By Telegraph View
Published: 6:50AM GMT 04 Jan 2010

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President Barack Obama's statement on Saturday linking the failed airline bomb attack over Detroit on Christmas Day to an al-Qaeda group based in Yemen will have surprised no one. It confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that the coming decade will be as dominated as the last by the threat posed to the West by Islamist terrorism. The focus of the battle is, however, shifting. Significant successes by the United States and its allies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have forced al-Qaeda largely to re-locate to Yemen and Somalia.

Yesterday the senior American commander in the region, General David Petraeus, met Ali Abdallah Saleh, the Yemeni President, to examine ways in which the United States can assist local security forces in hunting down al-Qaeda militants. The US and UK have already agreed to fund a counter-terrorism police unit there, and Gordon Brown will convene a summit in London at the end of the month devoted solely to the security situation in that country. At least Yemen has a functioning government with which the West can deal. Somalia does not, which will make al-Qaeda's gravitating to that wretched country all the more likely, and all the harder to handle.

Yet the key to success against the jihadists will always be good intelligence. This is the most troubling aspect of the failed Detroit attack. There was plentiful intelligence on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, yet he still slipped through the net. It is imperative that the West's intelligence agencies become far smarter at sharing the information they have on terrorist suspects, and far more decisive in acting upon it.

Against this menacing background, the announcement by an Islamic group, Islam4UK, that it intends to carry mock coffins through Wootton Bassett in protest at the "murder" of Muslims in Afghanistan is repugnant. Freedom to demonstrate in this country is rightly treasured but if public order is threatened, as could well be the case here, the protesters should be told to conduct this nauseating charade elsewhere.

By Matthew d’Ancona
Published: 4:32PM GMT 02 Jan 2010

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There is nothing Gordon Brown relishes more than a chance to claim leadership on the global stage: and so it was all but inevitable that the Prime Minister would find a way of holding an "emergency summit" in London after the Christmas Day airline bomb attack – a "crisis meeting" on Yemen, as it turns out. He loves a crisis meeting, does Gordon. And, like all politicians, he is pathologically fearful of inaction – or, more accurately, the appearance of inaction.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Obama administration has flailed badly in its response to the attempted downing of Northwest Airlines flight 253 over Detroit: a deeply unsettling echo of September 11, a sort of 9/11-lite. In spite of warnings from the suspect's own father, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's name was not posted by US intelligence on the official "no-fly" list. Yet, according to Janet Napolitano, Obama's Homeland Security Secretary, "the system worked". To which one can only reply: not so much.

In the end, the President himself was forced to concede that the near-catastrophe reflected "human and systemic failures". One of Obama's supposed historic functions was to make all this nasty stuff go away, to act, as his very name suggests, as a balm to the geopolitical brow. His administration dropped the nasty phrases "war on terror" and "long war", preferring the much nicer term "overseas contingency operation". It has even referred to terrorist acts as "man-caused disasters". No wonder the President has looked so vexed and neurasthenic in the past week. This sort of thing was not meant to happen to him.

The primary purpose of the PM's New Year's Day statement, posted on the Downing Street website, was to convey the opposite impression: a leader in control, unfazed, overseeing a surge in activity. "We have trebled our security budget," Gordon declared; then added that "we must never be complacent" – which is why he has ordered a thorough review of airport security and already signalled his support for full-body scanners. There was just a whiff of condescension in his promise that all this would be done "in cooperation with President Obama and the Americans" – as if the PM were saying, "leave this to me, Barack, I know what I'm doing."

That said, Brown is also keenly aware of the potentially hideous embarrassment for this country in Abdulmutallab's immediate past. The Nigerian did, after all, spend three years studying at University College London, before embarking on his career (it is alleged) as a fully-fledged jihadi. Was he radicalised at UCL? In a sentence of fabulously tortured syntax, Gordon urged us not to draw conclusions. "Although we are increasingly clear that he linked up with al-Qaeda in Yemen after leaving London," the PM said, "we nevertheless need to remain vigilant against people being radicalised here as well as abroad."

