough snippets of news to keep the argument going, Fox has made itself the most watched of the cable networks. One American in four now is a regular viewer.

Fox's winning formula is essentially the continuation of talk radio by other means: All opinions are shouted, and contrary views are admitted only if they agree to come on camera dressed as straw men. To anyone prone to twist the AM dial on the car radio, it's a familiar caldron, a witches' brew of rancor, sneers and resentment stirred for maximum distortion.

A certain number of people find this brew entertaining — much, one supposes, as others do bull baiting or cockfighting. The problem is that since it is popular within the relatively small universe of cable news viewers — the medium's most popular show actually has an audience about the size of a good metropolitan newspaper — and because it's cheap to put on the air, the other two networks are attracted to the model....

Ray Sanders and his wife, Sharon, grew up on farms in the American Midwest, but Israel has long been their home. Their journey began in the 1970s, when they read Hal Lindsey's apocalyptic bestseller,"The Late Great Planet Earth," which laid out a scenario for the end of the world according to a literal interpretation of Bible prophecies.

"That awakened our understanding to Israel and its prophetic role in the Last Days," Mr. Sanders explains in his spacious Jerusalem office."That was a real paradigm shift in our lives."

That shift spurred the couple to leave their jobs, attend Bible college in Texas, and move to Jerusalem, where in 1985 they helped found a biblical Zionist organization called Christian Friends of Israel (CFI).

With a handful of similar groups here they are marshalling financial and moral support from evangelical Christians around the world, and particularly in the United States, to fulfill what they see as their role in an unfolding final drama.

Christian Zionists, an Evangelical subset whose ranks are estimated at 20 million in the US, have in the past two decades poured millions of dollars of donations into Israel, formed a tight alliance with the Likud and other Israeli politicians seeking an expanded"Greater Israel," and mobilized grass-roots efforts to get the US to adopt a similar policy.

Christian Zionist leaders today have access to the White House and strong support within Congress, including the backing of the two most recent majority leaders in the House of Representatives.

For many Jews, the enthusiastic support of these evangelical Christians is welcome at a time of terrorism and rising anti-Semitism. Several Israeli leaders have called them"the best friends Israel has."

But other Jews and Christians have begun speaking against the alliance, which they see as a dangerous mix of religion and politics that is harmful to Israel and endangers prospects for peace with the Palestinians.

The prophecy

For Christian Zionists, the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of God's covenant with Abraham and the center of His action from now to the Second Coming of Christ and final battle of Armageddon, when the Antichrist will be defeated. But before this can occur, they say, biblical prophecy foretells the return of Jews from other countries; Israel's possession of all the land between the Euphrates and Nile rivers; and the rebuilding of the Jewish temple where a Muslim site, Dome of the Rock, now stands.

These beliefs lead to positions that critics say are uncompromising and ignore the fact that most Israelis want peace."Pressuring the US government away from peace negotiations and toward an annexationist policy, that has a direct negative impact on the potential for change in the Middle East," says Gershom Gorenberg, a senior editor at The Jerusalem Report newsmagazine.

Two former chief rabbis of Israel, Avraham Shapira and Mordechai Eliahu, recently approved a ruling urging followers not to accept money from the groups, warning that their ultimate intent is conversion of Jews. (Christian Zionists believe that during the Last Days Jews must either accept Jesus as the Messiah or perish.)

Other Christians in the Holy Land oppose what they consider a false interpretation of Christianity that is heightening tensions here."Christian Zionism transforms faith into a political ideology, and one that needs an enemy," says the Rev. Rafik Khoury, of the Catholic Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem.

But Christian Zionists argue that Christians' role is to back Israel wholeheartedly and conform to God's message in Genesis:"I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curses thee" (Gen. 12:3).

To this end, Christian groups have sponsored the migration of thousands of Jews from Russia, Ethiopia, and other countries. They've funneled resources into social programs for Israeli communities, and they encourage churches in the US to support Jewish settlements in the occupied territories....

America's spy agencies have been under relentless scrutiny over mistakes they made on Iraq and their failure to prevent the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A public report from the Senate intelligence committee expected to be released soon will spell out the flaws in US intelligence in Iraq in more detail and the spotlight will return with a later report from the panel investigating the September 11 attacks.

British agencies will face a similar examination over the Iraq war next week with the publication of Lord Butler's review of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

As their records are examined, the fortunes of the intelligence agencies of the two countries will to some extent rise and fall together. While their assessments of the threat posed by Iraq in 2002 did not agree on everything, they shared an enormous amount of raw information and co-operated closely on the analysis. Inevitably, intelligence co-operation across the Atlantic will come under intense review.

According to Thomas Powers, a US intelligence historian, the close co-operation between the American and British services"helped President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair make their case for war while protecting them from awkward questions".

In many respects, US and UK co-operation represents the most significant aspect of the so-called special relationship. Its closeness is often the source of great frustration to the intelligence services of Britain's European Union partners. Indeed, European governments argue that Britain's obsession with its transatlantic partner obstructs intelligence sharing within Europe - which is especially important in light of the terrorist bombings in Madrid last March. From the British perspective, the relationship with Washington has no peer. Britain's intelligence budget is large in international terms, but it represents only about 5 per cent of American spending. Piggy-backing on the US opens a world of information to the government in London to which it would otherwise have no access. Nowhere is that more true than in signals intelligence, known as sigint, where a network of satellites, computers and other high- technology assets is used to eavesdrop electronically on targets all over the world.