All of this is a familiar ritual, one to which we should have grown used since 9/11. There is an Islamist attack, successful or narrowly-thwarted. Governments promise a tough response: summits, reviews, the facing of "hard choices", the removal of gloves. We are told, as Tony Blair told us on August 5, 2005, after the 7/7 atrocities, that "the rules of the game have changed". There is a flurry of activity. And then, quietly, everybody creeps back to their various comfort zones.

More than eight years after the destruction of the World Trade Centre, there are two competing narratives in the West. The first is frightening, difficult and poses a host of deeply unwelcome questions. According to this version of events, we face a global struggle against a new mutation of militant Islamism ready to use all and any means at its disposal, bonded by anti-semitism, hatred of America and a desire to enforce sharia law and to restore the Caliphate. This network plots globally and kills locally. The merit of this is that it happens to be true.

The second narrative dismisses the whole notion of the "war on terror" as an aberration of the Bush-Blair era. According to this version of events, Islamist terror is mostly the consequence of "Western foreign policy" (for example, the Iraq War was directly responsible for 7/7). With Bush and Blair gone, and al-Qaeda supposedly scattered to the winds, it follows that the winding up of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will bring the whole sorry chapter to an end, and we can all get on with life as normal. The only flaw in this comforting narrative is that it happens to be complete nonsense.

In recent years, the Labour Government, driven by the ebb and flow of public opinion, has borrowed arbitrarily from both narratives. A year ago, David Miliband declared that "the notion [of the war on terror] is misleading and mistaken" and may even have done "more harm than good", and that there was no "unified, transnational enemy". The terrorist threat, he said, was disaggregated and heterogeneous. We were dealing with "myriad fragmented demands".

Yet on Friday the Prime Minister explicitly (and correctly) acknowledged the existence of a global Islamist network. "Almost 10 years after September 11, international terrorism is still a very real threat," he said. "Al-Qaeda and their associates continue in their ambition to indoctrinate thousands of young people around the world with a deadly desire to kill and maim." That's true. But was the Foreign Secretary freelancing a year ago or accurately reflecting the tactical position of the British Government at the time?

According to the Guardian, "profiling" – more stringent checks for certain types of passenger – is now "in the mix" of the review of airport security. Hitherto, this Government has always ruled out this technique on the grounds that it would provoke ill feeling among Muslims and British Asians. In 2005, prime minister Blair said that "the rules of the game have changed". Last November, on the other hand, Alan Johnson readily conceded that some of the counter-terrorism proposals after 7/7 were "too draconian" and "not the right way to go". Yet, last Monday, the same Home Secretary was talking tough again on the Today programme, warning of the perils of "the most serious threat from a type of terrorism that we have never experienced before".

Which is the authentic voice of the Government? Robust or appeasing? Hawkish or dove-lovely? The truth is: both and neither. The tone and content are determined by the news cycle, by the needs of the hour. And that is the great advantage the jihadis have over us: they think not in days, but in centuries. They would never drop the phrase "long war" because, for them, all wars are long. Gordon will have his summit on Yemen – and then it will all be forgotten, before you can say "election campaign launch". Meanwhile, doubtless pleased and fortified by the political mayhem caused by the Detroit attack, al-Qaeda will resume its quiet plans for a campaign of infinitely longer duration.

By Colin Freeman, Chief Foreign Correspondent
Published: 5:12PM GMT 02 Jan 2010

 The man charged with the attempted murder of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard is carried into court on a stretcher in Aarhus, Denmark Photo: AP

The 23-year-old man, who broke into Kurt Westergaard's home late on Friday night, was shot and wounded by armed police called to the scene by Mr Westergaard pressing a panic button.

Yesterday, as he appeared in court charged with two counts of attempted murder, Jakob Scharf, head of Denmark's PET intelligence agency, said the attack had been "terror related".

"The arrested man has, according to PET's information, close relations to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab and al-Qaeda leaders in eastern Africa," Mr Scharf said.

"The attack again confirms the terror threat that is directed at Denmark and against the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in particular."

Mr Westergaard has been the target of numerous death threats since his 2005 illustrations depicting Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban. They sparked anti-Western riots throughout the Muslim world, where images of the Prophet are seen as idolatrous.

Yesterday the 75-year-old artist told how he fled into a specially-made "safe room" after hearing his assailant breaking into his house shouting "Revenge!" and "Blood!"

"I got into the safe room and raised the alarm to the police while he energetically tried to bash down the door with a hammer or something," Mr Westergaard said.

"But he wasn't able to get in. I don't remember what he said, but it was very bad language. He spoke broken Danish and promised that he would come again."

Mr Westergaard's grand-daughter Stephanie, 5, was in the house at the time, and was in the sitting room as Westergaard was forced to take refuge in the safe room.

"I knew he wouldn't hurt her and I wouldn't have been able to do anything if I had tried," he added. "It was terrifying. The most important thing is that I remembered to think and go for safety. But it was close. Really close."

The Somali, whose identity has not been released by the Danish authorities, had previously granted asylum in Denmark, Mr Scharf said.

He added that he was suspected of involvement in terror-related activities in east Africa, and had been under PET monitoring.

He is now being treated for gunshot wounds to the knee and hand, which police said were not life-threatening.

By Nile Gardiner

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There is no denying the breathtaking visual beauty of the $400 million 3-D sci-fi epic Avatar. It is already a global box office smash, taking in more than $200 million worldwide in its opening weekend. The special effects are simply stunning, and some of the action sequences are spectacular.

But Avatar is also a distinctly political work of art, with a strong anti-American and anti-Western message. It can be read on several levels – a critique of the Iraq War, an assault on the US-led War on Terror, a slick morality tale about the ‘evils’ of Western imperialism, a futuristic take on the conquest of America and the treatment of native Americans – the list goes on.

As I blogged earlier, director James Cameron has made it abundantly clear that the film is linked to both the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. In an interview with The Times he declared:

“We went down a path that cost several hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. I don’t think the American people even know why it was done. So it’s all about opening your eyes.”

“We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don’t know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America. I think there’s a moral responsibility to understand that.”

The story is set in the year 2154, and centres on an attempt by a US conglomerate to exploit valuable mineral wealth on the planet of Pandora. In the background, earth is dying with limited resources, no doubt because a climate change deal could not be finalized at Copenhagen.

The American firm employs an army of marines to fight on its behalf against the Na’vi, who seem to be modeled loosely on native American tribes. Slogans such as “shock and awe” and “fighting terror with terror” are deployed to give the film a more contemporary feel. The US forces are portrayed in one-dimensional terms and are led by a sadistic general, while the Na’vi are spiritual, nature-loving and peaceful tribesmen at one with the earth and creation. Humanity is ultimately redeemed by a paraplegic soldier (played by Sam Worthington) who goes native and sides with the locals against his own people.

In many respects, Avatar is a highly manipulative film. When I saw the movie last night in a packed theatre, I was disturbed by the cheering from the audience towards the end when the humans – US soldiers fighting on behalf of an American corporation – were being wiped out by the Na’vi. Washington is one of the most liberal cities in America and you come to expect almost anything here – but still the roars of approval which greeted the on-screen killing of US military personnel were a shock to the system, especially at a time when the United States is engaged in a major war in Afghanistan.

Avatar is more than just a 160 minute-long cinematic thrill-ride. It is an intensely political vehicle with a distinct agenda. In fact I would describe it as one of the most left-wing films in the history of modern American cinema, and perhaps the most commercially successful political movie of our time. While the vast majority of cinemagoers will simply see it as popcorn entertainment, Avatar is at its heart a cynical and deeply unpatriotic propaganda piece, aimed squarely against American global power and the projection of US economic and military might across the world.

By Nile Gardiner

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This is a list of the ten best films of the last decade that have advanced a conservative message, ranging from strong support for the military and love for country to the defence of capitalism and the free market. These are all brilliant movies that conservatives can be inspired by, and which are guaranteed to offend left-wing sensibilities in one way or another.