Some people in Britain are sceptical of its utility to the UK, but a central part of British strategy since the second world war has been directed towards securing and retaining a high level of US intelligence co-operation.

Some current and former British intelligence practitioners say that, as the junior partner in a complicated relationship, the UK tries harder to retain the attachment and to be useful to its American partner."In secret intelligence more than in most activities, a good reputation is slowly gained, and easily lost," said Michael Herman, a retired intelligence officer formerly with Britain's General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), at a recent conference at Oxford University.

Other experts, however, see it differently."It's a servant-master relationship," says Cees Wiebes, professor of comparative politics at the University of Amsterdam. In contrast to its free sharing with the US, Britain tends to be parsimonious with the information it shares with its European partners."In 2001, the Dutch almost broke off liaison with British GCHQ because it refused to share (information) with the Dutch," he says.

So what does Washington benefit from retaining the UK as its junior partner? With the possible exception of Israel, the intelligence relationship with Britain is America's most important, say US experts. Jeffrey Richelson, of the National Security Archive in Washington, says:"Very important is one way to put it. Another way would be that if the relationship were to disappear overnight, there'd be rather a significant loss in terms of US intelligence capability."

The relationship is managed on a host of different levels, but most UK-US co-operation is with the equivalent intelligence agency on the other side of the Atlantic. For instance, the key relationship for the National Security Agency (NSA), the US main signals intelligence operation, is with GCHQ in the UK. Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, liaises closely but not exclusively with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Security Service (MI5) with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA.

According to UK officials, a new Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre in London - with 100 personnel drawn from 10 government departments - has made it a priority to liaise closely with the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, an interagency group in Washington set up last year.

But it is in the field of signals intelligence that the relationship is the closest."The two Sigint organisations operate almost - but not quite - as if they were separate national divisions of some larger international conglomerate," said Mr Herman, the former GCHQ officer.

The relationship is governed by secret accords finalised in 1948, usually described as the Ukusa agreement, which also includes ties with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The agreement goes beyond the exchange of intelligence, providing for common security standards, a division of responsibility in terms of signals collection, and the sharing of intelligence assets.

Large numbers of GCHQ personnel go to the NSA, usually for three-year spells, and vice versa."We have integrated: Americans working here are firmly part of the team," says one official at GCHQ."But it's a relationship that nobody takes for granted. It's about very hard-headed business judgments. . . The Americans aren't there to subsidise us or feed us or direct our work. It's about mutual support."

Sharing intelligence is not automatic, but much more is shared among the Ukusa Sigint organisations than among their human intelligence (humint) counterparts. Material collected by US intelligence satellites does not go automatically into a common system. However, some activities - such as the Echelon arrangement that targets commercial communications satellites and allows interrogation using specific key words - is said by specialists to be available to all the Ukusa countries.

The closeness of the alliance occasionally produces strange outcomes. Take, for instance, the Suez debacle in 1956 when France, Britain and Israel launched an invasion of Egypt against strong US opposition."The UK continued its intelligence exchanges with its US critic while denying them to its French ally, and the US at the same time supplied Britain with timely U-2 bomb damage assessments of the RAF's attacks on Cairo airfields," says a former UK intelligence officer....

MICHAEL MOORE'S blockbuster, Fahrenheit 9/11, is the worst good film I have seen.

Opening in Britain after breaking box-office records in America, it ranks among the most savage and sensational antiwar movies. Though I agree with its thrust, the depiction of George Bush over Iraq is flawed. Don't miss it, but turn off your brain first.

Then go quietly home and read a slim volume from two conservative historians, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke. America Alone tells how a small group of neoconservatives contrived to take the greatest nation on Earth to war and kill thousands of people. Their anger is coldly controlled, and far more effective. How much better the Right does outrage than the Left.

Moore's thesis is simple. For more than a decade the Saudi aristocracy invested deeply in Bush family interests in Texas. They wanted to keep close to Washington out of self-protection, as they kept close to the Taleban. After 9/11 George W.

Bush was appalled that his Saudi friends might be threatened by the catastrophe.

He smuggled them out of the country, played down bin Laden's role and devoted all his efforts to blaming Saddam Hussein for 9/11.

These charges are visually spectacular rather than forensic. The Bushes are shown endlessly greeting Saudis, often in sinister slow motion. They bail out young George's business ventures. In return the CIA is ordered to prove the unprovable after 9/11. Soon two thirds of Americans hold Saddam responsible for the attack.

Scares are exaggerated and exploited by the White House (as in Britain) to generate a war psychosis. America is terrorised into confrontation.

This film may be one-sided but then so was the war. It should be compulsory viewing for every politician who orders into the air that most obscene and cowardly weapon, the bomber. Targets are missed everywhere. Bits of babies splatter the screen, interspersed with Donald Rumsfeld boasting his"brilliant accuracy".

The public gets to see not just triumphalist footage of the Pentagon's Apocalypse Iraq, in theatre-shaking ferocity. It sees the human consequence on the ground, the numb bafflement of bereaved families and smashed neighbourhoods. I left the cinema with my contempt for the futility and cruelty of air power reinforced. I also left with a deep respect for many American soldiers, having to risk their lives in the backlash from the bombing yet not afraid to admit their shame at what America was asking them to do....