This is not intended as a list of films made only by conservative filmmakers, who are, it has to be said, few in number. Ironically, some of the best films of all time that have projected conservative values have been made by directors who are apolitical or even politically liberal. Steven Spielberg’s magnificent Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List, Cy Enfield’s Zulu, and Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields, are cases in point.

Hollywood may well be a bastion of liberalism, but it does continue to occasionally produce major films that advance conservative principles, not least because a large percentage of filmgoers in the United States are conservatives. Many of the films listed below were hugely successful at the box office.

A central theme that runs through several of my top ten picks is the eternal conflict between good and evil, and why the forces of tyranny and despotism must be confronted and defeated. They include films that Barack Obama should watch as he contemplates appeasing the likes of Iran and North Korea, or turning a blind eye to mass murder in Burma, Sudan and Zimbabwe. They also provide important lessons for the president as he faces the Taliban in Afghanistan and the broader threat posed by al-Qaeda.

1. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir, 2003)

Peter Weir’s unashamedly old-fashioned and visually stunning adaptation of Patrick O’Brian’s novel is one of the greatest odes to leadership ever committed to celluloid. Australian director Weir has made many terrific films, including Gallipoli, Dead Poets Society, The Year of Living Dangerously, and Witness, but Master and Commander was the pinnacle of his career so far. Nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, it should be essential viewing for any commander-in-chief. Russell Crowe delivers a powerhouse performance as Jack Aubrey, Captain of HMS Surprise, a British warship that hunts and ultimately captures a far larger French adversary during the Napoleonic Wars. Set in 1805, it is an epic tale of heroism and love for country in the face of incredible odds, and a glowing tribute to the grit and determination that forged the British Empire.

2. Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001)

Sir Ridley Scott’s searing depiction of the ill-fated US raid on Mogadishu in 1993, which left 19 American servicemen dead, was released just months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States and the launch of the War on Terror. Based on the book by Mark Bowden, it won Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Sound, and Scott was nominated for Best Director. Many critics enthusiastically dubbed Black Hawk Down an anti-war film, and it is in some respects a cautionary tale about the perils of nation-building. But I regard it above all as an extraordinarily powerful and deeply patriotic tribute to the heroism and bravery of the US military, faced with overwhelming odds in a hostile city dominated by brutal Somali warlords. It is essentially a story of incredible sacrifice and camaraderie in the heat of battle, and ranks alongside Zulu, Saving Private Ryan and A Bridge Too Far as one of the greatest war films of all time.

3. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003)

All three parts of the Lord of the Rings trilogy were great pieces of cinema – The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and finally The Return of the King, which won Best Picture at the 2004 Academy Awards. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings, was a devout Catholic and conservative, and a close friend of C.S. Lewis at Oxford. His vision of a mighty battle between good and evil in the realms of Middle Earth was brilliantly transferred to the screen by New Zealand director Peter Jackson, perfectly fitting a post 9/11 world where the forces of freedom found themselves pitted against a barbaric enemy.

4. Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)

Ridley Scott is without a doubt one of the finest directors of the modern era, and preceded Black Hawk Down with his masterful Best Picture winner Gladiator. The tale of an enslaved former Roman general, Maximus (played by Russell Crowe), who becomes a gladiator and brings down a corrupt Emperor, features some of the most exciting action sequences ever filmed, backed by Hanns Zimmer’s soaring soundtrack. In essence this is a movie about confronting evil and destroying it. There is not an ounce of appeasement or the whiff of “engagement” in Maximus’s blood, only the desire to avenge the murder of his family and see justice carried out. It is the sort of uncompromising movie experience guaranteed to send pacifists and lily-livered liberals running for the exits.

5. The Pursuit of Happyness (Gabriele Muccino, 2006)

This Will Smith vehicle, based on the autobiographical bestseller by Chris Gardner, is one of the most powerful tributes to the free market and the value of individual responsibility ever made. Smith plays an impoverished entrepreneur from a humble background in 1980s San Francisco who through sheer determination and strength of human spirit defies all odds to become a stockbroker with a top investment firm, before making his fortune. Smith’s character embodies the can-do spirit of Reagan’s America, and rejects the welfare state in favour of the capitalist ideal, while bringing up a young son on his own. The Pursuit of Happyness is an inspiring and often deeply moving tribute to the American dream, and one of the great conservative movies of this generation.

6. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

Christopher Nolan’s global mega hit raked in over $1 billion worldwide, and it’s not hard to see why. Featuring some of the most striking set designs since Blade Runner, Nolan’s towering vision of Gotham City looked glorious in IMAX, and was a ground-breaking cinematic achievement. Heath Ledger’s pitch-perfect performance as The Joker deservedly won him a posthumous Best Supporting Actor award. It is though its depiction of Batman’s relentless war against the Joker’s campaign of terror, which marks The Dark Knight as a standout conservative film. The Dark Knight himself, played to perfection by Christian Bale, is unwavering in his determination to defeat his adversary, whatever the cost.

7. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)

Kathryn Bigelow’s critically acclaimed tribute to the heroism of US Army bomb disposal experts in Iraq has already been nominated for three Golden Globes. It is a searing and tense war film that has been the surprise hit of the year in the United States. What is refreshing about the film is its willingness to portray the US military presence in Iraq in an overwhelmingly sympathetic light, and the al-Qaeda-backed enemy as barbaric and fundamentally evil. There are no shades of gray in The Hurt Locker, and this is a strikingly patriotic motion picture that has been embraced by an American public weary of the anti-Americanism churned out by Hollywood in its portrayal of the War on Terror – from Rendition and Lions for Lambs to Redacted and In the Valley of Elah. The Hurt Locker is by far the best conservative film of 2009, and one of the greatest of the decade.

8. Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004)

Hotel Rwanda is one of the most powerful films ever made depicting genocide. In its unflinching portrayal of the weakness and indifference of the United Nations and the broader international community in the face of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, Terry George’s film vividly captured the horror of the mass slaughter of the Tutsis by the Hutus, which left one million people dead. The film’s moving true story is told through the eyes of Paul Rusesabagina (played brilliantly by Don Cheadle), a hotel owner who selflessly saved the lives of over a thousand refugees from the minority Tutsi tribe. It is a hugely important film with a powerful conservative message on two levels – it demonstrated the impotence and moral bankruptcy of the UN’s leadership in the face of genocide as well as the limits of multilateralism, and ultimately made a compelling case for the use of force by the free world to act against evil. It is a film that former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan (head of UN peacekeeping at the time), should be made to watch over and over again.

9. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)

There have been surprisingly few films made about the massive human cost inflicted by Soviet Communism, and its ruthless dominance of eastern and central Europe over the course of nearly four decades. The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) is one of the very finest, and is a damning indictment of the totalitarian surveillance society run by the Secret Police in East Germany. Set in East Berlin in 1984, the film tells the ultimately redemptive tale of a conflicted Stasi officer (played by Ulrich Mühe, in his final role) tasked with spying on a dissident playwright (Sebastian Koch). The Lives of Others deservedly won the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Oscars, and was a huge success in its native Germany, where it forced the country to once again confront the ghosts of its recent past and the huge pain and suffering inflicted by Communist rule in the east.

10. 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007)

Any film that prompts howls of indignation from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his brutal acolytes in Tehran deserves recognition. 300 achieved that in spades with its fiery retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, where three hundred Spartan warriors took on a vast army of Persians commanded by Xerxes. Zack Snyder’s faithful adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel featured incredible battle sequences shot with the latest digital technology, and proved a major box office hit. As he contemplates how to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, Barack Obama should ditch his failed appeasement strategy and take some tips from the Spartans about standing your ground in the face of an evil tyrant.

Honorable Mentions

These films didn’t make the final list, but would be strong contenders for a top 20.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Andrew Adamson, 2005); Cinderella Man (Ron Howard, 2005); Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008); Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007); The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004); Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, 2006); Tears of the Sun (Antoine Fuqua, 2003); United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006); We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, 2002).

Published: 10:44PM GMT 31 Dec 2009

The bombing , which came as President Barack Obama's surge is gathering pace, represented the biggest loss of life suffered by the US intelligence agency since an attack in Beirut in 1983. The CIA said on Thursday a further six agents had been injured in the attack.

On Thursday night it was reported that the bomber had been invited onto the base and had not been searched.

A former senior intelligence official told the Associated Press that the man was being courted as an informant and that it was the first time he had been brought inside the camp.

The official said a senior and experienced CIA debriefer came from Kabul for the meeting, suggesting that the purpose of the session was to gain intelligence.

That official and another former intelligence officer with knowledge of the attack spoke to the news agency on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly.

The CIA would not confirm the details, and said it was still gathering evidence.

"It's far too early to draw conclusions about something that happened just yesterday," said spokesman George Little.

A separate US official suggested the bomber may have set off the explosives as he was about to be searched.

The bombing was expected to deal a major psychological blow to the spy agency, if not its ability to collect valuable intelligence on Taliban and al-Qaeda forces operating along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan.

By Toby Harnden
Published: 31 Dec 2009

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Time stands still for the dead at Arlington Cemetery, but history marches on. In Section 60, the dead of Afghanistan and Iraq are buried each week. The names of the latest to be interred are still being carved into marble headstones.

For now, a "temporary grave marker" of white card marks the final resting places for Major Duane Dively of Rancho, California, Staff Sergeant Matthew Pucino of Cockeysville, Maryland, and Sergeant Daniel Frazier of Saint Joseph, Michigan.

Over the course of the coming months and years, the sodden earth in front of Dively, Pucino and Frazier will be filled with more young Americans. They will join the 464 in Arlington who have been killed in the current Iraq conflict and the 116 others in the cemetery who met their end in Afghanistan – about a tenth of the total American dead.

President Barack Obama visited Section 60 last month, a fortnight before he decided to send 30,000 more troops to fight in what has now become his war.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote of the "end of history" being reached with the triumph of liberal democracy. That year, however, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan sowed the seeds of al-Qaeda and in the next, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait set the stage for the fateful invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It was in 1941 that the magazine publisher Henry Luce declared the 100 years that ended the last millennium – and provided most of the 330,000 occupants of Arlington Cemetery – to be "the American Century".

In 1999, the Washington columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that the United States was as powerful as imperial Rome and that the world appeared to be on the cusp of a "Second American Century".

Considering the attacks of September 11, 2001, the continuing Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the biggest global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the economic rise of China, that now seems like hubris.

For most Americans, the Aughts – as a 1999 poll in USA Today dubbed the first decade of the 21st century – began with the 9/11 attacks. More than 60 of those killed that day at the Pentagon, which is visible from the cemetery, are buried in Arlington.

The Aughts ended, perhaps, on November 4, 2008, when Mr Obama was elected to be the country's first black president, making it a short decade – the Bush decade – of only seven or eight years.

But the thwarted al-Qaeda terrorist attack on Christmas Day aboard a Northwest Airlines Airbus 330 from Amsterdam to Detroit was a reminder that Osama bin Laden and his followers did not stop when Mr Bush left office. And the alarming failure of the American intelligence agencies to "connect the dots" on 12/25 just as they failed to do on 9/11 illustrated that, in some senses, little had changed in eight years.

In seeking to contrast himself with his predecessor at every turn, Mr Obama has certainly tried to open a new page of American history. He apologised to Europe, stating in Strasbourg that "America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive". He told the Muslim world that America has "not been perfect" and that his election would "restore" the "respect and partnership" that once existed.

Perhaps most strikingly of all, he reduced the notion of "American exceptionalism", the term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville to denote the special position in the world of the US by dint of its history and values, to mere patriotism. "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism," he said, in an unfortunate comparison with two countries that lost their empires.

This has been music to much of the world's ears. From Oslo to Damascus and Beijing to Caracas, there has been celebration at the end of what Hubert Védrine, then French foreign minister, described in 1998 as America's "hyper-power" status. The unipolar world, it seems, ended with the Aughts.

Certainly, the past decade has culminated in what is now a crisis of American confidence. Gallup found that just 25 per cent of Americans are now happy with the way things are going for their country, compared with 69 per cent a decade ago.

Capitalism, having been shaken by the collapse of Enron, appears to be foundering after last autumn's bank crisis, triggered by the obscure sorcery of credit default swaps and the outright fraud of Ponzi schemes masterminded by the likes of Bernie Madoff.

Trust in government was severely eroded by the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003. Torture at Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo Bay prison fuelled a sense felt by many that America had lost its moral bearings. The aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005, in which bloated corpses were left for days in the waters that engulfed New Orleans, wounded the American sense of self.

Although Mr Bush gave himself a shot at redemption by stabilising Iraq with the 2007 surge, much of America is wondering whether Afghanistan will become Mr Obama's Vietnam – the war that still haunts the country's imagination.

The hope engendered by Mr Obama's election has given way to intense fretfulness. Despite government spending soaring, unemployment recently reached a 26-year high of over 10 per cent.

It appears that Mr Obama will get his historic healthcare reform Bill – meaning 30 million more Americans will be insured – but the measure was rammed through the Senate on a razor-thin party-line vote and most believe the country cannot afford it and that it will not work.

Many Americans have already had enough. According to Gallup, just 47 per cent of Americans approve of Mr Obama, a stunning drop of nearly 20 points since his inauguration, making him the least popular president at the end of a first term since polling began. The pollster Frank Luntz found that 72 per cent of Americans felt the same as Howard Beale, the barking-mad anchorman of the 1976 film Network, who declared: "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more."

This accounts for the rise of the conservative anti-government Tea Party movement, which has led to protests against big government throughout 2009, and to the popularity of Glenn Beck, the commentator whose weeping
rants on Fox News have sent his ratings skyrocketing to more than three million.

Mr Obama's dramatic address in Cairo and use of his full name of Barack Hussein Obama cut no ice with Major Nidal Hasan, a US Army psychologist and radical Islamist who slaughtered 13 at the Fort Hood base in Texas last month.

Two of Hasan's victims are among the newly buried in Arlington, which is open to all serving and retired service members on their deaths, though the families of most opt for local cemeteries.

Although Mr Obama was elected largely on the basis of giving some magnificent speeches and not being Mr Bush – and won a Nobel Peace Prize to boot – he has already found that this is not nearly enough to succeed as president.

Thus far, his humble overtures to engage with Iran and attempted rapprochement with Russia have yielded little or no result. The promise to close Guantanamo within one year will be broken – and maybe not achieved within two.

Mr Obama was humiliated at the Copenhagen climate change summit, when Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, sent in a mid-level official to deal with the United States president and blocked any meaningful deal being achieved. The unspoken message was that this was China's century, not America's.

But the demise of America in the Aughts is based as much on wishful thinking in Europe and elsewhere as it is on facts. And while there is a danger of Mr Obama's apparent belief that America is no longer the world's sole superpower becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, the States is much more than its president, be it a Bush or an Obama.

Although the anger at the summer "town hall" meetings on healthcare was widely condemned as illustrating a loss of national civility, in fact they demonstrated a passion and a fervent desire to be involved that were signs of a healthy body politic.

Americans want politicians to be accountable for what they say, even if they have won Nobel prizes for their eloquence. They need their trust in government to be restored. During this economic crisis, they want a hand up but not a hand-out.

Despite all the trials of the decade and the potent – and continuing – threat posed by radical Islam to liberal democracy, Americans combine resilience, resourcefulness, hard work and patriotism in a way that is unique.

This year, the US military met its recruiting goals for the first time since the draft ended in 1973. The economic downturn undoubtedly played a part in that. It also indicated, however, that despite the very real possibility that they might end up in Arlington Cemetery's Section 60, there is no shortage of idealistic young Americans who believe that their country is worth fighting for and will eventually prevail.